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When you look at a farm field, it’s easy to think that only farmers are tending the soils and crops. But beneath the surface, there’s a vast living workforce making sure those plants can thrive: microbes.
With the right microbes in and around their roots, corn, soybeans and other crops are able to absorb more nutrients from the soil and have a better chance of fighting off insects and surviving drought and flooding.
This mutually beneficial relationship has existed for millennia, but synthetic fertilizer has been changing things.
As entomologist Esther Ndumi Ngumbi, who studies soil microbes at the University of Illinois, explains, when fields get too much fertilizer, nature’s once-vibrant microbe communities can lose species and fade.
That matters to farmers right now. As the war in Iran drives up fertilizer costs, many farmers are rethinking how much fertilizer they really need, and how they can nurture their soil-dwelling microbes in economically strategic ways that pay off for their crops and nature, too.
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