Agricen and Taranis, a precision agriculture company, have received a grant from the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation to collaborate on a project to advance and commercialize a new precision agriculture system for abiotic stress detection and prevention in row crops. 

Abiotic stresses are environmental or physical impacts on a plant (e.g., drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, nutrient deficiency), and result in billions of dollars of lost crop value each year. The Agricen/Taranis collaboration will address this agricultural challenge by creating a solution that merges the Taranis platform—which incorporates field imaging technology and a deep learning algorithm—with Agricen’s proven biostimulant technologies.

Over the past few years, we've posted several agriculture-related videos that showcase the efforts growers are making to implement new products and practices that help them improve ag productivity and sustainability. If you haven't yet seen them, here are a few of the most popular and most recent.

For the past several years, Chris Perkins, a grower and CPS location manager in Otwell, Indiana, has been running an experimental, high management, continuous corn plot using several products in the Loveland Products portfolio, including Accomplish LM and Titan, so that he can prove the value of the products he sells to his customers.

Many of the decisions that Chris makes in the management of his plot are driven by ongoing research at the university level, primarily that of Dr. Fred Below of the Crop Physiology Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Biostimulants and biofertilizers are now joining biopesticides as technologies that have proven themselves in the field. As they continue to deliver benefits to growers and acceptance grows, more and more biological-based products are being introduced from companies of all sizes—including products like Titan XC and Extract. 

Accomplish LM, Extract PBA and Titan XC are innovative biocatalysts available from Loveland Products. Powered by a naturally derived biostimulant technology, these products are designed to increase nutrient availability from applied fertilizers, promote nutrient mineralization in the soil to increase existing nutrient availability, and support root growth through biochemical interactions with the plant. 

We are happy to announce today that Agricen now has operations on two continents: North America, with headquarters and a manufacturing plant in Texas, and Australia, with a new manufacturing facility in Dandenong, Victoria.

Agricen Australia is producing sustainable fertilizer biocatalyst products under the names of Basis® and Foundation™ LM for distribution in the Australian market through Loveland Agri Products and Landmark. The products are manufactured using natural, locally sourced base ingredients in our recently constructed Australian plant.

Titan XC is now available from Loveland Products! Designed to improve dry fertilizer efficiency, Titan XC is a new, next-generation biocatalyst for dry fertilizers that ‘unlocks’ applied nutrients, making them available more quickly so that more of them are taken up by plant roots. It is extra concentrated for easier application and superior impregnation onto fertilizer prill.

We are very excited to introduce “Prove It to Me,” a new film that follows five farmers through the 2015 growing season—from planning and planting to growth and harvest.

By Maud Hinchee, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Agricen Sciences

Getting a good start is key to a germinating seed’s need to “survive and thrive.” Essential to this process is establishing a root system that creates a strong foothold and provides access to available nutrients and water. But how does the emerging seedling root do this?  

By Maud Hinchee, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Agricen Sciences

Plants are constantly responding to their senses. They can touch, smell, taste and otherwise sense water, food and predators—and they can remember. Of course, they don’t do all of this exactly the way a human does, but they do respond to the messages they receive from the world around them to survive, thrive and reproduce—much the way we do.

This is a pretty stimulating idea – that plants are actually sentient beings responding to stimuli in a purposeful manner and communicating with each other and with potential friends and foes. (For more on this, take a look at the “What Plants Talk About” episode from the PBS series, Nature.) It’s also an idea that has captivated researchers and companies in the agricultural space in recent years, most notably around the topic of biostimulants and other agricultural biologicals.