John is a Boy Scout. He enjoys playing the piano, the saxophone, and the drums. He rides his motorcycle on a dirt track he designed himself. John would like to pursue a career in structural or civil engineering. "I've always liked building things like forts, models, motors, and motorcycle jumps," he says.
John's science hero is his mom. "She loves science and always has experiments for my brother and me to work on at home," he says.
When John's family planted 500 new orange trees on their ranch, they got a lot of confusing information about fertilization. John knew that nitrogen was a critical element of fertilizer for citrus trees and decided to find out which types of urea nitrogen produce the best growth with the least damage. John consulted an expert, Robert Krueger, to help him refine his research project, which was to look at low biuret urea (LBU) and high biuret urea (HBU) fertilizers. John predicted that medium concentrations of LBU would produce the least amount of necrosis and the most leaf growth and that HBU would produce necrosis in even lower concentrations.
John began by selecting 65 young orange trees in the family grove and marking off two branchlets from each tree. He produced six different concentrations of both LBU and HBU fertilizer and painted the different formulations on the leaves of the 130 branchlets using 10 as controls. Over the next month, he conducted three field evaluations using a necrosis and growth rate scale. His results showed that all concentrations of LBU produced more growth than equivalent HBU concentrations, except at the 0.02 and 0.04 HBU concentrations. John concluded that the use of an HBU fertilizer at low concentrations might be a viable foliar fertilizer for young citrus trees. The added benefit of HBU fertilizer is that biuret degrades seven times more slowly than urea, reducing groundwater contamination while fulfilling the need to advance the growth of the citrus trees.
