Agriculture is facing a great number of different pressures due to the increase in population and the greater amount of food it demands, the environmental impact due to the excessive use of conventional fertilizers, and climate change, which subjects the crops to extreme environmental conditions. One of the solutions to these problems could be the use of biostimulant products that are rich in amino acids (AAs), which substitute and/or complement conventional fertilizers and help plants adapt to climate change. To formulate these products, it is first necessary to understand the role of the application of AAs (individually or as a mixture) in the physiological and metabolic processes of crops.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBoron (B), an essential nutrient for plants, participates in many physiological processes, with emphasis its role in the formation of the plant's cell wall. In soil, the range between deficiency and toxicity of B is very narrow as compared to other nutrients, which makes its management in agriculture very difficult, as it depends on the soil and environmental conditions. B stress simultaneously acts with others (extreme temperatures, excess of light, high concentration of CO, drought, salinity or heavy metal contamination, etc.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The current need to produce food for a growing population, from diminishing natural resources, such as water and energy, and with minimum environmental degradation, demands the optimization of production. We compare the economic feasibility of tomato production in an open system with a perlite substrate, a closed system with the nutrient film technique (NFT), and a hydroponic crop (deep flow technique, DFT) using three levels of salinity that are found within the normal range for irrigation water quality in southeastern Spain.
Results: Production with DFT resulted in an increase in the cost of phytosanitary treatments and the cost of maintenance.
Ecotoxicol Environ Saf
May 2019
In citrus, the effects of an excess of boron (B) are conditioned by the type of rootstock. In the present work, the morphological, physiological and biochemical responses of seedlings from three citrus genotypes, commonly used as rootstocks in citriculture. In particular, Citrange Carrizo (CC), Citrus macrophylla (CM) and sour orange (SO) seedlings were treated with an excess of B (10 mg L) in the nutrient solution in order to determine the relative tolerance and to understand the possible mechanisms that make a rootstock more tolerant than the others.
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