If You Give a Seed An Aspirin...

by

Clarence Swanton has worked for 16 years on a super cool project that takes about 40 minutes to explain properly, as he did at the recent Southwest Agricultural Conference. Perhaps more impactful, however, is the time-lapse video he showed whereby the mere presence of weedy surroundings actually killed a tobacco seedling.

Perhaps this makes sense — enough competition for light, water, and nutrients could starve out a plant. But Swanton’s work took out the competition factor; the seedling died because of too much oxidative stress, triggered by the presence of a competitor.

Swanton’s work into how crops compete with weeds is not just fascinating to see — the implications of how plants communicate and how they react to weed pressure even before emerging is truly ground-breaking (pun intended).

While we’ve covered Swanton’s work previously on RealAgriculture, I thought it was worth a discussion on not just how plants communicate but just WHAT they can decipher based on their surroundings. From there, Swanton also relates what happened when he used vitamin C and Aspirin as a seed treatment…the opportunities are endless!

Wake up with RealAg

Subscribe to our daily newsletters to keep you up-to-date with our latest coverage every morning.

Wake up with RealAg

Privacy Preference Center

Necessary

Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.

gdpr, __cfduid, PHPSESSID, wordpress_test_cookie, woocommerce_items_in_cart, woocommerce_cart_hash, wp_woocommerce_session, wordpress_logged_in, wordpress_sec, wp-settings, wp-settings-time, __cf_mob_redir, wordpress_cache, realag
__cfduid

Marketing

Measuring interactions with the ads on the domain.

__gads,fsk_ut_2317
IDE

Statistics

These are used to track user interaction and detect potential problems. These help us improve our services by providing analytical data on how users use this site.

_ga,_gid,_gat,_cb,_chartbeat2,_chartbeat4
_ga,_gid
metrics_token

Preferences

Preference cookies enable the website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.

chartdefaults, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url
JSESSIONID, _os_session,anonymous_votes,csrf-param,csrf-token,user,user-id,user-platform,intercom-session,intercom-lou,intercom-session
personalization_id, tfw_exp

 

Register for a RealAgriculture account to manage your Shortcut menu instead of the default.

Register