I remember reading about a brainstorming session where the group was trying to reduce egg breakage in a packing facility and after a lot of discussion that went nowhere, one group member threw up her hands and said, “Why can’t the chickens just do a better job?” And that’s what they went with. Calcium was added to the feed, and egg breakage was significantly reduced.
So, why can’t plants do a better job of staying healthy?
As technology continues to advance in agriculture, things that we used to make us scratch our heads in wonderment or curiosity are now becoming clearer. The University of California, Riverside, recently conducted a study on Acmispon strigosus, a plant in the pea family, showing a 13-fold growth increase in plants that partnered with a highly effective strain of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Bradyrhizobium.
Plants don’t always recruit beneficial microbes, instead surrounding themselves with a mix of both helpful and ineffective bacteria. When we try to manage microbial populations by inoculating the soil with very specific beneficial strains, it’s not always sustainable or successful. We’re still learning about the interaction and cooperation among microbes in order identify “companion” microbes that are somewhat similar to companion plant relationships. We have discovered, however, that introducing a broad and extremely concentrated level of microbes greatly improves a successful inoculation. Our compost teas and fish hydrolysate products would fall into this category.
Joel Sachs, a professor of evolutionary ecology at UC Riverside and a member of the university’s Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, has come up with an alternative approach. He’s advocating breeding plants that are better at managing their microbial partners with the hope that this advancement could be passed down to future generations.
In a study published today in New Phytologist, Sachs’ team has advanced our understanding of how plant genetics and environmental factors affect microbial soil populations in the field. The paper’s first author is Camille Wendlandt, a graduate student in Sachs’ research group.
The researchers investigated whether Acmispon strigosus (the pea plant) changes how it associates with different strains of nitrogen-fixing bacteria when its environment changes. Surprisingly, they found that changing the plants’ environment by fertilizing the soil did not change how plants associated with microbes. Instead, the researchers found that genetic variation among the pea plants was the most important factor in whether plants invested in relationships with the most beneficial microbes. In other words, some variants of the plant are better than others at developing these beneficial partnerships.
In the future, plants may do a better job of helping themselves. This will hopefully contribute in propelling us to the next level of crop production.
