Scientists at the University of California Davis recently developed wheat plants that stimulate the production of their own fertilizer, opening the path toward less air and water pollution worldwide and lesser costs for farmers.
Wheat makes own fertilizer
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Eduardo Blumwald, center, is a distinguished professor in the University of California Davis department of plant sciences. He stands in a greenhouse surrounded by rice plants with lab members Hiromi Tajima, left, and Akhilesh Yadav. They have been working to develop wheat and rice that can stimulate bacteria in the soil to produce nitrogen the plants can use for fertilizer. Here, rice grows in their greenhouse on campus.
Hiromi Tajima, a staff scientist in the lab of Eduardo Blumwald, measures the number of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in samples of soil in which the team has grown a new kind of wheat. Tajima is first author on a paper the lab’s team recently published about developing wheat that stimulates production of its own fertilizer.
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