Meet Prof. Hugh Earl Descriptive Transcript

Summary: Prof. Hugh Earl describes his research on crop physiology.

00:00 - 00:05 
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Text: :60 Second Snapshots
Meet the Profs of the Ontario Agricultural College

00:05- 00:31
[Screen fades to show video of Prof. Hugh Earl speaking in a library setting; University of Guelph logo and white text on a black box fade in at bottom with text: Prof. Hugh Earl Department of Plant Agriculture. Music fades out.]

Hugh: I study crop physiology, not a lot of people really understand what that is. It's similar to plant physiology, but it's not just plant physiology studying agronomically important species, it's more than that. We study plants not just at the plant level, but at the community level to try to understand yield formation, but what determines crop yield, and a lot of those phenomena that are important can only be understood if you look at the community of plants and the interactions between them.

00:31 - 01:11
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Hugh: Biomass production is really a function not just of photosynthesis, but the balance between photosynthesis and respiration. It turns out that about fifty percent of the carbon that's fixed by a crop over the course of a season is actually lost again due to respiratory carbon loss. Plants respire just the way other organisms do, and it's always been interesting to us that there's so little research on that side of the equation. It's kind of like, you know, managing your household finances and only looking at your income and never looking at your expenses. If you want to 
understand carbon available for biomass production and yield, you have to look at both sides, so we're doing some interesting work [music fades in] on understanding what determines respiratory carbon loss of crops.

01:11 - 01:16
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Text: www.uoguelph.ca/oac
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