Supporting Beneficial Soil Fungi

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

There are many products on the market that are intended to improve soil health and root growth. But don’t overlook the natural mycorrhizal fungi that can thrive in the soil and create symbiotic relationships with plants. Dr. Toby Kiers shares how farmers can maintain a healthy environment for these beneficial organisms.

Kiers... "We know that the more nutrients that you add to the soil, the higher the level, the fertilization, the less mycorrhizal fungi you'll have, both in terms of abundance, so how much, how dense the network is, but also, how diverse the network is. So you can have things like tillage that can be quite negative as well, you know, management strategies like tillage that can really chop up the network and select for a kind of a weedy type of fungi that grows that might not give as many benefits and you can have fertilization causing a negative effect. And of course, fungicide, by definition is not ideal for mycorrhizal fungi. And so those are the most sort of basic management strategies that we know can have big effects, but there's a lot of complicated science out there about just how much we can use these mycorrhizal fungi to scavenge for nutrients, for example."

Kiers adds that more research is needed to identify how different crops and soil types interact with mycorrhizal fungi.