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?
Is the reason this is note worthy the % amount calculated by the study?
In this case I am sure earlier studies have been done, but I would not write off further exploration just because a topic has been previously studied.
"A team of researchers from the universities of Zurich and Basel, Agroscope, and the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) has now shown for the first time on a large scale that applying mycorrhizal fungi in the field works. The fungi were mixed into the soil before sowing crops on 800 trial plots at 54 maize farms in northern and eastern Switzerland."
So this is not upping yields 40% across the board. More about bringing poorer-performing fields up to the level of better-performing ones.
Personally I think a well-managed field wouldn't need this type of inoculation, as it would have the beneficial fungi in its soil already (and these research findings seem to indicate this). The #1 thing there would be to disturb that soil as little as possible (like, no-till farming).
For less-well managed fields, this might be a quick 'n dirty fix to undo some of the shortcomings in a field's condition.
It's the second sentence of the abstract.
They conducted a large scale field trial of 54 fields.