According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, saline soil conditions that are developed due to drought, flooding, rising sea levels and poor agricultural practices poses a major threat to global food security. The organisation estimates that 833 million hectares of agricultural land - or 8.7 pct. of the world's total land area - is affected by salinity, costing DKK 183 billion annually in lost profits.
Associate Professor Ling Ding from DTU Bioengineering and her team at Agrobiomics want to make plants more resilient to climate change, while ensuring the best uses of current arable lands across the globe and helping farmers achieve higher crop yields.
"We want to create an alternative that is good for the environment and therefore public health in the long term. That's why we use nature's own resources, such as natural microbes that can contribute to plant growth. We have found soil bacteria that produce an active substance that helps plants cope with different types of abiotic stress," says Ling Ding, co-founder of the DTU startup Agrobiomics.
Abiotic stress conditions, such as drought, salinity, heat and cold trigger stress reactions in the plants that hamper their development and ultimately affect crop yields negatively. Agrobiomics, is currently focusing on drought and salinity.
Using bacteria from harsh regions
Around the globe, wherever plants grow in dry and saline soils, there are bacteria that live around the roots of plants and consume the root exudates (different substances secreted by plant roots, ed.) or the dead biomass of the plants.
The researchers behind Agrobiomics have found a group of these beneficial bacteria which were originally isolated from a very dry area of Iran and on the barren Easter Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The bacteria produce an organic acid that helps boost plants photosynthesis and regulate various stress reactions in the plants. This enables them to grow despite drought and high soil salinity.
As the result of a fermentation process in a lab the organic acid is extracted and used to coat seeds, making future crops more resistant to salt and drought – and this is quite an efficient way to combat stress related problems, says Ling Ding.
"One of the advantages of our technology is that you only need small amounts to cover large agricultural areas, as the product is highly effective at lower dose rates,” says Ling Ding.
Sustainable solution to a severe problem
The technology from Ling Ding and the research team is especially groundbreaking, considering the growth limitations plants have in saline soils and drought conditions. To compensate for the exposure to these stress conditions large amounts of fertiliser are normally applied, which are not necessarily absorbed by the crops and could end up leaching to groundwater or over saturating the surrounding environment.
With a focus on sustainability from the beginning of development, it has been important for the researchers to ensure that non-target organisms are not negatively affected by the technology.
"We have tested the substance on plants given normal growing conditions to ensure that it does not have a negative effect. Under normal conditions it has no immediate effect, but under saline conditions, where plants normally suffer, the substance almost makes the plant grow as normal again," says Lind Ding.
After promising results in greenhouses, Agrobiomics is now conducting tests in field conditions with tomato and soybean in saline soils and/or prone to drought in Spain and Brazil. The results of the field trials are aligned with greenhouse data with yield increase of up to 20 pct.
Agrobiomics expects to have their patented product on the market within the next two to three years. The startup has just received an investment of four million euros from the investment fund NOON Ventures, which will help them scale-up the production and support a continued development of sustainable alternatives for the food production in the future.
"In the longer term, we would like to develop more biopesticides and other biofertilisers in the company that can contribute to food security in the future," says Ling Ding.
