Soil microbiome beliefs

By Andi Anderson

A collaborative study by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University sheds light on organic farmers' perspectives on soil microbiomes and their management practices.

By surveying 85 organic vegetable farmers in New York, researchers aimed to understand the connection between farmers' beliefs and their agricultural methods.

The study revealed that an overwhelming 96% of the farmers believe that the microbiome on their farm significantly influences plant defenses and pest suppression. However, their beliefs varied on what practices promote a healthy microbiome.

Lead researcher Elias Bloom highlighted, "Farmers who valued on-farm practices like no-till or cover crops for influencing the microbiome tended to implement these methods, aligning with scientific literature on preferred microbiome-supportive practices."

Co-author Shadi Atallah emphasized the economic aspects of adopting microbiome-friendly practices. He noted, "In the long run, we want to understand organic farmers’ incentives to adopt microbiome-friendly practices from an economic perspective."

The study identified seven belief clusters among farmers regarding the impact of various factors on the soil microbiome. These factors ranged from on-farm practices to external influences such as climate events and neighboring lands.

Despite the focus on beliefs, demographic factors like farm size and farmer age also influenced practice adoption.

Larger farms, often less diversified, were less likely to adopt no-till and biological mulches. This finding suggests a need for strategies to scale up these practices to larger farms to make them more manageable and beneficial.

The researchers are looking forward to linking these behavioral insights with biological data from soil samples collected across the surveyed sites. Co-author Clare Casteel added, "We're actually going to measure changes in the microbiome and link biology to the understanding of economics and current beliefs."

The researchers cautioned that while beliefs are a strong indicator of practice adoption, demographic factors alone do not fully predict it.

This groundwork paves the way for potentially introducing market incentives like microbiome-friendly ecolabels on food products, aligning consumer health interests with sustainable farming practices.

Photo Credit: cornell-university