Introduction
Background & Rational:
Alberta agriculture is a fundamental sector in Alberta’s economy and development, which contributed $10.2 billion in GDP in 2022 and created 69,000 job positions for Albertans. Also, Alberta agriculture plays a critical role in the global food market because Alberta produces nearly 29.9% of Canada’s canola, 33.0% of Canada’s wheat, and 32.1% of Canada’s pulses. Remarkably, Canada is the #1 exporter of canola seed, #3 exporter of wheat, and #1 exporter of dry pulses worldwide (InvestAlberta-Agriculture, 2023).
Figure 1. The devastating impact of heat and drought stresses on the Alberta crop field.
Therefore, it is highly necessary to maintain Alberta agricultural production in a high quantity with good quality; achieving this goal is quite challenging since agricultural production, especially crop production, is very susceptible to abiotic stresses, such as drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, chemical toxicity, and oxidative stress (Wang et al., 2003). Unfortunately, crop production in Alberta is getting more threats from the increased heat and drought stresses over the last decades, and exceptional heat and drought in summer 2023 (Stein, 2023) had caused a significant reduction of dryland crop yield compares to the past 5- and 10-year averages cross Alberta (Alberta Crop Report, 2023).
Unlike crop nutrient deficiency and crop damage created by weeds, pests, or diseases, it is not very practical to solve the decreased crop production by using fertilizers or pesticides. On the one hand, applying fertilizers and pesticides cannot improve crops’ heat and drought tolerance directly. On the other hand, using fertilizer and pesticides in dry crop fields under heat stress could generate more problems like increasing soil salinity and chemical toxicity, which further reduce crop production. In this case, a recent and environmental-friendly innovation called plant biostimulant (PB) has become popular in the practice of crop production against heat, drought, and other abiotic stresses.
The definition of plant biostimulant (PB) is that “A plant biostimulant shall be an EU fertilizing product, the function of which is to stimulate plant nutrition processes independently of the product's nutrient content with the sole aim of improving one or more of the following characteristics of the plant or the plant rhizosphere: i) nutrient use efficiency, ii) tolerance to abiotic stress, iii) quality traits, or iv) availability of confined nutrients in the soil or rhizosphere” (EU, 2019).
Figure 2. An illustration of Biostimulants' functions.
Research Objectives:
The PB manufacturer Acadian Plant Health (APH) has recently developed a new PB named “Product-X”, which is a liquid PB and is designed to be applied as a foliar treatment on common Alberta crop species to make crops have a high and good production under heat and drought stresses.
The APH sent Project-X’s samples to their collaborators and wants them to test and evaluate the benefit of Project-X on different Alberta commercial crops; Dr. Ludovic Capo-Chichi and his research team are responsible for evaluating the benefit of Project-X on winter wheat (Triticum aestivum). By the end of the research, they want to know: i) Does the application of Project-X improve winter wheat production under heat and drought stress? ii) Do different application dates (referring to the BBCH-scale for winter wheat) affect the production outcome? iii) Does multiple applications of Project-X improve the production outcome than a single application?