Mycorrhizal Fungi – Renewing an Ancient Partnership with Crops
Millions of years ago a symbiotic partnership developed between plants and mycorrhizal fungi dwelling in the soil among plant roots. Both faced many natural stresses, and to survive each needed something the other could provide. The fungi needed sugars plants could manufacture for them as food. The plants needed greater root reach and numbers to draw in more nutrients so they could grow stronger, and stronger.
Mycorrhizal fungi began to serve as a secondary root system, organizing and extending themselves far out into the soil with tubular structures that extract mineral elements and water from soil and transport them to the roots of their host plant. The fungi in turn live off the plant’s sugars translocated to them by the roots.
Trees and plants with thriving “mycorrhizal roots” systems are better able to survive and thrive in stressful environments, such as the nearly biologically sterile soil conditions modern agricultural technologies have created for crops. Mycorrhizal fungi still exist in farm soil, but their numbers have been greatly diminished over decades of tillage, fumigation, chemical applications, fertilization, and too often, drought.
The scientists who launched Plant Health Care, Inc. researched and developed environmentally sound ways to mass produce inoculants that reintroduce into the soil appropriate quantities of mycorrhizal fungi, often in tandem with other essential soil bacteria. PHC now has a growing line of natural mycorrhizal products for agriculture that restore what Mother Nature intended – a soil ecological balance that enhances crop root systems, plant health and vigor, and ultimately improves yield and quality.