Fungus mycorrhizae appears to reduce costs without affecting India's crop yields, while also enriching soil in marginal farmlands.
Researchers at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India are testing a fungus as a possible crop fertilizer.
With fertilizer prices estimated to have risen worldwide as much as 400 percent in recent years, and India’s fertilizer subsidy increasing as a result, farmers could find themselves relying less on synthetic chemicals to grow their crops.
Increased demand for food in India and China, and increased interest in feedstocks for biofuel production have led to the high price of fertilizer. Now the Indian government is concerned that farmers have been overusing the chemicals, without seeing any positive effects on crop yields.
TERI has been testing the mycorrhiza fertilizer on certain fields in the Haryana region. Farmers sow dried mycorrhiza powder with their seeds, and let nature take its course.
The fungus establishes a symbiotic relationship with the plant roots and act as root extensions. Mycorrhizae help the plants get to nutrients that might otherwise be beyond their reach, and its desert origins also lets crops thrive in otherwise environmentally-stressful conditions.
A comparison of fields using only chemical fertilizers with fields that use a 50-50 mix of chemical and fungal fertilizers suggests that the mycorrhizae have no negative effects on the crops.
Rough estimates indicate that the fertilizer subsidy could be cut by at least 30 percent if mycorrhiza were used in more fields.
A recent three-week TERI workshop trained participants to do further fungal research on their own to test more plants in the fields and nurseries.
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