According to Cornell University's Chronicle Online, two Cornell-based research projects -- one that boosts the soil-building effects of biochar for plants and another that harnesses genomics technology to accelerate maize and sorghum breeding in Africa by three-to-four times -- have each been given more than $1.6 million in grants.
The first project aims to develop microorganisms (inoculants) to add to biochars, produced when organic waste is burned at low temperatures without oxygen, to improve soil health in small farms in Kenya, where soil degradation is directly linked to food insecurity, hunger and poverty.
"Biochars act like a sponge or microbial reef where microorganisms like to live, proliferate and hide from predators," said Johannes Lehmann, associate professor of soil biogeochemistry, who leads the project. The inoculants would infect plant roots and support mycorrhizae fungi and other bacteria to provide plants with such essential nutrients as nitrogen and promote growth.
Lehmann's group also seeks to develop stoves that would be made locally in Africa. The stoves would produce biochar while they were used for cooking and would eliminate indoor smoke, a serious health consequence of wood stoves in Africa. Also, farmers would be able to use such on-farm waste as shrubs, grasses and crop residues -- rather than harder-to-find wood -- to fire up the stoves.
The $1.6 million project also includes outreach to spread information and protocols about biochar, inoculants and cook stoves through workshops, presentations, CDs and publications.
The group includes researchers from Cornell's Departments of Crop and Soil Sciences, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Applied Economics and Management; the University of California--Irvine; World Agroforestry Center of Kenya; and the University of New South Wales, Australia.
To more than triple breeding cycle rates to develop new maize and sorghum varieties in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers received $1.7 million to apply new molecular breeding technology to sequence trillions of base pairs from 12,000 breeding lines of maize and then sorghum. They hope to winnow the lines down by 90 percent, retaining only those that hold the most promise for drought tolerance and nitrogen efficiency.
Read the full story $3.3M in grants to improve soil, plant breeding in Africa
