Read your crop's roots before you add anything

When a crop looks weak, the first instinct is to add something. But the roots usually show what is wrong, and a few minutes with a spade can save a season of guessing. This guide is about looking first, and choosing a product only when you know what you are looking at.

How to look

Do not pull the plant. Dig it up with a spade, a little away from the stem, so the roots come out with soil on them. Do this on one or two plants that look weak and one that looks healthy, and compare.

Healthy roots are white or light in colour, branched, and covered in fine hairs that hold soil. Warning signs are roots that are brown or black, thin, short or sparse, soil that does not cling to them, swollen knots along them, or a rotten smell.

Also check the ground itself. A hard layer that stops the spade, water standing after irrigation, or fertiliser landing away from the root zone can each hold a crop back, whatever you apply.

What the roots may be telling you

• Brown, soft or smelly roots. Usually rot, often with waterlogging. Fix drainage and irrigation first. See the guide on protecting a crop from disease and rot.
• Swollen knots on the roots. A sign of nematodes (on pulses and other legumes, small round nodules can be normal). See products for pests, and Nemarix for nematodes in vegetable and orchard crops.
• Thin, short, pale roots in a soil that is hard or off in pH. The roots have little to work with. This is where root-zone products fit.
• Healthy roots but a hungry-looking crop. The problem is likely nutrition, not roots. Read why nutrients can be in the soil and still out of reach.

Where Green Care Agro’s root products fit

These products work on the root zone. None of them fixes compaction or waterlogging, so deal with those first.

• Hunter is used to balance soil pH, improve soil structure and promote white-root development for better nutrient uptake. Dose: 5 litres per acre through drip.
• Steam Gold stimulates healthy white-root development. Dose: 500 g per acre through drip.
• Myconet is a mycorrhiza culture, used to increase root growth and nutrient absorption. Mycorrhiza lives on and with a crop’s roots, so it needs living roots to work with. Dose: 100 g per 200 litres of water.
• BacilAgro is a Bacillus culture that creates a favourable environment around the root zone. Dose: 250 g per 200 litres of water.

Use the dosage calculator to turn these doses into the quantity for your area.

What to do next

Match the product to what you actually saw on the spade, and apply it at the stage given on its page. If you are not sure what you are looking at, send us a photo of the dug-up roots and the crop stage on WhatsApp, and we will tell you which product to use, and which not to.