New PC Hub Podcast: Growing Smarter Tomatoes Through Protected Cropping Research
October 2, 2026
How does a tomato plant respond when it receives less nitrogen? And can more targeted nutrient management help protected cropping systems use resources more efficiently while maintaining production? These questions are explored in a new episode of the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food (LISAF) podcast.
🎙️Listen here on Spotify.
The project uses the Micro-Tom tomato as a research model to investigate how plants respond to different nitrogen levels and growing substrates. Researchers are combining controlled environments, automated fertigation, environmental sensors and advanced imaging to better understand plant growth, crop performance and resource use.
The episode also explores how technologies such as plant phenotyping and imaging can provide new insights into crop health and stress. While the findings are not yet a direct fertigation recommendation for commercial crops, they are helping build the evidence needed for future trials and smarter crop monitoring tools.
The podcast highlights the importance of collaboration between researchers, growers, industry organisations and technology providers in translating research into practical outcomes for protected cropping.
The APPN Node at La Trobe University offers access to a range of precision-controlled growth environments and sophisticated phenotyping technologies.
Their extensive facilities provide academic researchers and commercial organisations with the capacity to rapidly, accurately and objectively assess plant performance using non-destructive digital technologies. This means research crops can be assessed repeatedly through their entire growth phase, to provide a valuable temporal dimension to the plant performance data.
Fore more details and contact details: click here.
Stay tuned for updates on our research, industry collaborations, and opportunities to engage with the PC Hub.
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