In the vast universe of soil microbiology, one star shines bright: Bacillus subtilis. This Gram-positive, rod-shaped bacterium has a pivotal role in enhancing soil health and nutrient cycling, contributing significantly to sustainable agriculture and ecological balance. This article delves into the world of Bacillus subtilis, its mode of action, and the benefits it brings to the soil ecosystem. The Bacillus subtilis Effect: Mode of Action The central attribute of Bacillus subtilis lies in its versatile metabolism and ability to produce a variety of enzymes that assist in breaking down organic ..read more

Wheat impacted by crown rot (Fusarium spp.), which causes the whitening and rotting of the seeds. Wheat is among the major crops grown worldwide, and suffers heavy loses that could be mitigated with preventive methods Since the late 20th century, the role of mycorrhizal fungi for plant growth and yield improvement in agricultural settings has been increasingly acknowledged. Policymakers, businesses, farmers and researchers around the world grow increasingly aware of the complexity of the processes that bring food to everyone ─ processes far, far more complex than the mechanistic input-output ..read more

To anybody in charge of anything, no matter how complex their job may be, or how ample the extent of their authority, two laws are always evident: inadequate behavior must not be rewarded, and adequate behavior must be rewarded. All rules (all the way from kindergarten play rules to the Penal Code of countries with civil-law legal systems) are forms of rewarding socially adequate behavior, and disavow or even punish inadequate behavior. When interacting with the market as economic agents, the governments have those same two methods ─ and in markets considered ‘free’, their method of choice is ..read more

Let’s imagine the following scenario: there is a city on the margins of a river, upwards of which there is a forest. This forest makes all sort of contributions to the life of the city; it serves as a tourist attraction, as a park for the city’s population, as a refuge for a certain kind of migratory bird, as a space for research by agroforestry professionals of a nearby university, as a containing agent in case the river threatens to flood the city and, finally, as a source of wood for the local lumber industry. For the lumber industry, the goal is very much a clear one: chopping down more tr ..read more

Two women pick tea on a plantation in Sri Lanka. Tea producers were one of the most affected sectors by the ban, alongside rubber and paddy rice producers. Ten months and sixteen days before the COVID-19 pandemic started, on January 1st, 2019, the national government of Sri Lanka published an eighty-page-long text detailing a new framework for its future policies. The document, grandiosely entitled “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour”, contained references to an upcoming effort dedicated to “promote and popularize organic agriculture during the next ten years” (p. 29), which aimed towards the ..read more

The desirability of carbon-rich soil is a no-brainer for anybody engaged in agriculture and other land-based forms of food production. The fact that carbon is volatilized practices such as tilling the soil is less known, but well-documented in the literature, with millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) being released into the atmosphere through the action of microbes that turn the carbon, present in the soil as organic matter, into its gaseous form. This is why, for example, simply adopting no-tillage practices could reduce by a whopping 30% the greenhouse gas emissions of the agricultural s ..read more

Two women pick tea on a plantation in Sri Lanka. Tea producers were one of the most affected sectors by the ban, alongside rubber and paddy rice producers. Ten months and sixteen days before the COVID-19 pandemic started, on January 1st, 2019, the national government of Sri Lanka published an eighty-page-long text detailing a new framework for its future policies. The document, grandiosely entitled “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour”, contained references to an upcoming effort dedicated to “promote and popularize organic agriculture during the next ten years” (p. 29), which aimed towards the ..read more

The desirability of carbon-rich soil is a no-brainer for anybody engaged in agriculture and other land-based forms of food production. The fact that carbon is volatilized practices such as tilling the soil is less known, but well-documented in the literature, with millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) being released into the atmosphere through the action of microbes that turn the carbon, present in the soil as organic matter, into its gaseous form. This is why, for example, simply adopting no-tillage practices could reduce by a whopping 30% the greenhouse gas emissions of the agricultural s ..read more

Ending hunger for everyone in the world by the year 2030 is the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the United Nations. A goal that would seem to belong to the realm of utopian thinking just a hundred years ago is nowadays considered feasible, with the share of the global population living in hunger having declined from 13,4% in 2001 to 8,8% in 2017. Similarly, the share of underweight children went from a concerning 20,5% of all the world's children in the year 2000 to a reduced, yet still important 12,6% by 2020. The world seems to be closing in on hunger, slowly but surely. Yet, in ..read more

The principles of health, ecology and fairness are brought together into the fourth and final principle of organic agriculture: the principle of care. It is a principle already present in the other three (as with any consistent philosophy, any part of it leads to the others); it is present in caring for the health of those who consume the food produced by organic agriculture, by caring for the ecosystems within which we work, and for the societies that are inherently intermingled with the productive processes that go from planting a single seed, to putting food in the world’s tables. But the p ..read more