June 2017 - During two days, the STIMUL field trials in Italy were visited by the project team. The Italian trials are located in the region between Turin and Milan, a region well known for corn cultivation. In this region, the climatic conditions were really difficult this spring with the coldest spring from the last 50 years with freezing episodes. Hence the analyses of these trials will be really interesting to assess the influence of biostimulant treatments to help the plant to resist to abiotic stresses.
Four corn trials and three soybean trials were visited in two days, these trials correspond to the second campaign of STIMUL project. For all these trials, 8 biostimulant treatments are compared to an untreated reference.
The different trials visited were sowed between the 18/04/17 and 24/05/17. At the time of the visit, the corn plants were at the ideal stage for observations: a root system not too developed such as it is easy to remove plants to observe root system and plants shorter than 1 meter in height hence visual differences of the aerial parts are easily detectable.
Interesting observations were performed on the trials: the root system development is enhanced with the biostimulant treatment, let’s wait for the harvest to see if such a more developed root system triggers higher yield!
