Re:Inoculating soil with mycorrhizal fungi can increase plan...
by colechristensen on Monday December 04, 2023 @11:24PM
(#38527080)
Missing from the headline:
>"On a quarter of the plots, the mycorrhizal fungi enabled up to 40% better yields. That's huge," says the study's co-lead, Marcel van der Heijden, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich and at Asgroscope. But there's a catch: on a third of the plots, the yield did not increase and sometimes even decreased.
Considering studies and trials that fail will also fail to get attention there's a problem: a significant uphill battle to getting the relationship right between fungi and crops to actually increase productivity.
These are complicated relationships that swing between parasitic and mutually beneficial depending on species, varieties, microclimate, and your favorite shade of blue. It is not at all a case of "add some fungi and everything will be better!", a lot of stuff has to be mechanistically understood and controlled and we're right at the beginning of that.
>"On a quarter of the plots, the mycorrhizal fungi enabled up to 40% better yields. That's huge," says the study's co-lead, Marcel van der Heijden, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich and at Asgroscope. But there's a catch: on a third of the plots, the yield did not increase and sometimes even decreased.
Considering studies and trials that fail will also fail to get attention there's a problem: a significant uphill battle to getting the relationship right between fungi and crops to actually increase productivity.
These are complicated relationships that swing between parasitic and mutually beneficial depending on species, varieties, microclimate, and your favorite shade of blue. It is not at all a case of "add some fungi and everything will be better!", a lot of stuff has to be mechanistically understood and controlled and we're right at the beginning of that.