How Your Survey Participation Can Help Lead a Revolution in Plant Health

Horticulture is rooted in soilless culture, with ample opportunities for ever-evolving systems to better produce specialty crops while overcoming a diminishing availability of soil fumigants, increasing pest pressure, and the need for flexibility in a constantly changing world of new cultivars and production methods.

Soilless culture, specifically using growing media (i.e., soilless substrates), provides an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we produce nuts, small fruits, tree fruits, vegetables, leafy greens, pharmaceuticals, and hemp. The foundational science and knowledge used to produce containerized greenhouse and nursery crops for the past half-century can inform future innovations, while also incrementally improving existing ornamental production systems.

The USDA Specialty Crops Research Initiative has awarded a planning grant to a multi-disciplinary team of seven North American universities and federal laboratories, led by Dr. Jeb Fields at the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. The goal of this grant is to reimagine and redefine soilless substrate science to better meet the expanding range of crops and production systems that are transitioning from traditional field soils into soilless substrates.

This goal will be accomplished through hosting a North American Soilless Substrate Summit to steer research, pursue innovative ideas, and develop a national needs assessment for current and future specialty crop growers. We are seeking input from growers and growing media manufacturers/suppliers across the continent, representing multiple sectors and demographics, to identify needed innovations and constraints when producing specialty crops with soilless substrates, regardless of the system utilized. Together we will determine the needs, cost restraints, material availability, and overall sustainability to ensure successful paths forward for each crop sector and within emerging markets.

We invite you to provide your input through .

Note: This article was submitted by project collaborators Jeb Fields (Louisiana State University), Jim Owen (USDA), Brian Jackson (North Carolina State University), James Altland (USDA, The Ohio State University), and Loren Oki (University of California-Davis). Reach out to any of them for more information and to become a partner in the project. For updates and more current information, visit http://www.soilleSSSubstrates.org.