When you think about the essentials for growing season, seeds, fungicides, herbicides, nutrients, and much more come to mind. According to an expert from Stoller, farmers should also be checking off plant growth regulators and hormones on their to-do list.
“They are very essential because just like in the human body, they are the ones that control the nutrient uptake in your body and how well you perform. If you don’t have the right amount of hormones throughout your life span you are going to have detrimental effects and you are going to go into stress,” said Dr. Ritesh Sheth, Chief Chemist and Global Director of Business Compliance for Stoller. “Especially when you are under stress, your body says let’s hold back on our hormones and let’s play survival. The same thing happens in a plant. They try to survive and when they try to survive they don’t produce as much.”
We had the opportunity to catch up with Dr. Sheth at the recent Ag Media Summit in Snowbird, Utah on a brand new product Stoller will be launching at the 2017 Farm Progress Show later this month.
Fortified Stimulate Yield Enhancer Plus is a powerful, patent-pending product containing a proprietary blend of four bio-identical growth regulating hormones. With the optimal concentrations of cytokinin (CK), gibberellin (GA), and two auxins (IAA and IBA) formulated in the ideal ratio of 2:1:1, the product works through time: initially CK, GA, IAA for triggering plant growth, then: CK, GA, IBA for developing better yield characteristics.
“What we are looking for as farmers and growers is to have the most output out of our plants,” Dr. Sheth said. “That’s what we are trying to do by putting in the three hormones, plus an additional being IAA which is not found in any other formulation. We are able to provide not just a slow release auxin but a fast release auxin as well.”
Fortified Stimulate Yield Enhancer Plus can be applied as a seed treatment, in-furrow at planting, or foliar on corn and soybeans. It can also be applied tank mix with most insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and foliar fertilizers. The product is labeled for vegetable crops, field crops, beans (including soybeans), sorghum, wheat, small fruits, vine and tree fruits, trees, and ornamentals.
So far the product has been launched through Stoller’s select dealer network to current customers who reported a marked improvement in their fields right away.
“When we look at plant growth regulators, there are a lot of me-too products out on the market. As a customer, you want to make sure that the product you have is the most stable — that what you are going to get today you are going to get in a year from now,” Dr. Sheth said. “That is what we have with our patented process. No one else has this patented process to keep hormones stable. We are trying to get people aware that you want stable products that are going to perform year to year to year.”
