A fabric from military uniform research tripled strawberry yields in North Carolina trials

Strawberries grown under a knitted fabric called Plant Armor produced as much as 3.56 times the fruit of uncovered plants in tunnel field tests at North Carolina State University. The textile began as a different problem altogether: making body armor more comfortable for soldiers.

“The path to Plant Armor started with trying to make a cloth to go on a soldier’s chest to make body armor more comfortable,” R. Michael Roe, a co-author of the study and a named inventor on the patent, said in the university’s account. The fabric is now patented by the university and licensed for commercial development, and the results appear in the journal Agriculture.

Three beds, one cultivar, one winter

The 3.56 figure deserves a closer look at the plot it came from. According to the paper in Agriculture, the trial ran from November 2024 to May 2025 at NC State’s Research Annex using Sweet Charlie, an early-season strawberry cultivar. Three raised beds were each split into a covered half and an uncovered half, with four plants in each section. The comparison fits in a few sentences: under the cover, harvestable fruit rose 3.56-fold and harvesting began about a week earlier. It is a clean comparison within each bed, but it is a small one, and the number is the best result reported, not a guaranteed multiple for a commercial field.

Some coverage of the work, including the ScienceDaily summary, describes the tests as spanning three growing seasons. The paper’s own description is of a single Nov 2024 to May 2025 trial, and that is the version used here.

Warmth without shade, and a lab test on aphids

The team’s central surprise concerned light. Gabriel Olawuyi, the lead researcher, said the group had expected the fabric’s seemingly opaque look to push plants toward leafy growth at the expense of fruiting. the fabric, he said, “did not impede access to light at all,” and fruit production increased significantly. The paper reports no significant difference in leaf, stem or root biomass between covered and uncovered plants, so the cover did not trigger the shade-avoidance response that would have diverted energy from fruit.

What the cover did do was hold heat. According to the paper, it raised average temperatures by about 1.93 degrees Celsius without raising relative humidity, which matters because trapped moisture invites disease. The NC State release explains that the warmth helped plants accumulate the growing degree-days needed to reach fruiting earlier. Olawuyi put it as the plants getting the warmth they need for each stage of development, so they produced far more than the uncovered ones.

In laboratory bioassays the fabric achieved what the authors call absolute aphid exclusion: no Rhodobium porosum nymphs got through during a 180-minute test, even though aphids had already infested plants in the field. The researchers suggest the barrier could cut reliance on pesticides, though the yield trial itself did not measure a pesticide reduction. Aphid exclusion was shown in the laboratory, while the field result is the yield and temperature record, and the two should be read as separate lines of evidence.

From soldier’s chest to strawberry bed

The material is a three-dimensional spacer textile. The patent, number 11,582,968 B2, assigned to North Carolina State University, describes an outer layer and an inner layer joined by connecting filaments, polyester throughout, with outer-layer pores of roughly 50 to 100 micrometers and 30 to 80 millimeters between the layers. Published in February 2023, it lists as inventors Andre J. West, Marian G. McCord, Richard Michael Roe, James Brian Davis and Jiwei Zhu, and and the patent describes the structure as a winding path that deters insects without being solid. The patent adds that insecticides, repellents or other protective agents can be built into the material, a possibility separate from the cover tested on strawberries in this study.

The lineage explains why a textile lab and an entomology lab ended up on the same paper. Roe said the discovery depended on many people doing research and following the science, and the university release on EurekAlert notes that the second-generation fabric, the one tested here, is the licensed version.

Replication is the work still ahead. The paper tested one cultivar at one site over one winter, with twelve covered plants per treatment arm across three beds, and both the NC State release and the ScienceDaily summary frame reduced pesticide and water needs as potential benefits rather than measured ones. A commercial grower would want to know how the cover performs on other cultivars, across full seasons and at field scale, how it handles labor and cost, and whether the roughly 1.9 degree warming that helped early fruiting in a cool-season crop turns into a liability when spring heat arrives. None of those questions is answered in the paper as summarized.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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