Mycorrhiza: The Symbiotic Relationship In Soil That Promotes Plant Health

Healthy soil is essential for profitable and sustainable crop production. And a key component of healthy soil is mycorrhizae, root-colonising fungi that send out filaments into the soil to increase plant nutrient uptake. Regenerative agriculture experts Gary Farr and Lindy Anderson explained this amazing symbiotic system to Lloyd Phillips.

- Lloyd Phillips

Life and business partners Gary Farr and Lindy Anderson are avid proponents of regenerative agriculture. Apart from researching it, they conduct field trials of its concepts on their smallholding in the rural Lidgetton area of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. In addition, their business, Regenerative Agriculture Specialization, markets products to help farmers build up healthy soils to grow crops profitably and sustainably.

Farr and Anderson stress the importance of farmers and other soil cultivators encouraging the development of fungal mycorrhizae if they want healthy soils. According to the New York Botanical Garden: “Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonise the root system of a host plant, providing increased water and nutrient absorption capabilities, while the plant provides the fungus with carbohydrates formed from photosynthesis.”

In the study, ‘Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi as natural biofertilizers: Let’s benefit from past successes’ (2016), researchers at the National Research Council of Italy’s Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection write that mycorrhizal fungi exchange mutual benefits with about 80% of the world’s land plants.

COMPLEX, FUNGI-DOMINATED SOILS

Farr explains that early on in the Earth’s development, bacteria emerged from the oceans to begin breaking down the solid rock that was the origin of land as we now know it. By converting the rock into tiny particles, the bacteria also released minerals from it. These basic prehistoric soils eventually led to the development of simple green plants that could photosynthesise.