September 2019 - The project team members visited the two rapeseed trials located in the region of Cologne in Germany. These trials correspond to the fourth campaign of tests on rapeseed of the LIFE STIMUL project. For this visit, the project team was accompanied by representatives of a seed company, which are the main stakeholders for LIFE STIMUL project. The objective was to demonstrate to them the interest of biostimulants to limit agricultural inputs.
For the two trials, 3 biostimulant treatments are compared to the untreated reference. The two trials visited were sowed between the 30/08/2019 and the 02/09/2019. At the time of the visit, the rapeseed plants were at an early stage, which corresponds to an ideal stage for observations as we can easily notice if there is any difference in the germination of seeds between the different treatments. Moreover, at this stage the root systems are not too developed such as it is easy to remove plants to observe the development of the roots. Very interesting observations were performed during the visits: it seems that the biostimulant treatments enhance the development of the root system. The objective is now to evaluate if this phenomenon triggers at the end an increase of the yield. The harvest of these trials are planned for summer 2020.
Development of the roots - control versus STIMUL biostimulant
