Biotechnologies for Sustainable Agriculture
Facilitators:
MCSC Impact Fellow
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Leading MCSC Seed Awards Project: Optimizing biological nitrification inhibitors for the suppression of N₂O emissions from agricultural soils
Associate Professor, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering
Key Takeaways from Session
- The leaders of the session, as well as session speakers and participants, highlighted in-depth strategies for engineering and managing the plants and soil microbes in agricultural systems and how these technologies intersect with farmers and corporate sustainability strategy.
- Agriculture is highly heterogeneous; solutions optimized in one location may fail to generalize due to differences in both physical factors such as differing soil chemistry, and socioeconomic factors such as regulatory incentives and farmer trust.
- There is an opportunity for biological products for agriculture (biofertilizers, biopesticides) to provide insulation against instability in the global oil supply chain (which is directly tied to ammonia fertilizer and chemical production).
- The workshop uncovered key barriers and tensions for technological development for sustainable agriculture, developing products using engineered microorganisms, and incorporating new technologies into the landscape of agricultural products.
- A current barrier to widespread adoption of biologicals is that they do not behave like many agrichemicals; they have differences in storage stability, transport, application methods, and consistency of performance. Microbial coatings provide one avenue for improving the resilience of microbes.
- Focus areas for future research accounting for practical constraints on-farm were established.