Anticipation of IPNC 2025
Bean and done it
For a scientist, there are few things more satisfying than designing, conducting and completing an experiment that confirms a hypothesis.
As you’d expect, it’s this concept that gets FertiGlobal’s crop scientists out of bed every morning: their commitment to better understand a crop’s nutritional needs. Why? Because by meeting those needs, we can influence everything from growth to yield to plant health, which can in turn give growers what they seek: better crops, better soils, better food and better farming.
But every scientist will also tell you that there IS one thing better. And that is when another scientist takes such an interest in your work that they conduct their own scientific studies – and uncover results that corroborate, independently, all your hard work.
Which is why we’re eagerly anticipating this month’s International Plant Nutrition Colloquium, hosted by the Portuguese city of Porto between 22-25 July. This year’s event centres on Cultivating Resilience: Plant Nutrition for Food, Feed, and Health.
Here, Professor Carlos Ribeiro Rodrigues, of the Goiano Federal Institute at Rio Verde in Brazil, will present a set of studies about FertiGlobal’s EnNuVi Technology-based products – a perfect alignment with the 2025 theme.
Why EnNuVi?
EnNuVi is what we would probably describe as FertiGlobal’s flagship technology. An acronym of Enhance, Nurture, Vitalize, EnNuVi is a bioactivating Technology that has a unique ability to trigger and control plants’ defence and resistance systems.
EnNuVi Technology based products regulate and influence the genes in the plant, helping to protect it from stress events. Its molecule of essential plant nutrients, active polyphenols and selected natural ingredients helps the crop to grow, healthy and strong, to reach its full yield potential.
What most excites us– and many others – about EnNuVi Technology-based products is how they can boost a crop’s natural defence systems. In turn, this can significantly reduce pesticide use. And thus it meets the central tenets of FertiGlobal’s philosophy: reducing farming’s impact on the environment, and ensuring farmers can deliver high-yielding, high-quality output without requiring excessive resource use (EnNuVi also reduces crops’ water consumption).
It was these features that caught the attention of Professor Rodrigues. In conjunction with one of his students, Humberto Pistore Eleuterio, he organised a study of Mantus, one of our most popular EnNuVi-based products. And it’s these results – together with a parallel study into Semia, another product in the EnNuVi portfolio – that will be presented at IPNC next month.
For the study, Rodrigues and Eleuterio chose the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). It’s a key source of protein, vitamins and minerals; in many countries around the world it’s a staple crop and a primary foodstuff.
Despite this, the common bean’s productivity falls short of expectation. To grow better crops, more reliably, more efficiently and in greater quantities, growers – many of them small-scale farmers – must balance agronomic efficiency and resource optimisation. And then there’s the environmental sustainability: current agronomic practice relies on plant growth regulators and fungicides.
The study looked at how Mantus, which contains copper compounds alongside plant polyphenols, and Semia (zinc and polyphenols), might affect photochemical efficacy, photosynthesis, yield and other metrics. EnNuVi products were compared against products used in conventional farmer practice.
We’re not going to steal the team’s thunder by revealing the results here; for those, you’ll have to wait until we share the full information in next month’s blog.
But they did make our own scientists very satisfied…
Look out for the rest of the story next month. If you’re attending IPNC, look out for the poster – it will be presented on Day 3, July 25.
