Aerial Imagery Strengthens the Case for OPTRIENT MoCo in Almonds

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As growers make input decisions, most consider yield potential the significant deciding factor. However, to tell the story of why a product or practice is right for your operation, it’s also important to understand how it can improve yield and impact your ROI.

Addressing Nutrient Stress in Almonds During Harvest
When almonds are harvested, producers turn off the irrigation to make it easier for equipment to pass through. During this time, the trees become stressed as they become water- and nutrient-limited. This presents a unique opportunity to apply a product with molybdenum (Mo) and cobalt (Co).

OPTRIENT™️ MoCo -- the molybdenum and chelated cobalt blend from Koch Agronomic Services (KAS) -- was initially designed to improve flower retention in almond trees and to allow more time for bees to pollinate the flowers, leading to increased yields. These micronutrients are also essential in nutrient metabolism, so when members of the KAS team learned customers were wondering about additional opportunities to use the product for enhanced plant success, they experimented with the innovation through additional trials.

“We had some customers who were already using the product asking, ‘If we applied this product in the fall, what happens?’” says TJ Bingham, technical agronomist for KAS.

The growers asking for the solution had previously experimented with similar products or nutrients and thought they had seen a positive result.

“We’d never used imagery to gather data, but we had a hunch we’d see positive results, so we ran the trial and got some interesting stuff.”

Letting Drone Imagery Tell the Story
In 2023, KAS worked with aerialPLOT to conduct a replicated research trial in San Joaquin and Chico, California. The study tested the effects of applying OPTRIENT MoCo to almond trees during the critical post-harvest period.

Using drone imagery, which provides a high level of resolution and allows for even more refined analysis, researchers could see that OPTRIENT MoCo decreased almond tree defoliation by 15% compared to the untreated trees (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

That same drone imagery visually compared the Leaf Area Index measurements between treated and untreated trees. The prominence of green and yellow hues in the treated trees indicates a higher leaf density (Figure 2).

Figure 2:

“It wasn’t just a pretty picture – we now had the imagery and the stats to prove that our product kept the leaves on the tree longer,” Bingham states. “As an agronomist, that’s a good thing because it's giving the tree a longer time to translocate all the energy it had in the leaves into the roots for storage to use next spring. If that tree drops its leaves really fast, we are potentially losing nutrients we've already put in the tree.”

This potential loss of nutrients is a concern that OPTRIENT MoCo effectively addresses.

Challenging Tradition with Extended Leaf Retention in Almonds

The data made sense to the agronomists and researchers, but some producers had questions about cultural best practices. Many almond growers traditionally thought that getting leaves off the trees was a good thing, as there were concerns that wind could impact the trees’ overall stability with the added top weight.

For these producers, it was just as essential to show what happened after the plant held leaves a little longer, translocating more energy to the roots before going dormant in the fall. So, in the spring, researchers analyzed how the treated almond trees compared in bloom amount and retention.

Figure 3:

The images in Figure 3 visually compare the bloom measurements between treated and untreated trees. The prominence of red and yellow hues indicates a higher bloom. This was true in images collected at 10-20% bloom and again at 75-100% bloom.

“We flew the drone and went back again at 100% bloom and made sure we didn't just bring on an earlier bloom. We wanted to ensure we were able to put more flowers on the tree and hold them throughout the entire bloom cycle,” says Bingham. “We started with more flowers and finished with more flowers.”

In Figure 4, the orange and grey lines represent the performance of the trees treated with OPTRIENT MoCo and the untreated trees, respectively. The fact that these lines run parallel indicates that bloom didn’t just start earlier – the trees treated with OPTRIENT MoCo at harvest outperformed the untreated trees, maintaining a higher number of blooms throughout the cycle.

Figure 4:

“We now have data to show that the healthier we can keep trees going into dormancy, the healthier they will be when they come out in the spring,” Bingham says.

OPTRIENT MoCo Keeps Trees Healthier into the Next Growing Season

OPTRIENT MoCo is a ready-to-use liquid micronutrient designed to reduce plant stress and enhance nitrogen utilization, increasing yield potential and ROI. In almond production, OPTRIENT MoCo has been proven to boost flower retention, optimize fruit setting and protect against early fruit and nut drop, giving farmers even more reason to be excited about harvest.

Contact your KAS representative today to see how OPTRIENT MoCo can improve your crop's performance.

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