Bugs in the system

MICROBES, though they get a bad press as agents of disease, play a beneficial role in agriculture. For example, they fix nitrogen from the air into soluble nitrates that act as natural fertiliser. Understanding and exploiting such organisms for farming is a rapidly developing part of agricultural biotechnology.

At the moment, the lead is being taken by a collaboration between Monsanto and Novozymes, a Danish firm. This consortium, called BioAg, began in 2013 and has a dozen microbe-based products on the market. These include fungicides, insecticides and bugs that liberate nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium compounds from the soil, making them soluble and thus easier for crops to take up. Last year researchers at the two firms tested a further 2,000 microbes. The top-performing strains boosted maize and soyabean yields by about 3%.

In November 2015 Syngenta and DSM, a Dutch company, formed a similar partnership, and earlier that year, in April, DuPont bought Taxon Biosciences, a Californian microbes firm. Hopeful startups abound. One is Boston-based Indigo, whose researchers are conducting field tests of some of its library of 40,000 microbes to see if they can alleviate stress induced by drought and salinity in cotton, maize, soyabeans and wheat. Another is Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies, of Seattle. The scientists who set up this firm study fungi that…Continue reading
Source: Economist