11. The Microbiome: Key to Climate Tolerance?

‘There are more living organisms in a teaspoon of soil than there are people on Earth’

David Wolfe

Farmers have historically focused on trying to improve the chemical and physical conditions of their soils to increase productivity, as evident in my last few posts. But they have typically ignored the role of soil microorganisms (particularly bacteria and fungi), known as the ‘microbiome’. Climate change threatens agricultural productivity via increased temperatures and increased rainfall variability. Soil microbes may be the key to maintaining/increasing crop yields under such conditions.

Fig. 1 Examples of bacteria and fungi living in the soil (Source: Grain News) 

Recent research has found that transferring microbial colonies from environmentally tolerant (often inedible) plants to less tolerant crop plants can confer this tolerance without needing to change the plant genetics! Anti-GM protestors can’t argue with this! For example, adding fungus from salt-tolerant dune grass plants to rice plants reduced their water needs by up to half, whilst simultaneously increasing their yield. Similarly, experiments in which wheat plants were treated with fungus from heat-tolerant ‘panic grass’ were able to tolerate temperatures of up to 70°.

In 2008, two pioneering microbiologists founded a company called ‘Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies’. The company produces liquid ‘microbial inoculants’ that can be applied to seed or plant tissues to increase their tolerance. This product is explicitly registered as organic.

Fig. 2 The logo for the ‘Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies’ company that makes microbial inoculants (Source: Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies)