Maximizing Plant Growth with Plant-Based Solutions

Plant nutrition and protection are at the heart of growers’ requirements, to ensure optimal growth of their crops and meet the global food demand.

Ensuring that plants have all the essential nutrients they need for their growth is crucial. That’s why plant fertilization and soil nutrition are key components.

Raising the challenge of sustainability with no compromise on yield

Moving towards more sustainability in agriculture, growers need to find alternative solutions to conventional fossil fuel-based fertilizers, to lower their environmental impact and respond to consumers’ consciousness of how their food is cultivated. Yet, growers still expect optimum results for their plant growth and crop yield. 

From plants to plants: plant-based ingredients as a reliable alternative to synthetic fertilizers

Roquette has developed a range of plant-based ingredients, specifically answering the need of growers for more environmentally friendly solutions for the nutrition of their crops.

This range of ingredients, refined for specific applications, conditions, and crops helps growers substitute mineral and chemical fertilizers for natural alternatives that offer: 

• Balanced and optimized NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium)
• A combination of organic acids, vitamins, and other trace minerals

Outperforming conventional solutions

Comparative studies were performed within Roquette as well as in partnership with Iowa State University (ISU in Ames, Iowa, US) to demonstrate the performance of these plant-based solutions for the cultivation of tomato plantlets.

Each comparative case study provided evidence that Roquette plant-based ingredients have considerable potential, matching and even outperforming the results of synthetic NPK fertilizer.

What experts say

About the studies at ISU, Dr. Ajay Nair, Associate Professor and Extension Vegetable Specialist, ISU, said, “Overall, the results are very promising. The Roquette products in their relatively complex forms did exceptionally well when compared to synthetic salt-based fertilizers, clearly demonstrating the potential to significantly influence transplant growth and development.”

About the studies at Roquette, Matthieu Ramette, Research Engineer in Microbiology, Roquette, said, “Following on from the results generated by ISU, we wanted to explore the robustness of beneficial effects with respect to growing media and plant variety. The results of this set of trials are really positive. We see strong performance across different media and with dwarf as well as standard tomato varieties. This suggests that the potential gains of switching to plant-based fertilizers/biostimulants are accessible to growers working in a range of environments.”

Download the study: Comparing the performance of plant-based fertilizers and biostimulants with synthetic alternatives

Learn more about our plant-based ingredients and how they perform in this technical article where we dive deep into their performance through comparative case studies on tomato transplants.