The Yorkton Film Festival might be thought of as a strange place for a farmer to have an opportunity to learn something new, but at this year's event grain farmers would have been at least intrigued at the screening of the film Smarty Plants.
The Festival program explained the film as one which "effortlessly integrates hard core science with a light hearted look at how plants behave, revealing a world where plants are as busy, responsive and complex as we are."
I suppose on a biological level one living thing is about as complex as the new once you go beyond one celled organisms, and even then the way they function and survive is pretty amazing. I am far removed from high school biology by years now, but that much information I have retained.
In the case of Smarty Plants, it does show some rather fascinating discoveries about how plants react within their environment, and with each other.
It is quite amazing to see a Daughter Plant actually moving in a circle, through time lapse video, in search of a host. The plant has no root system and survives by latching onto to other plants.
Its preferred host is the tomato plant, and when a Daughter Plant is set between a tomato and another plant, it ultimately moves to the tomato the vast majority of times.
Not surprisingly it is reacting to a chemical given off by the tomato, but it does illustrate how a plant makes 'choices' in its life.
Such choices are of course reactions etched into the very genetic make-up of a plant. We see such things in animals all the time. Why do lemmings go on their famed runs, because sometime wired into their core existence through thousands of yeas compels them to do so.
Smarty Plants also takes viewers underground to look at the complex root systems most plants have. They show how a root will grow more quickly toward a food source, fertilizer, and then slow that growth as it takes in the nutrient once reached.
Such behavior would not be a particular surprise for farmers.
We have all seen how a crop seeded into wet conditions will have a shallow root system because it has easy access to moisture.
If drier conditions occur after a crop has started growing, top side development will slow, maybe stop, for a time, as the plant puts energy into growing additional roots to find now more distant water resources.
And certainly gardeners see how reactive to their environment plants can be. In an unkempt lot dandelions will flower on rather lengthy stems as they compete for sunlight with other plants.
Yet if that dandelion is in a lawn which is regularly mowed, it will flower on a stem which is usually shorter than the cutting height of the mower.
Gardeners are also aware plants react differently to one another. There are vegetable plants which, when planted near each other, are complimentary to one another.
As Smarty Plants producer Merit Jensen Carr clearly identifies in the film, the relationships of a plant with its environment, with other plants, and even with the plants resulting from its own seed, can be far more involved than most of us realize.
From a farm perspective research into the actions of plants may well help with the development of new crop varieties, and farm systems better targeted at triggering natural responses from plants to improve yields, complete with weeds, or fight off harmful insects.
In that regard the documentary nature/environment category was certainly intriguing for what might be accomplished as science better understands plants, and what they are naturally capable of doing.
