Can Soil Microbes Slow Climate Change?

One scientist has tantalizing results, but others are not convinced.

This article was in Scientific American online but is worthy of being more widely dispersed into the wider agricultural and soil science community.  Worth a read!

By John J. Berger on March 26, 2019

Can Soil Microbes Slow Climate Change?

With global carbon emissions hitting an all-time high in 2018, the world is on a trajectory that climate experts believe will lead to catastrophic warming by 2100 or before. Some of those experts say that to combat the threat, it is now imperative for society to use carbon farming techniques that extract carbon dioxide from the air and store it in soils. Because so much exposed soil across the planet is used for farming, the critical question is whether scientists can find ways to store more carbon while also increasing agricultural yields.

David Johnson of New Mexico State University thinks they can. The recipe, he says, is to tip the soil’s fungal-to-bacterial ratio strongly toward the fungi. He has shown how that can be done. Yet it is not clear if techniques can be scaled up economically on large commercial farms everywhere.

Johnson, a trim 67-year-old microbiologist who is as comfortable using the latest metagenomics technology as he is shovelling cow manure into a composter, thinks society can only maximize carbon storage, increase soil’s water-holding capacity and grow plentiful crops if it restores the soil microbiome. “We currently have very degraded soils physically, chemically, but mostly biologically,” he says. “Microbes restore this balance.”

Johnson conducts precise soil-biology experiments into how to increase the capacity of agricultural systems to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. In a recently completed four-and-a-half-year field trial, Johnson planted fast-growing cover crops and applied a microbe-rich solution derived from a vermiculture (worm) compost produced in a low-tech composter of his own design. The bacteria, fungi and protozoa fed a soil food web of nematodes, microarthropods and other beneficial organisms.

Through photosynthesis, the cover crops pulled CO2 from the air, sank roots deep into the earth, and towered over the land. The results were unusual—and highly controversial. Johnson reported a net annual increase of almost 11 metric tons of soil carbon per hectare on his cropland. That’s equivalent to removing about 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide per acre from the atmosphere annually—roughly 10 times the increase that other scientists have reported in many different soils and climates.

Johnson ascribes these improvements, along with large increases in crop yields, to improved soil health stemming from the application of the microbes from his vermiculture, leading to an increase in the soil’s fungal-to-bacterial ratio.

Professor Rattan Lal of Ohio State University, widely regarded as a leading authority on soil carbon sequestration, says he was “intrigued” by Johnson’s outcome. “I want to understand why he’s getting such exceptional results.” Lal thinks that further, larger-scale trials are needed to validate Johnson’s work, of course.

Johnson is also conducting meticulous laboratory studies. They focus on the correlations among fungal-to-bacterial ratios and soil health, fertility and crop productivity. He reports finding increases in fungal-to-bacterial ratio, plus large increases in soil carbon and other nutrients as a result of his management practices.

In all this work, Johnson maintains that as the ratio of fungi to bacteria increases, the soil biome becomes more efficient in utilizing carbon and other nutrients and that the soil therefore releases less CO2 to the atmosphere. The jury is still out, however. Although peer-reviewed soil science literature contains some confirmation, other findings in submerged, forested and subarctic soils—admittedly different circumstances—failed to confirm the relation.

Keith Paustian, a professor of soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University, says he has seen some “quite high rates of carbon accrual” in degraded croplands that were converted to productive perennial grass systems. But he has not seen strong evidence that the same outcome can be produced by adding microbes.

EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS

Johnson asserts that if his approach were used across agriculture internationally, the entire world’s carbon output from 2016 could be stored on just 22 percent of the globe’s arable land. He says that would provide net benefits of $500 to $600 per acre rather than net costs, if credits are provided for carbon capture and related benefits are counted, such as reduced irrigation and increased soil fertility.

To arrive at his global carbon-capture numbers, Johnson projected results from cropland plots of three to 75 acres of various soil types in five states. That is still a fairly limited sample. Henry Janzen, a research scientist at Lethbridge Research and Development Center in Alberta and a professor at the University of Manitoba, cautions that such a projection is risky. “Every ecosystem is unique,” he says. “A practice that elicits soil carbon gain at one site may not be effective at another. And always, the rate of carbon gain will depend on a host of interactive factors, including soil properties, previous management practices, climatic conditions and the vagaries of human whims.”

Janzen also points out that soils do not absorb carbon indefinitely. After some years or decades, they inevitably approach a new steady state. For that reason, he says, soil carbon sequestration is rarely seen as a long-term solution to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

Johnson acknowledges those factors but says managing soil to improve the health of its microbial life can provide strong carbon gains before the soil’s capacity levels off. He is in the process of scaling up his experiments to try to replicate his results on even larger plots in different geographies with a variety of cover and commodity crops, “to assess the impact for the rest of the world.”

A NEW PARADIGM?

Johnson’s work is based on a somewhat different paradigm from that of most conventional soil scientists. They often seek to boost agricultural productivity in traditional ways by adding fertilizer and using pesticides and herbicides as needed. This approach is anathema to Johnson. He decries almost every conventional farming practice—ploughing, bare fallowing, and the application of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. All these, he says, “assault soil microbiota.” He claims that glyphosate (sold in commercial products such as Roundup) will kill Aspergillus fungal species in soil. Aspergillus is often regarded as a marker of fungal presence and is important in carbon and nitrogen cycling.

As for fertilizer, Johnson believes he has demonstrated that microbially inoculated soil enriched with tilled cover crops naturally accumulates more than enough nitrogen for vigorous plant growth. (Nitrogen is the limiting nutrient in most agricultural situations.) In one of his plots where he reports having increased net primary productivity five times, the soil accumulated 770 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year.

Much of this fixation is done by free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Because a normal crop only requires about 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre, Johnson says it would be unnecessary to add artificial fertilizer to a system like this.

As with all of Johnson’s work to date, this result has appeared only in the form of reports and other “grey literature.” Harold van Es, professor of soil and water management at Cornell University’s School of Integrative Plant Science, is one of Johnson’s severest critics.

“In science, we strongly believe that research should be subjected to peer evaluation,” van Es says. “His ideas should not be at all presented as scientific facts.”

The fungal-to-bacterial ratio is indeed important, van Es says. “But there are many ways to increase that ratio,” not just Johnson’s approach. “Reducing tillage has similar effects and this has been much more widely documented.”

Although Johnson has irked some soil scientists and even aroused some ire, as climate change intensifies in speed and fury, many scientists believe it is important to leave no stone unturned in the search for ways to limit carbon emissions quickly. Perhaps the soil’s microbiome can be a powerful tool.

Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John J. Berger

John J. Berger is an environmental science and policy specialist who has written numerous articles and books about the environment and climate change. He is the author of Climate Peril, The Intelligent Reader’s Guide to the Climate Crisis.

Recent Articles

Crisis in the Cryosphere, Part 2

Crisis in the Cryosphere, Part 1

Published online here on Blogger with acknowledgments to the author and Scientific American online

The Tropics - Most Prone to Erosion - New Study Published

Those who live there are unlikely to be surprised by the conclusions in the study, but it does attempt to quantify those areas where it is most severe.

The north of Australia is among some of the most severely impacted areas but has some respite due to seasonal issues - little rain for a number of months in the middle of the calendar year helps reduce the problem.

The first world erosivity map provides a picture of those areas where it is worst.  And it is likely to get even worse with an  increase expected with changing climate and more frequent extreme rainfall.

Regions in the tropical climate zones suffer the greatest rainfall-related soil erosion, reports an international study.

The study, published last month (July) in Scientific Reports, has developed the first-ever Global Rainfall Erosivity Database and a Global Erosivity Map. It notes that while rainfall provides moisture critical for plant growth, it is also one of the prime causes of soil degradation, referred to as rainfall erosivity, which threatens food and water sustainability. 
[study available here in full - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04282-8] 

For experts, model predictions of global erosivity are very important because they help assess risks as well as plan and implement effective soil mitigation and restoration strategies.

According to the study, erosion by rainfall remains poorly quantified despite its significance. This is because it is a complex event influenced by various factors including rainfall intensity, duration, amount and frequency — factors which are not captured in current erosivity estimates.

To model annual rainfall erosivity for different regions, the international team relied on rainfall data gathered from 3,625 stations scattered across 63 countries. Their analysis shows that annual mean rainfall erosivities for countries in the tropics are more than double the global average of about 2,190 megajoule millimetres per hectare per hour per year.
 
South America (particularly Brazil, Columbia and Peru), South-Eastern Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Bangladesh), the Caribbean, and Western and Central Africa have annual mean rainfall erosivities that are greater than 5,000 megajoule millimetres per hectare per hour per year.
 
Cold and dry regions like Canada, the Russian Federation, Northern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East have the lowest annual mean rainfall erosivity.
 
“The tropical forests and the monsoon zones (covering Amazonia part of Brazil, Central Africa and Southeast Asia) have intense rainfall but also excess monthly precipitation (greater than 1,000 millimetres for two consecutive months),” says Panos Panagos, study leader and scientific officer at the Joint Research Centre, European Commission. “The Mediterranean zone (a typical temperate climate zone) has seasonal rainfalls which are less intense than the ones in the tropical zones.”

“This is a great effort,” says Anton Vrieling, assistant professor of geo-information science and earth observation at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. However, he observes that calculating rainfall erosivity at different times in a year would be more useful than having an annual average value.
 
“In a given year, there are rainstorms of different intensity and duration. Other factors like the protective vegetation also vary throughout the year,” notes Vrieling.

With extreme rainfall events becoming more common as a result of climate change, soil erosion is expected to increase — leading to further impacts on agricultural production, and a greater contribution to disaster-related risks such as flooding and landslides.
 
Panagos says the emerging risks can be managed through good agricultural practices like reduced tillage, cover crops, grass margins and contour farming. 

Northern Australia - a small area by global standards is in the second highest zone, according to the mapping.  Small areas may of course be a little different.

Annual mean rainfall erosivity above the global average, by region

Region	Annual mean rainfall erosivity (in mega Joule millimetre per hectare per hour per year)
Global mean	2,190
Caribbean countries	8,000
South-East Asia	7,400
Western Africa and Central Africa	7,000
South America	5,874

More Carbon in Soil - Better Soil and Better Environment

Special Report: Food for Tomorrow

A Boon for Soil, and for the Environment

By BETH GARDINER MAY 17, 2016

Photo

At a farm in Peru, charcoal from bamboo burned in special ovens is used to fertilize the soil. Carbon farming is seen as a way of replenishing depleted farmland and helping reduce damage to the environment. Credit Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters

LONDON — When Gabe Brown and his wife bought their farm near Bismarck, North Dakota, from her parents in 1991, testing found the soil badly depleted, its carbon down to just a quarter of levels once considered natural in the area.

Today the Brown farm and ranch is home to a diverse and thriving mix of plants and animals. And carbon, the building block of the rich humus that gives soil its density and nutrients, has more than tripled. That is a boon not just for the farm’s productivity and its bottom line, but also for the global climate.

Agriculture is often cast as an environmental villain, its pesticides tainting water, its hunger for land driving deforestation. Worldwide, it is responsible for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, though, a growing number of experts, environmentalists and farmers themselves see their fields as a powerful weapon in the fight to slow climate change, their very soil a potentially vast repository for the carbon that is warming the atmosphere. Critically for an industry that must produce an ever-larger bounty to feed a growing global population, restoring lost carbon to the soil also increases its ability to support crops and withstand drought.

“Everyone talks about sustainable,” Mr. Brown said. “Why do we want to sustain a degraded resource? We need to be regenerative, we need to take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the cycle, where it belongs.”

Since people began farming, the world’s cultivated soils have lost 50 percent to 70 percent of their natural carbon, said Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at the Ohio State University. That number is even higher in parts of south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, he added.

Globally, those depleted soils could reabsorb 80 billion to 100 billion metric tons of carbon, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 38 to 50 parts per million, Mr. Lal said. That does not include the carbon that could be simultaneously sequestered into vegetation, but the numbers are significant on their own, equaling up to 40 percent of the increase in concentrations since pre-industrial times. Last year, atmospheric carbon dioxide for the first time hit a monthly average of 400 parts per million, a symbolic threshold but one that many experts say could indicate that warming will soon spiral beyond control.

When carbon escapes from soil, it combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Sometimes the loss is gradual, the result of plowing that leaves upturned layers of earth exposed to the elements, or of failure to replant or cover fields after harvest.

Sometimes it happens more suddenly. The thick prairie sod of America’s Great Plains was a rich carbon store until settlers tore it up for farms, leaving hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil to be blown away in the Dust Bowl years. The destruction of millions of acres of carbon-rich Indonesian peatlands for palm oil plantations is helping to drive climate change today.

Low carbon levels leave the ground nutrient-poor, requiring ever-greater amounts of fertilizer to support crops. They also make for thin soil that is vulnerable to erosion and less able to retain water, so yields suffer quickly in times of drought.

To bring levels back up, a set of techniques known as carbon farming, or regenerative farming, encourage and complement the process by which plants draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, break it down and sequester carbon into soil. They include refraining from tilling, or turning, the soil; mixing crops together rather than growing large fields of just one type; planting trees and shrubs near or among crops; and leaving stalks and other cuttings on fields to decay.

Mr. Brown keeps his fields planted for as much of the year as possible to minimize nutrient loss. When he mixes clover and oats in the same field, the clover fixes nitrogen into the soil. After the oats are harvested, livestock graze the clover and leave their manure behind.

Such strategies have allowed him to stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, reducing costs. And the rich soil not only yields higher volumes, but the crops are more nutritionally dense than those grown on depleted land, he says.

“Economically, it’s much, much, much more profitable,” he said.

Mr. Brown’s approach is very different from the techniques of industrial-scale farming that have taken hold in the United States and other wealthy countries, where single crops stretch over many acres, and fertilizers and pesticides are used heavily.

Things are worse in poorer nations, where farmers’ desperation often means they are unable to care for the soil, Mr. Lal said. He recalled seeing a Mexican sharecropper carting corn straw away from the fields to sell: “I said, ‘Why don’t you leave it on the land? The land will be better next year.’ And he said, ‘This land will not be mine next year, and I need money now.”’

There is some momentum behind a shift. The French government, which helped broker last year’s landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, is pushing an effort to increase soil carbon stocks by 0.4 percent annually, which it says would halt the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Mr. Lal called the target unrealistic, but said achieving just a quarter of that sequestration would be meaningful. In a generation, he said, agriculture could become carbon neutral, removing all the emissions it creates, for example through the energy used by farm equipment.

Worldwide, 5 percent to 10 percent of growers are using regenerative, climate-friendly techniques, said Louis Bockel, a policy officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. That number is likely to increase, he said, as multinational institutions and wealthy nations start incorporating carbon sequestration incentives into existing aid to farmers in poor countries.

“More and more additional funding will be available” to encourage such efforts, Mr. Bockel added. “We are moving quite quickly on this.”

Farmers need financing to help them adopt new techniques, though generally only through a two-to-three-year transition period, said Eric Toensmeier, author of “The Carbon Farming Solution.” That money could come through a higher price charged for foods whose cultivation encourages sequestration, via a carbon tax or through trading systems in which polluters buy credits to offset their emissions, he said. Programs known as payment for environmental services, in which governments or others pay farmers for stewardship of land, are another potential avenue.

With that kind of support, the industry could be ready to do things differently, said Ceris Jones, a climate change adviser at the National Farmers Union in Britain.

“People say that farmers are pretty conservative, but actually practice can change quite quickly,” she said.

Another obstacle is the lack of an agreed-upon system for measuring carbon sequestration in soil, which will be required as the basis for any payments, Mr. Toensmeier said.

Technically, though, many elements of carbon farming are ready to be put into practice quickly, he said. Something as simple as planting trees around fields drastically increases the amount of carbon fixed into soil, Mr. Toensmeier said.  “I would love to see a huge, major transformation of agriculture in the industrialized world, but if we started with just adding trees to the system we have, it’s a huge gain,” he said. “We can sort of meet farmers where they are”

It’s not just crops. The earth beneath the world’s grasslands, from America’s Great Plains to the Tibetan Steppe and the Sahel of Africa, holds about a fifth of all soil carbon stocks, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates. In many places that soil is badly depleted.

“This land is waiting to be filled up again with carbon if we could manage it sustainably,” said Courtney White, author of the book “Grass, Soil, Hope.”

That means moving livestock frequently so each patch of land is grazed just once a year, mimicking the patterns of the native bison that once roamed the American West, he said. The combination of stimulation during animals’ brief presence and long periods of rest encourages plants to lay down more carbon, Mr. White said.

With policies that encourage change, Mr. Toensmeier said, agriculture could benefit the climate rather than harming it. “There do seem to be a remarkable number of win-win opportunities, which is great news,” he said. “You don’t hear a lot of great news about climate change.”

A version of this special report appears in print on May 18, 2016, in The International New York Times. 

Related Coverage

1. SPECIAL REPORT: FOOD FOR TOMORROW

   Farms That Rise to the Challenge MAY 17, 2016

----------------

When the New York Times runs a special series of reports on agriculture and soil issues you know that issues such as soil carbon are nearly in the middle of the focus by those without a great interest in agriculture.

This is one of those times.

While ag scientists have long focussed on restoring soils and improving conditions for plant growth many others  have not noticed or cared.  Rattan Lal has long been an advocate for better soils and a transformative agriculture even as far back as when he worked for international agencies based in Nigeria in the 1970s and 80s.

The time for caring about our soils is now here.

This is a good read and worthwhile to bring a little understanding that agriculture is not always the "bad boy" - many farmers and scientists are out there doing a good job to improve environmental issues for all.  Better soil means better agricultural productivity.  And most soils can be improved! 

Acknowledgement - This post is based on an article in the NY Times of 18 May 2016.  It deserves the widest readership and understanding.

Healthy Soils - Healthy Planet - Healthy Life

The article below was written by Robb Fraley of Monsanto.  Yes, by someone from one of those apparently dreadful multinationals involved in agriculture.  It is not all doom and gloom!

Also - remember that December 5 was World Soil Day.

This article talks up soil and the benefits of productive healthy soils for life on earth.

Get with it...............add more carbon to your soil.  Carbon comes with the organic matter added to soils.......and why add carbon?  Carbon is a basic fuel for many many types of soil microbes and helps boost their numbers.  Farming is truly carbon farming!

compost for carbon - in soils

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You may not quite realize it, but the dirt beneath your feet is teeming with life. In any given tablespoon of soil, there may be more than 50 billion microbes - bacteria, fungi, nematodes, mites, and more. Ninety percent of all the organisms on earth live underground. In a handful of healthy soil, there is more biodiversity than there is among all the above-ground animals in the Amazon Basin.

Until fairly recently, the human race has been largely uninformed about this vast ocean of uncatalogued life. Although farmers have always valued their soil and understood the importance of maintaining it, science offered little detail about the organic material within it, let alone how that material interacts with crops to give us our food.

Now, however, advances in biotechnology have begun to exponentially advance our understanding. As a result, we are on the cusp of making major strides in sustainable agriculture that will benefit both humanity and our ecosystems.

These advances are clearly coming just in time. By the year 2050 we will have 2 billion more people to feed on this planet, and global food demand will be about 70 percent higher than it is today.
Meanwhile, our key resources are threatened. Fresh water - our single most precious resource - is finite in supply and fast being depleted. Topsoil - which is literally the foundation of our food supply - is being stripped or degraded faster than Nature can replenish it (new topsoil is made at the rate of 0.025 mm to 0.125 mm per year).

And now climate change - to which agriculture itself is making a contribution - is threatening crops and livestock with a variety of new challenges, including withering heat, drought, and new pressures from bugs and diseases.

For these and other reasons, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) explained recently, the world needs a "paradigm shift" to more sustainable methods. It's no exaggeration to say that if we don't think more holistically about agriculture, the 21st century could be grimmer than any of us want to imagine.

The good news is we can do this. We can enable a more sustainable and productive agriculture. And in part we can do that through the development of new frontiers that, not surprisingly, coalesce around soil.

In 2003 Craig Venter and a team of scientists set out to demonstrate that advances in genomics and computing power could enable the mapping of microbial life all over the planet. Beginning in the Sargasso Sea and then circumnavigating the globe, Dr. Venter and his team were able to uncover the secrets of microbial life and diversity throughout the oceans. Over the last few years many other scientists have followed, leading to the description of the microbial life in the soils, permafrost, deep-sea vents, and even geysers.

As a result, humanity is now finally learning about what lies below. At the same time, we're learning how different crop plants interact with the biological communities, or micro-biomes, in the soil. We're learning how some organisms help a given plant and some hinder it, not unlike the ways of micro-organisms in our own bodies.

For example, just as the "good" microbes in our gut help us digest our food and maintain our immune system, "good" microbes in the soil form symbiotic relationships with plants and help them absorb nutrients through their roots as well as resist bugs and diseases. "Bad" ones do things like triggering the outbreak of plant diseases. There is growing evidence that "good" microbes added to the soil can provide health benefits to crops just like "probiotics."

All of this is leading to a day when farmers will be able to use the tools of genomics and precision agriculture to analyze their fields in an unprecedentedly detailed way. They'll then be able to introduce or reintroduce the kinds of beneficial microbes found in the most productive soils. We may even be able to restore fertility to some of the lands - for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, or even areas of our own rich bread basket in the United States - where management practices driven by a variety of forces have rendered the land less productive.

By doing below ground what we've done above in reintroducing endangered species, we'll achieve great benefits. Specifically, healthier organic life in the soil will bring us:
• Healthier, more resilient plants - Crops will have less need for some of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides we now rely on for production. They'll need less irrigation too, because the soil will retain water better and the plants will absorb it more efficiently.
• Climate change mitigation - Healthier soils lead to lower rates of greenhouse gas emissions, as I'll discuss in a moment.
• Increased biodiversity - the more beneficial microbial life in the soil, the more life there will be of all kinds.
• Better ecosystem "services" - By many calculations, the living soil is the Earth's most valuable ecosystem. Besides mitigating climate change, it protects against soil erosion, filters our water, and performs other functions worth trillions of dollars each year.

To make this future work best, however, it will also be important for farmers to keep adopting better soil management practices, such as conservation tillage and cover cropping. Conservation tillage is a broad term to describe any method of cultivation that leaves the previous year's crop residue - corn stalks or wheat stubble, for example - on fields before and after planting the next crop. Cover cropping involves planting a secondary crop after the main one is harvested, to stop erosion or replenish nutrients in the soil.

These practices, which have indeed been gaining popularity, stand in contrast to tilling - the process of breaking and turning over the soil while plowing under the residue for the purpose of hampering weed growth. Tilling is a time-honored practice, but it disrupts the soil's sponge-like structure and disturbs the balance of its microbial life, decreasing the land's capacity to absorb water as well as nitrogen and phosphorus from artificial fertilizers. The result is excessive runoff of water and nutrients, leading to the infamous dead zones that afflict places like Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico and larger releases of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

By rebalancing the microbial community in the soil toward air-loving organisms, tilling also leads to the more rapid decomposition of the organic matter buried in the soil - and thus to the release of the carbon sequestered within it. And astonishingly, there is more carbon in the soil than in all the plants and the atmosphere combined. Only the oceans contain more.

Biotechnology - herbicide-tolerant crops, in particular - has helped farmers move away from till farming by giving them another way to control weeds. This USDA report is only the latest of many to make that point. In other words, biotechnology has proved to be a foundational technology for the new advances we anticipate in improving the soil biome.

Even more advances in soil management are on the way. Right now, for example, our company is partnering with the National Corn Growers Association and partners in conservation and academic science to gain a more systematic understanding of the economic and environmental benefits of different soil management strategies on a region-specific and crop-specific basis. The Soil Health Partnership, as it's called, has already established demonstration farms in the Midwest where innovative management practices are aimed at improving soil health. The partnership aims eventually to publish its findings and to encourage farmers to adopt them as appropriate.

Much more such research needs to be conducted. Success will take partnerships and collaborations among all of us -public and privately funded research groups, farmers, ecologists, and many others. My own company has partnered with Novozymes, a world leader in the use of microorganisms. We expect that marrying their insights into microbes with our knowledge of agriculture can accelerate much needed solutions to the problems we face in feeding a growing population.

The soil clearly must be protected, and to do that, we need to understand it. But we're making great strides now, and they're going to make agriculture more productive and sustainable - better for us and the earth.

Follow Dr. Robert T. Fraley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobbFraley

more:

Biotechnology Soil GMO Microbes Food for Thought

[ originally from the Huffington Post - Science of December 11]