A Corrective Measure to Problematic Conventional Agricultural Approach

Abstract

Some microbes and fauna (particularly insects) act as natural forest structuring (stratifying) and diversifying organisms or forest creating engineers. Removal of plants during the forest conversion to agriculture and subsequent practices such as tillage and the use of chemical inputs in crop cultivation create stress factors for all living organisms, thus reducing biodiversity of functional flora, fauna and microbes. Here, most of the disappeared biodiversity as a response to the stress factors enter into an inactive or dormant phase to bypass the unfavorable conditions, by forming 'seeds', which are stored in soil seed bank. It has been proven that surface-attached microbial communities known as biofilms secrete a wider range of environmentally important compounds than mono or mixed cultures of the same microbes. Some of those compounds break dormancy of the soil seed bank, thus re-establishing the lost biodiversity relatively short term for reinstating ecosystem sustainability. Biofilm based biofertilizers called biofilmed biofertilizers (BFBFs), which also can reinstate ecosystem sustainability, also render numerous biochemical and physiological benefits to plant growth, and improve soil quality, thus leading to a reduction of chemical fertilizer (CF) NPK use by 50% in various crops. This reduction has not been achieved by conventional biofertilizers so far. Thus, the concept of BFBFs is not only biofertilization, but also a holistic ecosystem approach. These formulations should therefore be considered as biofilmed microbial ameliorators (BMAs), rather than the BFBFs. If this agronomic practice could be adopted in the future, it would lead to a more eco-friendly agriculture with an array of benefits to health, economics and the environment.