PCT Shorts: Did Wildfire Smoke Help or Hurt Ohio Crops?

Are you choked by the smoke? Hi, welcome back to our PCC Short, I'm Jonah Johnson. So we had a lot of residual questions about what did the implications from the wildfire smokes do to our crops over the last couple weeks when we had this nasty smoke dissipate down to the entire Ohio Valley. And so several things I first consider and similar back to 2023 when we experienced this before, but I don't think we had the severity like we did here in 2026. And so several things when you think about what was emitted into the atmosphere. Ingredients like black carbon, for example, carbon monoxide, similar to what comes out of your tailpipe on your vehicle, a toxic odorless gas. We had particulate matter, so essentially microscopic dirt that gets put up in the atmosphere and comes back down. And then of course, O3, which when that's combined with dirt up in the atmosphere becomes smog, which you see pictures of along very large cities, that also can have a negative effect to our plants. And so first of all, when you think about carbon monoxide, that can actually displace or reduce the uptake of plants uptaking carbon dioxide. So obviously we breathe out carbon dioxide as an exhaust gas, but plants uptake that to help make photosynthates when they produce their own energy. And so if carbon monoxide displaces that, the plants can't be as proactively uptaking CO2, carbon dioxide, and so basically slows the plants down for being as in their growth pattern. And so that's a negative. Another negative is O3 or ozone that can actually cause burns on the leaves, stalks of the corn, for example. And we actually saw some of that back in 2023. And so those are some negatives there. The other ones there is when you think about the particulate matter, the microscopic dirt in the atmosphere, that can actually clog the stomates or the pores on the underside of our plant leaves. And obviously that can impact our lungs as we try to breathe and process that when you had to be outside during this heavy smoke emissions. And so when you take that forward, what is that going to do to our plants? Is there any positives out of that? One positive you could look at is in regards to the light transmission to the plants. So the smoke became essentially a giant filter and you all saw that how it reduced the light intensity during the day. But one benefit of that is actually is the diffusion of that light. So sunlight, obviously during the day, as it moves over top of us, it's intense most of the day, especially around noon. And we've all experienced that in a hot summer day. And so plants can only receive that intense, a certain intensity of light in their maximum zone when they're making photosynthase. When it gets too high, the plants essentially can't receive that light. And an analogy to this would be, is if you look at commercial windmills and say a large wind event comes, they just don't keep spinning faster. They essentially stop those windmills from spinning because it's too, too much RPMs are too hard on those generators and machines. So once the winds get back down in that normal operating zone, they'll start to spin again. So that's similar to how when the sun's really intense during the day, they may shut down for a while and severe drought and heat days. That's why you see the soybean leaves turn upside down and the corn plants roll up to defend itself. So back to how that impacts our plants. So when the lights diffuse, similar to comparing a spotlight versus a floodlight, that light can engulf those plants longer during the day. And it's a more quote-unquote digestible light during the entire day versus the intensity that can fluctuate during the day. So that's a benefit there as well. Now at university studies, it looked at shading trials in regards to different percentages of light transmission and receiving of plants during the day. One study from Nebraska showed that 46 percent reduction light over a week only reduced crop yields about five percent. So it's not terrible, but I don't think we were anywhere close to that amount of light filtering, if you will, when we experience those wildfire smokes. So if you have further questions, follow us on x or pctnutrients.com. I'm Jonah Johnson. Thanks for watching.