How do common farm management practices influence microbe-mediated acclimation to drought?
Working at the Kellogg Biological Station LTER, I leveraged a long-term tillage experiment combined with newer rainfall, soil organic carbon (applied as sorghum biomass), and fungicide/nematicide manipulations to test how tillage, soil organic carbon, and microbial diversity influence microbe-mediated adaptation to drought. I found patterns of microbe-mediated adaptation in conventionally tilled fields, but not no-till fields, suggesting that any direct benefits from no-till practices may be offset by eliminating beneficial microbe-mediated indirect effects. In general, these results show that management decisions can impact crop resilience to drought not only directly, but also indirectly via changes to soil microbes. |
Large-scale study of farm management, microbes, and plant drought tolerance
Collaborating with social scientists and microbial ecologists, I used soils from 70 farms across the midwest to test whether several farmer management practices, including irrigation, cover cropping, tile drainage, and no-till practices, influence the capacity for soil microbes to promote adaptive drought responses in corn crops. This work is ongoing, but we detected significant variation among farms in their microbes’ ability to promote drought tolerance in corn, and we hope to explain that variation using management and microbial community data from the 70 farms. |