DR MARCELLOUS LE ROUX
Department of Agronomy (Faculty of AgriSciences)
University of Stellenbosch
A
griculture has not escaped the responsibility
to ‘green’ its activities
through environmentally
-friendly technological innovation.
In fact, there is perhaps an even
greater onus on agriculture to come
up with novel ideas on how to stem
the tide of environmental degradation and resource exhaustion, since
it may be the single most important
source that has contributed directly
to the current situation through
extractive practices over the years
and the release of nocuous gases
that exacerbate climate change.
Notwithstanding this realisation
research spending on developing
new, technologically driven agricultural production as a proportion of
the global agricultural GDP, although on the increase, remains dismally low, given the multitude of
challenges agriculture faces. This is
of particular concern in low-income
countries, especially in sub-Saharan
Africa, which have seen spending
on average, grow by 2 percent per
year from 2000 to 2008 (well below
the global average of 22 percent for
the same time period), with spending in many of these countries stagnating or declining.
In the past it has always fallen to
traditional plant breeding (and
more recently genetic engineering)
as well as pratices such as irrigation
and treatment with agrochemicals
to enhance crop productivity as
crop plants get introduced to new
areas. These, as part of technological interventions under the auspices
of the Green Revolution, have been
critical in the development of commercialized plant genotypes of several staple crops that are responsive
to high chemical fertility of soils, at
the expense of biological fertility.
These aforementioned approaches
form part of a tier of agricultural
management strategies that is
deemed as macro-level (Weekley et
al., 2012). Such interventions
equate to large-scale monoculture
production systems that are associated with field-level, uniform input
applications of agrochemicals and
water resources. Large inefficiencies
in these systems are becoming increasingly apparent and the
cost:benefit ratio is disproportionate at the best of times.
That the importance of microorganisms has been ‘undervalued’ in conventional agricultrural systems,
which rely heavily on non-
sustainable inputs of energy, fertilisers and other agrochemicals,
would be an understatement. Optimising microbial communities in
agricultural practice is regarded as a
novel innovation that, if understood
better, could possibly provide the
catalyst to ‘endure’ agriculture as a
vehicle for positive change. Several
microbial formulations have exploded onto the market in recent years
in an attempt to deliver nutrients
(and subsequent boost to safeguard against disease) more directly
to the plant hosts. Companies are
vying to put themselves ahead by
‘showcasing’ unique blends of biological products that may contain
specific strains of fungi or bacteria
that claim to deliver the mineral
nutrient in an accessible form to the
host plant quicker and more reliably, that is, precision delivery of
inputs synchronized with growth
stages of crop plants. Such genetically-profiled microbes allow microbial population dynamics to be
linked to soil type and farming inputs and outputs as well as to distinguish whether such microbes are
actively contributing or rather just
passive ‘hitchhikers’. (Weekley et
al., 2012). This is bio-technology in
top gear! Moreover, such blends