Addressing Wildfire Smoke Concerns

This past week, much of the upper Midwest saw significant air quality impacts from wildfire smoke blowing down from Canada. While the level of particulates could be particularly unhealthy for people in some areas, the impact on agronomic crops should be of much less concern for Maximum Farming System farmers than their more conventional neighbors.

Summer heat and light stress are annual factors affecting crop productivity, the magnitude of which varies from year to year depending on the frequency and magnitude of cloud cover and rainfall. Management choices mitigate those annual summer stresses in a variety of ways. Customers who implement the System, including reproductive foliar applications, promote continued root growth in their crops. This gives them greater access to soil water that can be transpired to both fix more carbon and cool the plant, resulting in greater yield potential.

While truly excessive smoke can lead to partial clogging of stomates, such issues are rare except in areas very close to the wildfires. Further away, at distances of 100 miles or more, the very fine smoke particulates actually do very little harm. In fact, the haze that looks like a light to moderate fog will actually diffuse summer sunlight to the point that light stress is actually reduced during the midday hours. Thus, through most of the US corn and soybean belt, the net effect is actually neutral to somewhat positive on the crop wherever soil water can be accessed by crop roots.