How many of you have heard this title that brace roots are stealing yield? Yeah, a couple of people. Alright, so I want to start first with just an overview of the maze root system. So you can see in red here, this is that primary root, That's what's comes out of the seed, the first radical during germination. You also have these purple blue roots here called seminal roots, which are also coming from the sea. These are going to be important in that early establishment of your plant. But then so we call those embryonic roots because they're coming from the seed. After that, you get these post embryonic roots. So lateral roots, which are roots that grow off of any other route. Crown roots which are here in gold that are coming from the stem below the soil. And then what we're going to talk about a lot are these brace roots above the soil. The reason that we're interested in these crown end brace roots are that these are the dominant roots in terms of function for the plant after about V6. So a lot of researchers study these early root systems because they're easy. But from a planning perspective, they don't really tell us a lot about the performance of the plant. So a couple of words that you should be familiar with, but I just want to put out there is a node refers to the stem region where these crown or brace roots form. And then a world refers to the set of roots that come out from that node. I'll talk about worlds of brace roots are nodes of brace roots kind of interchangeably. So what is a brace root? This is actually not a straightforward question. So I have a picture here on the left of this is a tropical inbred line, right? And so it has these brace roots at the bottom and they continue to go up the plant quite far. So some people call brace roots, all above-ground, quote unquote green roots, right? So they, they, they have a greenish color. Sometimes they can be a little red. Some people call brace roots only those routes that don't reach the soil. The idea being that they're there to brace the plant if it falls over. Other people only call brace roots those routes that reached the soil with the idea that they're bracing the plant, right? So this has actually caused a lot of confusion when we start to think about brace roots because it completely depends on what you're talking about, right? So again, all of these, depending on the person a farmer may come to me and say I have a problem with my brace roots. I'm like, Well, what do you mean, right? What do you mean by brace roots? It seems pretty obvious, but actually that definition can vary from person to person. Researcher, the researcher, et cetera. So for my definition, I call brace roots, all above-ground green roots, right? I like to take the holistic approach and just call everything above ground brace roots. Okay, so what is the function of brace roots? And I'm starting with these negatives. So you get your thumbs down at the top corner here. So if you Google brace roots, actually one of the first things that pops up is this article from Genesis, genesis ag, calling brace roots stealing yield. How many of you have seen this article knowing Google's brace roots like I do probably. Alright. So in this article, they basically say that brace roots or an emergency bypass, that they're bypassing some sort of blockage of the vascular system and that they are a stress response. And then this company is selling you a chemical to treat that, right? Some people say bracelets only formed during stress. This is wind stress, nutrient stress, et cetera. Again, brace roots forum when there isn't enough nutrition that the plant is somehow able to sense that there's not enough nutrition. So it puts out additional routes to actually acquire nutrients from the soil. So I'm going to address each of these as we go through the talk. Then there's the positive functions, a brace roots that have been proposed. One is important for plant Anchorage right there called brace roots because they probably brace the plant. They take up water and nutrients from the soil. And this is one I caught recently that some agronomists say that they know they exude sugars. And they said that those sugars are actually feeding the soil microbes that is going to benefit the plant in the long term. So let's, let's talk first about the importance for Anchorage. So at this point I'm going to switch primarily. Now completely digest those brace roots that are in the soil, right? So the brace roots that are in the air, just kinda weird. If they don't reach the soil, we don't really know. What their purpose is if they were meant to reach the soil, but there was a transition into flowering and they never made it. So most of what we know about breakthroughs really refers to those brace roots that are already in the soil. So let's talk about Anchorage. So this is important. So my lab is really interested in lodging and understanding route lodging in particular. So estimates of root lodging are kind of all over the place. So in this particular study, they say 7%, 25%. Here in the mid Atlantic when we get to tropical storm, it can be a lot more than that, right? So you get this mechanical failure of the root system. And we want to understand are brace roots actually able to prevent root lodging? So this is a little bit older study from 1988 where they're basically showing the reason why root lodging is causing yield deficits. And that's because of this phenomenon we know as gooseneck thing. So if a plant, let me put my next slide. So on the left here is the control plants, and so you can see it's perfectly upright. This is a plant that was root lodged at v tan and you can see it's got a little hook as that plant recovers and starts to grow back up and then be 13 and be 17, right? So this is corresponding with the yield losses as well. So the older the plant is when it falls over, the harder it is to get your combine in the field and actually harvest anything out of it. So it's not a factor of the the ears are gone. It's just that you can't harvest it. And so we're trying to understand really how roots anchor in the soil and how do we make plants better at withstanding these big storms that we start to get. So we developed a tool and a testing approach where we could actually ask what is a brace route doing for the plant? So we use this device here that is demonstrated by a former PhD student. And you can see it's kind of a clunky mechanical device, but what it gives us is a measure of the plants resistance to bending, right? So how tough is it to bend that plant? And then what we do is we manually cut off the brace roots and we then ask, did we change that plants resistance to bending. So if brace roots aren't doing anything, we shouldn't see any change in the resistance to bending. If brace roots are doing a lot, we should see that plant get a lot sloppier, right? So lo and behold, because this initial resistance to bending is kind of all over the place we do it relative, right? And this is one of the advantages of this approach is that we have a measure with the brace roots there, and then we have a measure without the brace roots. And what we see is that as if you kinda look at this as one would be no change in the bending resistance. You see this reduction when we take off brace roots. So this was our first indication that yes, brace roots are actually stabilizing that stock and preventing it from swaying as much. But this is just 11 plant. And so we've done this now for a research in breads across a couple of years. So in blue and purple here, we've done this at Purdue and here at University of Delaware. We've done this in our commercial hybrid of variety trials here. And what you can see is this is just a distribution basically of what brace roots do. But you'll notice that, especially in this commercial hybrid here in pink, that the, the least effective brace roots are still accounting for almost 25% of that bending stiffness. So this suggests that in commercial hybrids and research lines that brace roots are actually functioning to brace the stock, right? Probably not surprising, but when we started this work, it turns out no one had actually shown that brace, roots brace a plant that they'd been named this way because that's what they look like they do. But no one had actually taken the time to measure it. So what we're interested in next was kind of, okay, well what makes a traceroute better at bracing or worse that bracing. So we took advantage of a lot of this diversity, right? So some of these brace roots will trail across the soil before they enter in. Some of them are really thick, others are thin. And we wondered, does this variation in what the roots look like or the phenotype, does that influence its ability to brace the plant? So my background is actually also an engineering and so we've built these ground-based robots. And so we call this the brace root robot or the robot. And it has a little camera here on the front end. And basically what happens is it's going to run through the rows and it's going to take pictures at the base of all our, of our plants. This saves our backs immensely. I have to tell you working at the bottom of the plant is not great for your back health. But we use robotics and things like this to kind of overcome some, also some of the issues with manual, manually measuring these things. So then we also developed an analysis pipeline so that we can extract things like the number of roots per world, the root with the stock width, the height of the world right here. So how far, basically the internode length. So I think of this as almost like a big triangle. So we can actually measure that base of the plant and understand how the characteristics of that base influence how well the brace roots brace the plant. So on top of this, maybe some of you remember that 2020 lovely tropical storm ECS that rolled through. So we are fields are right here at the tip. Oh, right in this fast-moving storm. So as we were trying to do these studies, we got a big lodging event, two big root lodging events. So when you work on Route lodging, it's both a blessing and a curse to get root lodging, right? So we actually were able to us, There's what our field joy a joy looked like. I'm sure many of you have experienced the devastation of fields that look like this. But what we were able to do then is actually also link these phenotypes to not only this measure I mentioned before, but then also directly to root lodging. So we develop these predictive models and we're able to find that if we take just the brace root phenotypes were able to predict this ratio with 81% accuracy, right? So there's something else going on here as well, but that's pretty high accuracy to be able to say that the difference in how brace roots contribute to Anchorage is due to what the brace roots look like. We were also a little surprising able to predict lodging susceptibility with 72% prediction accuracy. I say surprising because this is just the brace roots. So the reason this is high could be that brace roots are the most important thing ever. Probably not, right? Or that brace roots are also reflective of what's happening below ground, right? So you can actually, what the brace roots, if we have a really wide breakthrough to above-ground, it may reflect also a wider root system below ground. And interestingly, if we add this measure in this kind of brace route contribution ratio, we up our prediction accuracy to about 79%. So this tells us that brace roots are anchoring the plant. And that is related to how much root lodging occurs when we have a big tropical storm. Everybody with me so far. Okay, I'm seeing nods, I'll take it. Alright, so bottom-line brace roots are important for Anchorage. This is an easy one, right? Shouldn't be a surprise hopefully to anyone. But I was at an event and I was an outreach event for junior high girls, try and get them interested in stem and agriculture. And I was at a panel discussion with Dr. Monique Head, who's pictured here on the top left. She's a professor in civil engineering. We were describing what we do and we were both saying the same thing except she works on bridges and I work on plants. And so we thought this is kinda fun. Why don't we get together and see if we can take what we understand about bridge construction and apply it to plants. So Dr. head has this structural monitoring equipment, right? So this is a really high-speed camera. And the way that this works is you a fixed targets. So there's little bull's eyes here. These are incredibly scaled down. So she uses this as like big bull's eyes on bridges. And then as you send heavy trucks over, you can monitor the movement of that bulls-eye and actually look at how application of forces is changing the structure. So we scaled this down to plants and we took a fan out in the field, which we're calling generously wind. And we applied a wind. And we basically are able to then monitor the movement of these, these targets and look at how a plant actually moves underwent. The first thing that was totally wild to me is, you know, this is a small-scale experiment. This is for stocks. We stripped them of all their leaves. We thought, okay, we just want to look at, we thought this would be they would be identical to each other, right? Thinking the leaves would act as like sales almost So we stripped them off. But what we were really surprised to see is actually the plants in the front here, a and B introduced turbulence that caused C and D to whip. So this is basically the Targets from the bottom of the plant up and you can see here. So plant a is basically straight up. Plant B is in the direction of the wind. But plant C and D are both towards the wind source. And if we look at this 10 s later, you can again see particularly plant D here, right? It's doing this whip-like motion. So this is fascinating to us because again, it's just a thing, a single stock in front of these other stocks that's able to introduce enough turbulence that these plants start to sway. This isn't enough that you would see it with your eye, but this sensitive equipment is able to detect this. So has anyone heard of the galloping dirty the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? This this is like an infamous bridge collapsed in 1940. And so I started to think about plant failure is very similar to this. So if you're not familiar, this is a bridge that was built over the Tacoma Narrows in Washington and as soon as it was built, it started to slay a little bit, right. So we've got the nickname galloping dirty. Well, one day, I think it was months after it was built. Not very long. Galloping dirty, started to trot, right. So this, I'm not a horse person, that's probably a terrible horse analogy. So basically, these small waves started to, to propagate and they got bigger and bigger and bigger and lo and behold, galloping dirty, totally collapsed, right? So I start, I'm starting to think more about when we're thinking about how wind interacts in a cornfield, that you have these little motions that when they're sustained wind, they actually get bigger and bigger and bigger until you would get snapping of the stock or, or uprooting of the root system, right? So this was kind of just shifting our thinking a little bit of how, how plant mechanics works. Of course, but I'm talking about brace roots. So we did the same thing we did before where we monitored the movement. We cut off the brace roots and we monitored the movement again. So lo and behold, we did, we showed the same thing that we see more horizontal movement, but what we didn't expect as we also saw more vertical movement. And so what this is basically telling us is the brace roots are acting like these, these guidelines on a tent. So they're tying down the plant and preventing it from lifting up as well. So that was again, a surprise for us because we were just thinking about motion in the horizontal direction. But it's also interesting to think about. I told you we got rid of the leaves. If the leaves were there, I can imagine even more uplift that these brace roots are basically tying the plants down. So important for Anchorage? Yes. Not just that horizontal movement, but also the tying the plant down and preventing it from lifting out of the soil. Alright, what about taking up water and nutrients from the soil? So this has been long proposed because brace roots enter the soil at a critical time for maize plants. So this is a growth chart of maize and under here is the nutrient requirements at these growth stages. So this is where that first lowest world embraced roots is entering the soil. And it's right before this high demand of water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium starts to happen, right? So people have said, sure, they must be important. But again, a lot of this has not been tested, It's just been stated. So the other reason for this is has to do with the number of Metazoan phylum elements. So xylem are the pipes that are moving the water and nutrients from the roots up into the plant. And if you look at a primary route, as I mentioned, this is that very first root that comes out. You have six of these elements here marked with an arrow and MX for metal xylem. Then this is from a paper where they showed brace roots have 33 of these. We actually see even more than this at time. So we see up to 74 elements. And again, this is not the same scale. So this route on the far right is much, much bigger. So everyone said, well, of course, if they have the ability to move water and nutrients, they must move water and nutrients, right? So we said, Okay, well, let's look at it. So we did a die uptake experiments as a way to trace where the water goes. Ask, okay, do simple question, do brace roots, take up water? And as you can tell, yes, they do. Again, a very simple experiment. So this red dye indicates what has been taken up and then it basically stains the cells of the xylem to indicate that it's been, it's been taken up through the root system. And zoom in here because you can just see how nice these, these cells are stained. So absolutely brace roots, take up water, right? We're in the process of trying to understand how much water, what their capacity is, and how that relates to plant needs. But that's kind of ongoing work at the moment. Okay, What about nutrients? We again, we fed brace roots labeled nitrogen and we said, can they take up nitrogen? And whoa, yep, they can write again, a lot of this shouldn't be a surprise. Their roots, they function as roots. One of the interesting things that we found is that there was no preference for nitrogen source. But again, this isn't a fully fertilized sufficient field. So maybe under stress there may be some different preferences for nitrogen sources. What we were really surprised to find is that larger roots take up more nitrogen per volume. The reason We were surprised about this is that people have long said that thinner roots are going to take up more. So if you consider this thin route, I've kinda drawn out that if your surface area is one and your volume is one, as you increase the volume, you don't necessarily increase your surface area. And that surface area is where the nutrient uptake is occurring. And so people have always said in the literature that if you reduce this surface area to volume ratio, you're going to also reduce your uptake per volume. This has led to the assertion that fine roots are better at taking up nutrients and things like that. We did not expect what we found, which is actually brace roots in particular scale their uptake by diameter. So the bigger they are, if they're twice as big, they take up twice as much nitrogen. So what this is telling us is that actually root diameter is not as important for brace roots verse and how much they can take up in terms of nitrogen. Alright, So, yes, they take up water and nutrients. We're still on a single plant scale at this point, trying to expand this to understand in terms of comparing to other route types and in the capacity of a field. What does this mean? So I mentioned this at the beginning, this that they feed soil microbes to benefit the plant. And I put a question mark there because I don't know. No one has shown that right now. So that's kind of an open question. It makes sense from the perspective that they produce these sugars and sugar speed microbes. But maybe that's something Dr. Taylor and I can work on together to understand in the future. Okay, What about these negative functions? So I started very positive. What about brace roots form when there isn't enough nutrition? I've heard this quite frequently. So what we did, this is kinda hard to do in a field setting because there's so much going on. So we have these, these rhizomes boxes as we call them. So basically their soil filled boxes that we there, they're four-foot tall, two-foot wide. And basically we can grow in breads or even commercial hybrids to harvest in these because they have a nice big soil volume. So we can also use this as a way to change in a controlled way what is the exposure of the nutrients to these plants? So we did, again, this is a preliminary experiments, but we did boxes with low nitrogen and high nitrogen and basically the number of brace roots that the worlds that produce brace roots did not change. The number of roots did not change. This to us. At least at the beginning, is again, initial one-off. But right now we have no evidence that brace roots are responding to limited nutrients, maybe other nutrients. So I meant to get to Jared Miller's low and high potassium fields this last year and then the summer got away from us as it always does, but still investigation. But again, initial indications are not that these roots are responding to nutrient deficits. Okay, What about shifted a little bit, but brace roots only formed during stress. I put an X here because they form all the time. But it's also hard. I've also put the question mark is supposed to go up one. What is stress, right? Everything is stress. A plant's always stressed in some way, so it's really hard to eliminate that possibility. But brace roots form and a greenhouse where a plant is protected from everything. There's no air movement. They still form. So I don't think it's a likely explanation that brace roots are only there during stress. Then the emergency bypass. I truly don't even know how to test this because they they claim things that aren't even biologically possible. So a vascular blockage from vascular toxins is not something that translates into a testable hypothesis, right? We don't we don't really know this. I would, I would equate the emergency bypass to this idea that brace roots only formed during stress. And again, we don't really see much evidence that that's the case. Okay, so I wanted to also hit on this other thing because a couple of years ago there was a rumor going around that planting depth was going to influence your brace root emergence. And I can't remember if it was plant deeper for more brace roots or plant deeper for less brace roots are what I can't remember what it was, but something about how planting depth is going to alter your brace roots. And so we thought that's an interesting question. So again, this is just a small trial and we were just using one inbred lines, so may not apply to everything, but I wanted to at least share the results so to make sure we hand planted at depths of 1 " one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half, three and 3.5 ". And the biggest effect we saw was on stand, right. So the deeper you plant, the less emergency you get. But what about brace roots? So the way we did this is we excavated the root systems and then we took a mallet and a razor, or basically a big blade here. And we split these stocks in half. We had actually spray painted with some holiday spray paint what was above ground so we can determine brace roots versus the below ground roots. And then we image these split stocks with a scale marker here of a popsicle stick. And then we can actually count the worlds that are above and below and also measure the length of the stem below the soil and the stem above the soil. So first thing, brace root nodes did not, was not affected by planting depth at all, right, so we saw in this particular line three to four nodes of brace roots regardless of planting depth. Remember that especially at like 3.5 because we had such poor stand, we don't have a lot of data here, but no effect on the number of grace root worlds that emerged. And this is actually consistent with the fact that what happened is the deeper you planted. This is the length of the stem below the ground. There was actually internode elongation below the soil to position that firstNode of brace roots at the soil surface. The plant has some inherent knowledge of wear. A brace roots is going to start and it will elongate the stem portion under the soil till it reaches where the brace roots above-ground. Fascinating to think about how a plant knows how many nodes go below ground versus above-ground. Totally wild to me. Again, this is just a, we'll say a one-off, right? Because there was one experiment and that, but basically not no evidence right now to support this idea that planting depth is going to affect the number of nodes of brace roots. Okay, so I'm gonna do a recap and then I wanted to leave plenty of time for discussion for questions. I know there's a lot of things we hear about brace roots that maybe we don't, we don't know the answer to. So brace roots are critical for limiting movement of the plant horizontally and vertically when exposed to wind. This, it means that they're important for preventing root login, right? We're still trying to figure out what's the minimum. So I kinda view brace roots as an insurance policy. What's the minimum amount we can put in to make sure we're covered in most instances without putting out a ton of brace roots and basically wasting energy of the plant. Brace roots take up both water and nutrients at a critical time for plant productivity. There's no evidence that brace roots form in response to nutrient stress and there's no evidence that planting depth affects the number of worlds. A brace roots that emerge. So our bracelets stealing yield, I say not likely, right? Because the benefit that they're giving is going to far outweigh any sort of carbon that goes into making them. Okay, so I'll thank the collaborators I mentioned throughout my awesome lab group and all of our funding and amazing things. And I'm happy to take any questions. Yeah. Next, travel very far. And we kind of racers. Thicker, darker in color, darker green. Pretty interesting to me. It was like he entered that zone if you went into the tropics, Yellowstone and contrast. We're talking about pretty him. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. You bring up another really cool point that we don't really understand is the greenness. So sometimes brace roots are greens, sometimes the red, sometimes they're striped. Like you see stripes of red and green. And we don't really understand what that means is if it is some signal of like happy and healthy or a little bit more stressed out. Super interesting. Yeah. I mean, it looked like it. Yeah. Yeah. So super interesting. Especially in the fact that if you have a single lodging events early and your plant recovers, your plants are much less likely to lodge later, right? So there is some sort of a mechanical response that if they're being beat up, that they will respond to reinforce themselves. It's interesting as well. So people say often if you look at a field, write that outside of the field tends to have bigger brace roots. People have proposed than if you were in the middle of the field and people have proposed that that's due to wind. Basically that they're buffering the wind. But the confounding factor there is also light. So we know that under shade brace roots don't form as well. And so the middle of the field is also more shaded. And so we don't really know right now what causes that kind of field effect there. I mean, we've been doing we haven't been pounding plants as hard as it sounds like you are. But we've been doing things where we kinda push on plants and see do they respond and we don't see much of a response, but maybe if you can beat them with a hammer, if you will. They will respond more. Yeah. Great observation. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So the question is, are there any lateral roots on the brace roots underground? Absolutely. So we see a lot of variation in that. And this is something that we have not been able to figure out a good way to quantify. But some brace roots come in the soil and they make very little lateral roots, right? And so you can just kinda pull them directly out of the ground. Other brace roots go in and they branch like crazy. And I imagine that that acts almost like a wall anchor, right? Where they poke in and they spread out and they prevent it from being pulled back out of the soil. And I think that that's gonna be a really important role of brace roots in bracing. But it's incredibly hard to quantify. But there's a lot of variation in how much they branch when they're in the soil. How much your plan when you plant death, What date was that? Oh, that was really late. So cool thing or no. No. So it was an inbred line and so we don't plant until early June up in New York. I think that one was June 6th, if I'm not mistaken, so yeah. Other questions? Yeah. Variety, depending what part of that? The breakout rooms. Oh, absolutely. So there's a lot of variation based on variety. It it's been something that has not been bred for. So brace roots have just kinda come along and they've come along in different forms. So now that we have a better sense of what makes a good brace route, we can start to look a bit more at varieties as well. Are there varieties? So interesting? The varieties with no brace roots vary. So there are, there are very few varieties that reproducibly don't make brace roots. If, especially if you consider, there's always one that seems to sit right at that soil surface. Maybe under, maybe above. We have found that the varieties that don't make brace roots tend to be weaker overall. We tried an experiment to say, what happens if we just as brace roots come out, we cut them off. What happens to the plant? And what happened was we got the tropical storm and those plants, it was like half the row with down that we'd cut the brace roots and the other half was up, right? So the other thing I haven't mentioned though here is also about the height of the plant. So hopefully everyone's familiar with the Green Revolution and this idea that dwarfing grains is going to reduce lodging. What we found is in maize, it's actually a little bit confounded. So it's not always taller plants lodge more. Taller plant in our work we found taller plants have bigger brace root systems, right? So they have a wider base and that wider base limits lodging where the taller plants promotes lodging, right. So it's not, I'm talking mostly about the brace roots, but it's also thinking about what is the weight that they have to hold up, right? So a bigger root system is going to be more important for a taller, heavier plants. Then, like a sweet corn, write a short plant that maybe isn't as heavy. Does that make sense? Yeah. Maybe I missed it. So great question. So we use inbred lines because we want to map the genes underlying these things. And if we can't do that with hybrids. So what we've been trying to do is establish what we know in, in breads and then switch over to hybrids were pretty limited. And what we can do on hybrids in terms of the research because of restrictions. Other questions? Yes. I can't talk about it. Hopefully soon I will be out of that. But yes, we've been working with bear on their short corn as well. Yeah. Crazy root syndrome. That was the the what was the chemical? That was the chemical one, right. Yeah. So just producing brace roots isn't enough. Am I remembering correctly that those were also kind of weird and like twisty. And so if you think about it just from a structural perspective, they're not structurally sound. They're not actually bracing. They're doing crazy things, right? Super interesting though, right now. I don't think it's just having brace roots. That is a good thing, right? It's having brace roots that are effective at bracing the plants, which we're still working on solving that mystery. Other questions. Back when we had court reporter, I was always, we were always wondering about the value for age groups. Probably literature. What does this all that kind of stress. Do you think Grace groups responded to the corn root worm? Said, Do you have an answer to that? We haven't really been able to document any direct impact per se on the brakes? Overall, I guess. But yeah. Yeah. And along those lines, it seems like with the Pythium work, if the plant is stunted early, it never really like everything is stunted including the brace root system. So yeah, I completely agree that it's probably the same with corn root worm, but we haven't, we haven't looked at it specifically. The hope was that they would somehow compensate, right? And we've tried several experiments to do that, to say, Okay, if something happens to the underground root system, maybe brace roots come into the rescue and they will save the plants. But basically if it's a small, weak plant, it stays small and weak and we don't see brace roots hoping anything. Alright. Omar. Yeah, So I guess assuming conditions, soil conditions definitely affect Anchorage. The link to that and brace roots. We have not seen. So when we're talking about that relative contribution of what brace roots due to anchor, that doesn't change with soil conditions. But the overall anchorage changes with soil conditions. So they seem to maintain a constant contribution. If it's weaker, they contribute proportionally less. If it's stronger they contribute proportionally more. What we're moving towards and our work now is, and I didn't put it in here, but we have built tools to measure route anchorage and trying to understand better why a plant fails beyond brace roots, what makes a plant anchor in the soil? And one of the interesting things to come out of this was that it's actually a less stiff root system that doesn't lodge the root systems that are able to act like a spring and basically absorb those forces are more likely to stand then a really stiff root system. And again, if we go to civil engineering, that's earthquake engineering. If you have a rigid base, it's going to fail. If it can absorb those forces, then you're able to withstand these fluctuations. So that work is still up in the air because you can't be two-week that you fall over, but you need to be flexible enough to absorb forces. And so we've built some tools that are allowing us to measure that now and try to understand more holistically what is root anchorage and how does it fail? Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you all for your time and your attention. I appreciate it.
2022 Crop Management School - Erin Sparks
From Robert Diiorio December 05, 2022
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