Part 2: Irrigation of Controlled Environment Crops for Increased Quality and Yield

Part 2: Nutrients and Osmotic Stress

Rev up your productivity

If you’re crop steering to optimize quality and productivity, understanding nutrient concentration is critical to stressing your plants correctly. If nutrient concentrations get too low, you won't get the production you're paying for with the rest of your infrastructure. If the concentrations are too high—you’ll risk killing your plants. 

Measure. Don’t guess.

You can’t quantify nutrient concentration just by looking at your plants or tasting them. The only way to know the nutrient concentration is to measure it. Crop steering can only be done if you know the electrical conductivity (EC) of the nutrient solution in the growth substrate. In this 30-minute webinar, world-renowned soil physics expert, Dr. Gaylon Campbell discusses how to measure EC and osmotic stress to optimize crop steering for maximum yield. He’ll cover:

• Environmental control of growth and development in plants 
• Electrical conductivity as a measure of nutrient concentration in the growth medium 
• Techniques for measuring pore water electrical conductivity in unsaturated media
• How to relate pore water electrical conductivity to the bulk conductivity being measured
• Crop steering using osmotic stress and how to monitor that stress

Presenter

Dr. Gaylon S. Campbell has been a research scientist and engineer at METER for over 20 years, following nearly 30 years on faculty at Washington State University. Dr. Campbell’s first experience with environmental measurement came in the lab of Sterling Taylor at Utah State University making water potential measurements to understand plant water status.

Dr. Campbell is one of the world’s foremost authorities on physical measurements in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. His book written with Dr. John Norman on Environmental Biophysics provides a critical foundation for anyone interested in understanding the physics of the natural world. Dr. Campbell has written three books, over 100 refereed journal articles and book chapters, and has several patents.