Projects of the One Health Region Vorpommern

AgriBiom

Establishing a standard diagnostics of the microbiome of agricultural soils

Microbiome diagnostics

How can we promote microorganisms in the soil for healthy, sustainable and profitable agriculture?

In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, agriculture is a very central economic pillar. Agricultural soil is one of our most important environmental resources - because after all, we all want and need to eat.

How good the yield of a field ultimately is depends not only on the nutrients in the soil and the climate, but also significantly on the microbes living in the soil. And this soil microbiome in turn is influenced by the entire management of the soil, e.g. from the type of crop, the application of fertilizers and pesticides to the physical cultivation of the soil.

In the AgriBiom project, AgriBiom wollen wir – das sind LandwirtInnen der Greifswalder Agrarinitiative und MikrobiologInnen – untersuchen, wie sich unterschiedliche Bewirtschaftungen auf das Boden-Mikrobiom auswirken und wie dadurch letztendlich der landwirtschaftliche Ertrag bestimmt wird. Bekannt ist beispielsweise, dass Gülle und ähnliche organische Dünger die Aktivität der Mikroben im Boden fördern, aber leider auch Krankheitserreger enthalten können, die im ungünstigen Fall bis zurück in den Menschen gelangen. Wir werden also untersuchen:

which microbes occur in the soil,

how nutrient-rich the soil is,

whether we find unwanted residues in the soil

and how all this relates to yield.

Our goal is to develop a “rapid test” to be able to determine in a standardized way how beneficial the soil microbiome is to the health of plants and ultimately people. Based on this, we want to work together to derive recommendations on how the soil microbiome can be promoted in order to promote the growth and resistance of plants to plant diseases and to produce sustainably healthy food.

Beteiligte Organisationen:

Institut der Mikrobiologie der Universität Greifswald

Praxispartner:

Greifswalder Agrarinitiative e.V.