UK: Lono for improved soft fruit launched by Levity

Levity CropScience is launching Lono for Soft Fruit, a pioneering new product that improves reproductive growth (fruit and flowers) of soft fruit crops, at this years Fruit Focus event.

Lono works by supplying nitrogen in an efficient way that encourages reproductive growth instead of the vegetative growth seen with conventional products. Levity MD David Marks said “Nitrogen is needed by plants to produce the proteins from which plants are built. Soft fruit growers know that there is a trade off between getting crops growing and quality. As nitrogen inputs rise crops get leggy and fruit quality starts to decline” What is less well understood is the effect that form of nitrogen has on growth, and it this that has formed basis of Levity’s research and development into how to feed soft fruit crops better”

 

David explains “The first thing to understand about soft fruit nutrition, is just how wasteful standard practice is. Research shows that typically only 15% of nitrogen applied to strawberry crops actually ends up in the plant. The rest is lost due to a combination of volatilization and leaching where the nitrogen farmers apply is lost to the environment.”

 

“The next thing to learn is that regardless of what type of N is applied, it tends to be mostly taken up as nitrate due to conversion by bacteria” Why is that important? Marks explains “The typical effect seen when nitrogen is applied, is that we see an increase in growth that is mostly vegetative so plants can become weak and straggly with too much height and leaf and not enough energy being used for fruit development. This is not a nitrogen effect, rather it is a nitrate effect created by the plant overproducing the auxin growth hormone in response to nitrates accumulating in the leaf”

 

“When plants feed on amine nitrogen, cytokinin hormone levels increase. This encourages more bushy plants with more root branching and greater production of flowers and fruit. The problem is that farmers don’t see any difference between nitrogen products, as they all change to mostly nitrate before the plant takes them in”.

 

This is where Lono can help, Lono uses chemistry developed by Levity to bond the nitrogen to calcium, and hold the form as amine. This has the double benefit of ensuring most of the N ends up in the crop giving good growth with small inputs. The second and more interesting benefit tough is where the growth is. David explains “with conventional nitrogen soft fruit growers have to be careful, too much and the crop gets leggy and quality drops. With Lono the growth is in the fruit, not the leaf, growers see shorter bushier plants with a higher fruit load and less quality problems”.

 

Anna Weston Levity MD further explains “the third aspect of Lono is how energy efficient it is. We feed crops nitrogen to get growth, but plants must use energy (in the form of carbon) to process and assimilate it. The more efficient that plant can turn nitrogen into growth (using less carbon from the air), the better, particularly when the crop is stressed as access to CO2 is reduced under stress conditions. Lomo supplies nitrogen to plant in a form that is 12 times more energy efficient than the nitrate most conventional fertilisers are taken up as. This means the plants fed with Lomo can keep growing when under stress.”

 

David concludes “Lono acts on three levels, it gets more N into the crop, generates growth in the part of the crop we harvest (fruit) and is easy for the plant to process even when stressed. What growers see as a result is higher yields, and healthier crops that perform better when growing conditions are bad.” adding “Soft Fruits are difficult crops to grow, with a trade off between yield and quality. When developing Lono Levity have taken time to understand the science of soft fruit crops, which has allowed us to develop a more advanced product. Lono can help growers deliver high yields of high quality fruit.”

 

Levity will be launching Lomo at this years Fruit Focus event on the 20th of June. The research team will be there to explain how Lomo and Levity’s other products for soft fruit work.