Grow Stronger Soybeans From the Start

Reducing soybean stress is one of the steps you can take to help maximize potential yield. This strategy protects the seedlings during their most vulnerable stage, which helps to improve the early season health and yield potential of your soybean crop.

How Does Stress Impact Soybeans?

There are two basic types of soybean stress: biotic and abiotic. Biotic stress is a biological type of stress, like a plant pathogen or insect pest. Abiotic stress is triggered by the environment, including cold, hot, wet and dry conditions. Both biotic and abiotic stressors reduce the growth rate of the soybeans, which in turn reduces yield potential.

“Ideally you don’t want any stress during the early vegetative growth stage since the soybeans have about as much biomass growing above ground as they do below ground,” says Dale Ireland, Ph.D., Syngenta technical product lead. “Any time early growth is slowed down, it also slows the root development rate. During early shoot and root development, slowing the root development rate nearly always leads to lost root size potential that won’t be regained in reproductive growth stages. During hot and dry weather during mid growing season, plants with less rooting will shed more flowers which leads to fewer pods and lower yields.”

Today’s elite commercial soybean lines are known to naturally abort up to 80% of the flowers they produce. Biotic and abiotic stressors influence this flower shed, largely. However, the more equipped that plant is to handle any stressors it may encounter, the more likely it is to retain more of those flowers and produce a higher potential yield.

Why is Plant Health Important for Yield?

Plant health refers to the overall health and vitality of the crop including how well the plant grows and how much yield it produces. “Be sure your neighboring plants are as uniform to each other as possible up and down the row. This is ideal for maximizing your variety’s genetic yield potential,” Ireland says. “With a uniform leaf canopy, your soybeans are able to optimize light capture and access more nutrients and water, which increases stress tolerance.”

How to Protect Your Soybeans from Stressors

From the moment your soybean seeds are planted, they are exposed to a variety of biotic and abiotic stressors. Crop protection measures, such as a broad-spectrum seed treatment and foliar fungicide application, are key to keeping soybeans safe and protected. When your soybeans are protected from stressors with a seed treatment, you are setting them up for a successful growing season by giving them the best chance for healthy development.

Ireland recommends Saltro^® fungicide seed treatment to keep your soybeans healthy. “Saltro gives you increased confidence that when you put that seed in the ground, no matter what Mother Nature has in store for you, you’re going to get as healthy and uniform of a stand emerging as you can,” he says.

Saltro provides protection from Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), robust soybean cyst nematode protection and red crown rot suppression. In addition to the powerful protection, Saltro also enhances plant health and crop stress recovery due to MagniSafe™ technology, “One of the strongest aspects of MagniSafe technology is that it decreases plant stress recovery time. In other words, plants recover from stress predictably more quickly,” explains Ireland.

Even in the absence of known pest pressure, Saltro delivers benefits like increased root and shoot mass, which adds up to healthier and stronger plants, and higher yield potential.