“How much?” That’s the question Justin Leavitt encouraged growers to ask themselves when it comes to watering their plants.
“But the real question is not ‘How much should I be watering?” It’s ‘How much oxygen is in water?”
Leavitt, the North American Horticulture Business development manager for Moleaer Technology, addressed a horde of horticulturists at Cultivate’24 in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this summer. He told his audience about the importance of understanding dissolved oxygen (DO) and oxygen saturation (SO2).
DO is the amount of free oxygen gas that’s dissolved in water. Oxygen saturation is a relative measure of the concentration of oxygen that is dissolved or carried in a given medium as a proportion of the maximal concentration that can be dissolved in that medium at the given temperature.
“Increasing DO helps improve your crops. And sometimes the steps you can take are relatively simple,” Leavitt said. “We know that cooler water holds on to more oxygen, so keeping the water you use in a cool storage location can help you see improvement.”
But for those who want to go further, Leavitt recommended growers look into nanobubble technology.
“As a grower myself and someone who’s worked in the industry for almost a decade, I’m excited to share how nanobubble technology can help more growers solve problems in their cultivation and operations,” said Leavitt. “Growers can get more from their irrigation water with dissolved oxygen and nanobubbles.”
(Leavitt previously worked with BioBee, specializing in crop protection, and as the IPM manager at Costa Farms in Florida. He earned his degree in horticulture from North Carolina State University.)
Justin Leavitt’s research has nailed down exactly how much dissolved oxygen can help horticultural growers. Photo by Enrico Villamaino
Nanobubbles are 70 – 120 nanometers in size – 2,500 times smaller than a single grain of salt. Due to their size, nanobubbles improve numerous physical, chemical and biological processes, allowing for water to enter a state of “supersaturation.” When water is supersaturated, it holds more oxygen than it would naturally hold at a given temperature.
“This procedure isn’t used so much to go from bad results to good,” Leavitt explained. “We find it’s mostly utilized by growers who are already seeing adequate results. But these growers want to go from ‘good’ to ‘great.’”
In his research and data collection, Leavitt had found that the use of nanobubbles produces an increase of 300% of the amount of DO in the water used.
“We witnessed a jump from six parts per million to 21 parts per million,” he said.
In trials conducted with plantings of violets, Leavitt recorded a consistent reduction in growing time from eight weeks down to six. “And in addition to a 20%-plus reduction in growing time, we also saw a consistent increase in the flowering yield of over 10%,” he noted.
Leavitt said that growers should find out if nanobubbles are right for them, but many do find the use of them to be a cost saving measure. “We saw a reduction in the amount of nutrients and micronutrients required… The plantings required 10% less fertilizer,” he said of his research.
The violets grown using nanobubbles also exhibited increased resilience to shipping conditions.
He concluded with a final piece of advice: “If you take away only one thing from this presentation, it’s that you should have your soil tested for its DO level. Knowing where you’re at can really help you know how much more you can be getting out of your plantings.”
For more information visit moleaer.com.
by Enrico Villamaino
