Beyond just “more inputs”: Silicon unlocks the nutrient pantry.

Specialty crop growers know the stakes of nutrient deficiencies all too well. Whether it’s tip burn in lettuce, Blossom End Rot (BER) in tomatoes, poor tuber quality in potatoes, or “bitter pit” in apples, the symptoms of “too little” can devastate both yield and quality. In all crops, nutrient deficiencies lead to compromised cell wall integrity, rendering fruits like grapes susceptible to sunburn, or leaves weak, folded, and less photosynthetically active. The financial consequences are steep for these fundamental compromises to plant architecture—but the costs are not only due to direct crop loss, but also from the associated increased labor, storage issues, and dissatisfied buyers.

In response, it's common to reach for more fertilizer. More calcium, more magnesium, more potassium, more nitrogen. And often, this works, albeit with the costs that come with the input and the effort required to apply it. 

But also, often, simply adding more isn’t the best solution—not just because of the cost, but because we can over fertilize with bad consequences for plant growth (for example, fruit splitting, or toxicity burn, or stunted flower and fruit set). It is sometimes also the case that “just adding more” isn’t a great idea because the nutrient doesn’t stay present and available to the plant; it leaches away, or gets locked up, or simply isn’t readily mobilized, uptaken, or translocated to the plant tissues that so desperately need it. 

This is a critical distinction: deficiency doesn’t always mean absence. Sometimes, the nutrients are there—locked in the soil matrix, tied up by pH, antagonized by other ions, or simply not in a form the plant can absorb.

This is where a shift in perspective is powerful. Rather than focusing only on adding more, maybe we can ask: what small additions can make what’s already there more available? How can we unlock the soil’s existing pantry? There are many answers to that question—microbial partners that solubilize phosphorus or fix nitrogen, organic acids that chelate minerals, root exudates that reshape the rhizosphere. But one increasingly important answer is silicon—a nutrient that doesn't just support plant structure, but enhances the uptake and availability of others, especially calcium.

Why Calcium matters—And why it’s hard to move.

Calcium is a foundational nutrient in plants. It’s essential for building strong cell walls, maintaining membrane stability, and regulating stress responses. In specialty crops, adequate calcium is not only tied to plant health and growth, but is also directly tied to the shelf life and appearance of produce. It keeps fruits from splitting and is essential for preventing undesirable softness in many crops (no one wants to eat a squishy bell pepper!)

But calcium is also a notoriously tricky nutrient to manage. It’s considered an immobile nutrient—meaning that once deposited in a tissue, it doesn’t readily move to where it’s needed next. In practice, this means that even if calcium is present in the soil, it might not reach developing fruit or young leaves. These youngest tissues depend on active transpiration streams (which themselves depend on water availability) to draw calcium in, and any disruption in this flow—due to heat stress, poor root function, or excess vegetative growth—can break that chain. 

However, “immobile” is not the same as saying stuck, and it is definitely not the same as saying inert. In recent years, we’ve come to believe it is more accurate to say that calcium has limited phloem mobility, meaning it is not often remobilized from older to newer tissues. But its movement through the xylem is influenced by many factors—including root health, water flow, and the presence of other nutrients. And that’s where silicon comes in.

Silicon: The Quiet Enhancer

Silicon is often described as a "beneficial element"—not yet considered essential for all plants, but profoundly helpful, especially under stress. One of its lesser-known superpowers is its ability to enhance the uptake and distribution of other nutrients, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. Research has shown that silicon can facilitate this in a number of ways, including by increasing the permeability of root cell walls, making it easier for nutrients to enter; improving transpiration efficiency, photosynthetic capacity, and root hydraulic conductance, which facilitates nutrient transport via the xylem; alleviating antagonistic effects from other ions (e.g., sodium or aluminum) by reducing competition at the uptake sites, and by stimulating microbial activity in the rhizosphere, which in turn mobilizes nutrients.

In short, silicon acts like a facilitator. It doesn’t just add—it unlocks what is there, and it makes applications more efficient.

It should be noted that silicon's power to help plants effectively distribute nutrients is not just true for what it does in soil-to-plant transfer. Foliar applications of monosilicic can actually help mobilize and stabilize nutrients within plants, which is often a challenge for growers, especially in tree crops. What you see below is data from one of our growers in which they tried applications of Calcium both with and without Dune monosilicic acid to help facilitate its uptake in cherry foliar spray. Both fields showed that Calcium uptake was improved with the co-application of Dune.

% Calcium in cherry leaf tissues across 2 fields.

One week after application.

Real-world impacts: Healthier crops, lower inputs

For growers, nutrient mobility and stability has tangible implications. Silicon supplementation—whether through liquid silicates, stabilized monosilicic acid, or silicon-enhancing microbes—has been shown to make many incredibly important saves for growers including the reduction of calcium-related disorders like blossom end rot and tip burn. It improves the nutrient use efficiency of what the growers do put on, meaning growers can get better results with less applied fertilizer. Silicon is also an incredible supporter of crop health and resilience, so in less direct ways– because of its buffering effect against abiotic stress (drought, heat, salinity)-- silicon improves nutrient uptake just by improving the architecture and vigor of the plant. A product like monosilicic acid not only solves many of these issues of deformity, but also is well-known for improving shelf life, which affects both the length of time that growers are able to sell their product, and the satisfaction of the end consumer. A product like monosilicic acid, particularly one that is concentrated and soluble, is also an easy and affordable way to address these issues because a very low rate is simple to integrate into a grower’s standing regime. 

Instead of overloading fields with expensive inputs that eat away at that bottom line, silicon is an inexpensive way of not only making the nutrients already in the soil more accessible, more mobile, and more effective-- but also mobilizing and stabilizing nutrients within the crop. 

As growers move toward a more resilient agriculture, especially in high-value specialty crops, tools like silicon become essential. 

They help us shift our mindset from more to available, from input-heavy to uptake-smart.

Nutrient management isn’t just about what we feed the soil—it’s about how we support the plant’s ability to feed itself.