FARMING INDUSTRY IGNORING VALUABLE RESEARCH AS FROSTS HIT

A Lincolnshire farmer believes many in the industry are ignoring valuable research into how best to protect crops from extreme weather conditions and are losing millions of pounds as a result.

As well as growing potatoes, sugar beat cereals and peas at Rose Villa Farm in Spalding, Lincolnshire, Marcus Palmer is the sole UK distributor of Algifol, a seaweed-based biostimulant.

Marcus says recent unexpected frosts, combined with almost no rainfall in April, will have had a drastic effect on many growers, who rely solely on chemical fertilisers.

Mr Palmer says that despite academic studies being produced since 2009, UK farmers are sadly ignorant of the natural properties of biostimulants such as Algifol.

One such academic papers - De Saeger, J., Van Praet, S., Vereecke, D. et al. Toward the molecular understanding of the action mechanism of Ascophyllum nodosum extracts on plants. J ApplPhycol 32, 573–597 (2020) - written in 2019, said that the use of brown seaweed enhances play tolerance against environmental stresses such as drought, salinity and frost.

While the studies have not shown how or why the biostimulant improves the plant's ability to cope with extreme weather, they have clearly demonstrated that the Ascophyllum nodosum extracts in Algifol and its lipophilic fraction significantly increased tolerance to freezing temperatures in vitro and in vivo assays.