Inoculating soil with mycorrhizal fungi can increase plant yield: study

Something I thought was really cool is that in Korean Natural Farming [1] there is a technique where you go to the forest near your farm and gather a bunch of decomposing leaves and other matter from the forest floor, then take it at home and throw it in a tub of I think starchy water to feed the microorganisms in the material you collected. You incubate this for a while and then spread this water over your soil. The motivation for this practice is the idea that your local forest has self-selected to grow well in your particular location, and those bacteria will be very helpful. I think it's an excellent innovation. It is both very simple for poor farmers all over the world to do and based on good scientific principles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_natural_farming

Missing from the headline:

>"On a quarter of the plots, the mycorrhizal fungi enabled up to 40% better yields. That's huge," says the study's co-lead, Marcel van der Heijden, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich and at Asgroscope. But there's a catch: on a third of the plots, the yield did not increase and sometimes even decreased.

Considering studies and trials that fail will also fail to get attention there's a problem: a significant uphill battle to getting the relationship right between fungi and crops to actually increase productivity.

These are complicated relationships that swing between parasitic and mutually beneficial depending on species, varieties, microclimate, and your favorite shade of blue. It is not at all a case of "add some fungi and everything will be better!", a lot of stuff has to be mechanistically understood and controlled and we're right at the beginning of that.

Okay, but this has been known for a while hasn’t it? I remember reading a statement like this in “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms” and that book was published in 1993.

Is the reason this is note worthy the % amount calculated by the study?

I use it when growing cannabis. Can confirm, noticeable difference in dry yield. (Not sure the exact percent but the title sounds close)

My last garden went gangbusters when I introduced this to the soil, especially in the second & third years after starting with it. It was really neat to see (via digging) that it was also invading the lawn around the garden, & that the grass there was clearly healthier than the rest of the lawn. The spores also did great when introduced to the compost pile.

Tree/fungus interaction is also interesting. I planted four fruit trees, two near where an old tree had been taken down, and two on the other side of the lawn. Same soil, same watering, but the second two died — the only real difference I could see was a sizable patch of fungus which had been growing around the old tree, & which was still in the lawn near the trees that lived. Next time I plant trees I'm going to add in a bucket of dirt taken from an old-growth patch around the sapling roots & see what difference that might make.

Check out Elaine Ingham's talks on these topics on YouTube, such as The Roots of Your profits:

https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag?si=snrZkCZqrIUAdSa2

Following piece of practical layman info was hard to locate in TFA, had to look up Wikipedia instead:

"Rhizophagus irregularis (previously known as Glomus intraradices[3][4]) is an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus used as a soil inoculant in agriculture and horticulture. Rhizophagus irregularis is also commonly used in scientific studies of the effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on plant and soil improvement. Until 2001, the species was known and widely marketed as Glomus intraradices, but molecular analysis of ribosomal DNA led to the reclassification of all arbuscular fungi from Zygomycota phylum to the Glomeromycota phylum."

Just don’t use Roundup (Glyphosate) which will undo this effort!

The biggest reason I hear from farmers whey they don't switch to organic farming practices is that yields are too unpredictable (and usually much lower) with current organic methods for field crops.

So maybe someone smarter than me could chime in: Could we expect similar results with field crops like corn, soybeans, wheat?

Soil microbiome has a large of number of similarities with the human microbiome. It's an overlooked factor that matters a lot to human/plant health. There are many unexplored facets that may overturn conventional understanding of human/plant systems and health. Supplementing the microbiome can help treat human/plant diseases. The microbiome is important for nutrient processing. There's no accepted way to systematically assess the microbiome, let alone any test that can properly identify problems with the human/soil microbiome beyond "something very bad is here that shouldn't be", or "there's almost nothing here when there should be". Interventions are hard to quantify beyond distant effects like yield or reported symptoms.

It's a bit silly, but sometimes I have to remind myself that fungi aren't plants.

I always said GMO fungus is going to be the next big thing. its going to be wild