 to these fights between them, these interactions, which leads to victories and defeats, and they can be seen across the spectrum and the various states. So this is part of some of my work where I suggest that the different biomes take the different functional communities and there are several factors that could switch their activities on and off. It's like a switchlight. So any alteration on these systems that could alter also these functionalities. Everybody has heard about this power report that's been launched recently that was involved as one of the three hundred scientists but also been involved in another report, which is highlighting why souls are at risk. And these are some of the threats to these European souls from highlighting from this report and the five of them, which are the solar organic matter decline, soil compactation, and soil shielding, soil erosion and degradation, some contamination and health. And they are all caused by changing land use and climate change. And what I want to do is to tackle every single of these problems using soil organisms as a solution. Here in the talks, we have heard the scientists and how important biodiversity is, but I'm going to try to do some quantitative facts. So unfortunately, despite we know all these threats and the protection of soil impact rates has clearly been a criterion for regulating land use changes and climate change mitigation policies. So I will start with the first problem, the climate soil organic carbon. While the souls in the European Union have been using organic carbon, 10% of the rates, the two YouTube projections are quite pessimistic. They reckon that between 10 to 40% of the problems and 6 to 10% of the problems are going to lose carbon. So how here comes the solution? Actually, soil organisms produce 25,000 kilograms of organic matter per year. So that's the weight of 25 cars. This is another of my research papers where we saw that if we feel the balance towards funding in the fund-adapted ratios, we're able to sequester more carbon in our souls. And this is another work I produced for that chapter for IU project, where I saw that soil organisms, they produce aggregates. It could be plants, it could be microbes, but it could also be my owner. And those aggregates, which are biogenic, they sequester organic matter, they protect the organic matter. Another problem I highlighted before is soil compactation and soil seeding. In intensive agriculture practice, especially using cedar machinery, the youth and development are forcing that our soil decreases in capacity. I'm assuming you are very familiar with the flow bank that is produced by the compactation by tractors and things. These compact layers, it could be several of them, they instead prevent the root growth. And then we also have urban areas, we put a lot of concrete around the world and apparently it's not correlated to human population. According to the European Environmental Agency, the surface for cities has increased by 878%. But the population has only grown by a smaller percentage than that. And around 500 kilometers square of land are seen annually, according to the report. So a solution would be, for example, to increase the number of earthworms. Earthworms produce, there is in a high position that we could have an estimated abundance density of 100 to 800 degrees per meter. They produce calories and they increase water penetration. Average estimates indicate that approximately 150 millimeters of water can be infiltrated per hour, for the lowest estimate of this density. So I did some calculations for agricultural soils where I have earthworm data for conventional and not-till systems and according to my results, we can increase water infiltration by 3-4, by 3-4, by not-till, if we don't apply conventionally. And if we remove earthworms from soils, we can also remove prevent water infiltration by 90 percent. There's a huge impact. Another big problem in Europe is soil erosion. According to one of my policy panels, 75 percent of the EU land and erosion rate is higher than the recommended threshold, which is two tons per hectare per animal and more than 60 percent of our future lands suffer from high erosion. So they are losing the soil and that's where the organisms come from. These are glomaline proteins that we use by microorganisms. They glue these particles, so they glue together, so they are more resilient to erosion. And here on this side, we have another sample of antitrays surrounded by pellets that also have a big particle. And then here we have a task by earthworms. And the sample contamination, we call it bioremidation, which is the use in plants or fungi to clean the soils. But soil organism can also be the cannabis in the coal mine, and that is called bioremidation. And here we have an isochial lines, which are produced by all city guidelines using colembola, nematodes, antitrays, and earthworms to tell us when we are on higher risk to have a very contaminated soil. So all these problems lead to land degradation. And yesterday we heard women the put in saying that we have many services provided by soil university. And when when we increase the production, we see positive productive, but all the services get reused. So the more systems, the less services we get by soil university. And that is the same for human health. We throw lots of pesticides that affect the soil microbiome, and that increases these living people with health. So now we are in a pandemic area, 70% of the diseases and pandemics are considered to be so noted, and maybe soil organisms could help. So this is my last slide. Policies to protect value and value of the city are distributed in every state, and it could be implemented. And this is a recent study that shows how the European and high-invested in soil environment diversity, as we can see, they put more money, six times more money in vertebrates than in vertebrates. So that story is we are 10 minutes now, if you can conclude very quickly. My take home message is that we need to replace soil biodiversity. This is possible and just kind of manage to have to include soil biodiversity. So thank you very much. I'm sorry. I had the microphone muted and I couldn't advise you. Okay, so very sorry. Thank you very much for this overall view of biodiversity roles. Thank you very much. And now I want to introduce Mr. Fornasje from Italy, who will deliver a presentation titled Soil Biodiversity for Cultural Production Environmental Integrity. So Flavio, you are here. Yes, you are, please Julia unmute Flavio Fornasje. What? I don't see his name in the... I see him. Is it six, five, seven, four, two, six? Okay. Please rename yourself Flavio. Yes, Flavio, you are named as a number. Six, five, seven, four, two, six. And so Julia couldn't find your... Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Are you here now? Yes. Thank you. Go ahead. I will send you an advice at nine minutes. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Can you load? Sorry, I have some problems with it. Okay. Why not? Okay. I cannot see the... Okay. Now, it's okay. Okay. Can you load my presentation by the organizers? Is it possible? Yes. Okay. Let me just start. Can I start? Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Now, next slide, please. Sorry. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Now, with my presentation, I will show you how we depicted the action of the microorganism at the ecosystem, at the ecosystem level. Next slide, please. When we investigate at ecosystem level, the micro... Sorry. When we investigate the microorganism and their action, we can use different tools. First of all, we can use genomics, cryptomics, and proteomics. These techniques generate an enormous data set and possibly with the possibility of getting drowned in such a notion of data. And possibly conclude, at last, the difference among samples are very small. So they are very time consuming, produce a lot of data, and moreover, this is not simple to interpret correctly and give a proper interpretation of the data. Because when we have a list of operational taxonomic units, for instance, we are not able to connect directly to the functioning of the single... And the action of the single microbial group in their environment. By contrast, we have time and cost effective high throughput techniques, which are multiplexed enzyme assay, double-strand based quantitation of soil microbial biomass, and assessment of intracellular and extracellular DNA. Next slide, please. And this is an example of our approach. We analyze the climate sequence, which is in the northern Italy, in the Trentino region, in the so-called Baldi Rabi. You can hear a map of this site. These sites are not different with respect to the state factors. So it means that the parent material is the same. The forest, we have the forest time of the same type and the land use. We have also natural grassland. And the soil type is can be sold to under soil or pozzles. We have different sites that are north, exposure at north and south, which are different for the climate. Next slide, please. Well, we have north-facing slopes and south-facing slopes. And you can see that the altitude... We have a pair of sampling sites, which are more or less the same altitude. We sampled ten sites. Each of them had three soil depth. Three independent fields replicates means more or less plots. And five sub-samples. This equals 450 soil samples. Next slide, please. When we use high throughput methods, we need a proper statistical approach and tools because we have a huge amount of data. Here is an example of what the method we used. The non-metric metodimensional scaling in this example is for soil enzymatic activities and microbial biomass content of the soil, which is just... And so the different sites are outlanded by... are separated with this technique. So what I want to tell you is that when you have a lot of... This is known, but with such a huge amount of data, we need a proper statistic tool to evidence the differences and similarities. Next slide, please. And these are the results. In the north exposure, we have more volatile soil solids, higher soil moisture, more clay and electrical conductivity, mineral nitrogen, higher carbon, organic carbon content and a higher activity of beta-glucosidate and acid-phosphon monoysterase. And this is connected to a lower pH. And then we have also a higher substrate-induced respiration-based microbial biomass, a higher buzzer respiration, and from looking at the microbial groups, we had a higher archaeal abundance. By contrast, there was no difference about the esterase activity, chitinase, and microbial biomass as measured as double-strand DNA. But in fungal abundance, it was more or less the same in the north or exposure or in the south. South, we have a higher ball density, a higher pH, and an activity of... A higher activity, only seen aminopeptidase, which is an enzyme linked to the nitrogen cycle, a higher alkaline phosphon monoysterase, phosphodiesterase are in sulphatase, and a higher bacterial abundance. So the results are good to depict and forecast what could be the result of climate change. So these results could be helpful to predict future scenarios, obviously in mountain ecosystem. Next slide, please. So we had a comprehensive picture of both microbiota and the complexity of biochemical cycling. So it means also the functionality of the soil. And we achieved by next generation sequencing a huge, very detailed data set and specific information for each sample, but also with the high throughput methods with the extracellular and intracellular DNA ratio, double-strand DNA microbial biomass, and multiplex enzyme SA, which are able to process hundreds of samples in a very short time at a minimal cost. These are not an alternative, these methods are not alternative to the, for instance, next generation sequencing or proteomics and others, but are are high end, sorry, are a tool to select samples for deeper analysis, so to evidence difference among soils. Our experience with tens of publications evidence that if any difference exists in functionality, they are easily evidenced with the multiplexed enzyme SA, which means that at the same time we are able to SA as many as 25 enzyme activities. One minute. Okay, I've finished. Thank you very much. What I want to stress is that with such investigation we need a suitable, not only specific statistical tool, but also a sampling strategy. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much for staying in time. And I now want to introduce Mr. Bender from Switzerland. Who is going to deliver a presentation titled, Sile Biodiversity for Agriculture Production and Environmental Integrity. So Mr. Bender, you have the floor, if you are somewhere. Thank you. I'm here, just trying to share my presentation. Thank you very much. Right, can you see it? Yes, clear. Okay, so yeah, thank you very much for inviting me. I will talk about soil biodiversity for agricultural production and environmental integrity. So we all know that there's a whole range of organisms living below ground and they, through their activities, provide different ecosystem functions and ecosystem services that we as a human society depend on for survival. And we also know that with increasing agricultural intensification, a lot of these organisms are negatively affected and this intensive agricultural management can actually lead to the local extinction of some of these organism groups. So the question is, if we lose these organisms, do we also lose these crucial functions and services that we depend on? So this is basically the main question of my research. So I want to frame it within the scope of this conceptual framework here. When we look at a natural system, we usually have a relatively high plant diversity, a high soil biodiversity and we have efficient resource recycling processes that maintain the system for long periods of time. So the system is sustainable but not very productive in agricultural terms. When we compare this to an intensive agricultural system, we often have crop monocultures and a high level of external resource inputs which has negative effects on soil communities. So the internal resource recycling processes are less well developed and we have higher nutrient losses through leaching or as gases emissions and overall we have a productive system but it's not very sustainable. So the ideal system would be a sustainable system with an intermediate level of plant diversity and a high level of soil biodiversity and efficient resource recycling processes and so we need less external resource inputs and we also have little nutrient losses so we have a productive and sustainable system. But first we need to find out what are soil organisms actually capable of. So I want to present you this model system that we conducted this experiment and we made use of lysimeters which are actually big pots on the plain air. We filled these lysimeters with sterilized soil and inoculated them with two different soil communities and enhanced soil life with organisms smaller four millimeters and a reduced soil life that contained organisms only smaller than 11 micrometers. These lysimeters have a hole in the bottom so we can collect the soil water running through the soil profile and analyze it for nutrients and then we also performed measurements of gases emissions of nitrous oxide and two. So we planted a mace crop into these lysimeters and let them grow to maturity so they became big plants. Then we looked at yield parameters and nutrient losses. So looking at the yields we found here the gray bars the dark bars the treatments with enhanced soil life we found that crop yield was significantly higher with the enhanced soil life compared to reduced soil life and so was crop nitrogen uptake and phosphorus uptake. Looking at the soil nutrient losses we found the opposite pattern with enhanced soil life nitrate leaching was strongly reduced compared to reduced soil life treatment and also the emissions of nitrous oxide gas and and two gas were much lower. So these are compelling results that show the potential that soil biota have for crop production and yeah nutrient cycling. But this is a model system and we need to find out does this also apply to the real world. So this is a study I performed at a research stay in at the University of California Davis and here we looked at a gradient of increasing management intensity in the field from grasslands to extensive rotations with cover crops and compost and intensive rotations that just receive mineral inputs and no organic inputs. So we analyzed soil communities in all these fields and extracted undisturbed soil cores put them in greenhouse planted tomato plants on there to assess ecosystem functions and looking at the first data for soil communities we always have an increase in management intensity from left to right grassland here intensive systems here. Yeah we see that overall there's a negative trend with increasing management intensity we find lower abundance and diversity of soil biota. For the ecosystem functions the pattern is less clear we see here for nitrate leaching we see an increase with management intensity but for yield and then to omissions it's less clear but when we correlate measures of yeah soil communities to ecosystem functions so here we have a correlation of the microbial biomass in the soil with tomato yield we found a significant positive relationship here the more microbial biomass the more tomato yield also the abundance of nematodes was positively related to crop yields and the amount of nitrate leached from the soil was negatively related to the ratio of fungi to bacteria and soil. So overall we find indications that actually what we found in our model system also applies to the real world. Now I presented third experiment a factorial experiment where we focus on a bascala micro-risal fungi a group of beneficial soil fungi that form associations with the plants and can have many benefits for the plants and we made use of this long-term field trial in Davis California where different agricultural management management systems are compared since 25 years we were interested in how does this long-term agricultural management affect the communities of micro-risal fungi in the soil and the ecosystem functions they provide. So we selected four different crop rotations some organics and conventional and we planted this tomato mutant system in there which consists of a regular tomato plant that forms associations with micro-risal fungi and then this mutant that does not form associations with micro-risal fungi so we can basically knock out the contribution of micro-risal fungi to crop yield. So when we look at the data here this is the abundance of the micro-risal fungi in the soil these are the different management systems and we see that the system actually worked in the wild type we find higher abundance of micro-risal fungi compared to the mutant system and yeah we found differences in abundance according to the management system and looking at the yield we find a similar pattern when we knock out micro-risal fungi yield goes down and yeah so with this we found that actually up to 33 percent of tomato yield is supported through micro-risal fungi so when we lose micro-risal fungi we might actually lose yeah quite a lot of our crop yields. So to summarize over these three different studies a model system a field survey and a factorial field experiment we found that soil biota can make a substantial contribution to agricultural yields and reduce environmental impacts. So now the question is how can we spread the news about this make society and politics and stakeholders aware of these benefits of soil biodiversity. So for this we launched a citizen science project in Switzerland called Beweisstück Unterhose which is basically proved by underpants so we make use of these soil your undies principle where you bury cotton underpants in the soil and the faster they get decomposed the better is your soil and the more active is your soil life and so we made a call to the Swiss public to participate in this project and we have more than a thousand participants that registered here you see a map of all the participants where they're spread all over the country and we will send standardized underpants to all the participants they all get two underpants that will yeah excavated from the soil after different time points and we hope to to get an overview of the soil biological activity over Switzerland and scientifically assess the potential of underpants to serve as an indicator for for soil quality soil health and yeah also to engage the public and to make them aware of the importance of soil and of soils as a living system and the good thing is the media love it so we we just launched the project and we've got media coverage all over Switzerland Germany Austria and even in Ghana and India and on aljazeera we had articles so yeah this is actually very nicely and we hope through this project we will be able to give soils and soil organisms the attention they deserve and with this yeah I come to the end I want to thank a lot of people that were involved in this research and the funding organizations that enable us to do this and thank you for your attention thank you very much very very nice experience with the science citizen my best compliments thank you very much thank you and now I want to call Mr. Yoshi from India who's giving a presentation title participatory learning action is important for community action to improve soil biodiversity so Mr. Yoshi Mr. Mr. Yoshi are you present yeah yeah hello hello can you share your presentation yeah yeah okay thank you very much yeah first I would like to thanks to F.A.O. for the giving the chance to research action in the classroom level research action research at the global symposium on the soil biodiversity and after two changes that changes ultimately we are here so welcome to all of you just I want to share the organization which is try to with the tribal reason India western India on the livelihood even the changing climate situation their children are at par with the other on all development parameters like education health rights and participation the basically the organization means mission is the empowering creating and nurturing vibrant institution of the indigenous community and that this part of India who can serve the appropriate scientific and indigenous technology for sustainable livelihood and realizing climate for childhood and the children by 2020 so basically this is the map of India and you can see this tri-junction of the indigenous people tribal area of the India Madhya Pradesh Rajasthan Wujrat we participate the community take action at that area the the some glimpse of the land and soil in the area the tribal area and unreachable area is also not safe just we want to share here so basically the living soil need to community action in India government policies and investment on the watershed development soil water conservation measure have tried to protect its vast degraded lands in upper reach to some extent against the process of the soil erosion in certain schemes but due to the lack of integrated approach and community action involvement result are not very effective on the front of the soil health and soil biodiversity that is the challenge demand from the tribal community have their diversity they have their component for integration soil water livestock vegetation but certain policies and certain action action and market driven action is reducing the soil health the basically now we are sharing here a community based participatory learning action developer test and applicability of the participatory learning action tools and consolidate this learning in the form of framework that could be the used to facilitate the wider adoption of the living soil in the agriculture that is quite important for entire area the step followed for the process is a PLA tool the community consultation and literature review assessing the traditional farming system evolve the PLA framework from the community and farming system test PLA framework with its tools so basically it's a five phase first phase the formulation foundation building second phase soil for the community and community for soil identifying the deciding community action that is the important because the entire process done by the community assessing the action an interval and consolidating consolidating learning after the whole process company so first foundation phase the worship soil the mother the indigenous people created a created a bridge between the community practice and third process of we try to usually indigenous people is always soil is a worship they ask as a mother earth for them so try to establish the connection identifying the resource based utilizing by the each family the linking access to resources within the farming system how the soil can help the livelihood and community perception on the soil that is the important many people is the usually ask is a god in the soil in the tribe indigenous area so why that is god so that was the important so this exercise was carried out in the very first PLA session so to the trigger action and interest in participants who express the earth to depend in the link between the local farming and food system so that was the different postures how the soil biodiversity can map biodiversity in the soil this is the food it's Indian India it's called the food is here we show the food is here not here so soil type and crop diversity relationship that was the important the identifying declining community action is the third listing the traditional action for the soil health selection of the community action and assessing the community actions the assessing the actions basically like this is the diversity mapping how they can understand about the earthworms and in their own practice this one is the live hedge for their community so that is the important how community can this just the capturing the visible diversity in the soil the production diversity praying worship as a mother earth of the soil so this is this one is the entire thousand villages in the western part of India the near about one like families participate in this word soil day for the as a praise about the soil saving so basically outcome of the this research is the a community of 600 indigenous women learn to link soil health with the practice and farming system 30 groups participate in the contributing overall validity of these tools for the for the evolve and implementation process the PLA have the identifying factors that either hinder or the enable soil biodiversity the process broaden the community understanding on the various traditional farming practices and revitalizing the process of the living soil particularly with the tribal community because the Vagdhara and our community is always believed if anyone can save the soil is the only and only indigenous community who save the soil because they live with the soil seed water and vegetation till now so community level finding is the basically PLA not only helped achieve the soil biodiversity but also held in the production diversity participating families earned a higher income compared the other compared to what they used to earn when they produced crop based on the market preferences that PLA approaches providing scope of the innovation by farming communities such as the inclusion of the legumes mix cropping to act as a natural fertilizer crop protection crop agroforestry and mulching natural mulching the critical role of the government is the deciding the fate of the land quality soil health soil biodiversity farming system nutrition and the farmer well-being the farmer play the crucial role in the protecting soil biodiversity since their choice of the tools of the techniques has an enormous influence on the factory of the life adoption of the PLA approach through involvement with the indigenous farming community one minute Mr. Josh. So only just last slide the experience of the demonstration the potential for the applying the approach of the community action is in the effective mechanism to protect one of the world's largest resource-based sustained and oldest occupation of the farming the community action in the revival of the living soil can help achieve the SDGs in particular SDGs 2 on 0 hunger it can also help to address the problem of the malnourishment through the local solution so just I want to share here the that major discussion happened in this different community involvement in the large number of traditional practices had to take the appropriate actions and environment of policies worldwide to evolve the program to wider involvement of the community in the soil building process so just I want to share here the this is the future agenda of Vagdhara before the thanking you just I want to urge in this platform and forum the community action and community efforts is only and only solution for the soil biodiversity and maintaining the soil biodiversity and saving the soil thank you for the attention thank you very much thank you very much also for this experience of participatory learning across in thank you very much and now we have unfortunately only six minutes for question and answer and I collected the couple there was a third one in in the chat but it was already answered by the speaker and one is for Mr. Flagefort Nasir and is the question is can next generation sequencing be involved in regular soil assessments that farmers do undertake would it be cost effective for them given that is also needs to be analyzed by an expert? Well next generation sequencing is quite expensive but the most important now could be more or less you need 100 euros to sequence all the fungus and the bacteria and the orarchia the real problem now we are facing is that you are not able to translate the information about microbial composition to soil functionality and so now we are studying and we are just starting to understand what is the link between functionality and microbial composition thank you and there is another question for Mr. Bender congratulations and then have you thought about increasing soil biodiversity in the intensive system by soil management options for example here in Sweden we added the organic matter in the subsoil and recorded several fold increase in microbial biomass and number of air torps also the yield increase by 5-10 percent Mr. Bender thank you for the question yeah so the the fields that we investigated were actually farmer managed fields so we did not perform any operations on there but of course management is is key to support and enhance biodiversity in agricultural systems I haven't thought about adding organic matter to the subsoil it sounds very interesting just wondering how you get the subsoil how to get the organic matter down there yeah into the subsoil there must be a lot of yeah right but yeah there must be a lot of yeah there's another question for you I think because how long you left underpants into the soil and how deep so we bury the underpants like vertically into the soil that the seam just looks out at the top so they're from zero to 30 centimeters roughly in the soil that we leave them in for one month the first underpanned and then the second one will be retrieved after two months so we have a yeah a timeline of the decomposition process thank you and another question for you and she says I work with soil specifically risobium and I work with soil inoculants do you think we should work on improving them so that they can be used successfully in commercial agriculture instead of fertilizer so new technology yeah so that's actually also something we are working on with mycorrhizal fungi producing inocular for for application in agriculture I think it's definitely a promising approach but I also think it cannot be the only approach to really yeah make a change I think we need a holistic holistic approach adjust the entire management system to really support soil biodiversity but applying inocular is certainly one important step that can help introduce beneficial organisms or reintroduce them to the soil so I wish to thank all the speakers and now it's time to pass to the second slot of the presentation so thank you very much to you all for and yes now we have we have the second part of our parallel session still the same team and still the same rules and yes please feel free to write in the chat your questions maybe the speakers can answer to you directly or at the end of the session so please I wish to call and give the floor to Mr Knebel from United States of America who is presenting a coordinating research at the price of agricultural soil bracket microbiomes and soil ecosystems across USDA research locations so Mr Knebel the floor is yours thank you very much it's great to be here to this global soil meeting I'll be sharing my screen so again welcome to the day and I appreciate the opportunity to share about what we're doing in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in soil microbiome research and soil ecology and soil biodiversity and what I want to do today is share some of our research efforts and talk a little bit about our organization and I have two purposes for this talk is to talk about the global concerns so that's why we're here it's not just a problem in the U.S. or our own particular nations but what we're trying to face and solve across the globe and what we're trying to do in the agricultural research service and how we're set up to do that to understand the soil ecosystem and then improve productivity and improve the environment and it's very important to us as a nation but then also as a community member of how we can collaborate and so I'm going to be providing some contact information and some activities where we wish to engage you and also invite you to invite us to participate in these global problems so what I would like to do is share a little bit about how we are set up in the agricultural research service it's a very large organization and it has a number of diverse different types of applications to research and after a short introduction of that I will move into our soil ecosystem research but just a very few snapshots of those and it was hard for me to figure out which best way to take so I'm going to just snapshot a few of our research efforts out of hundreds currently going on but the thousands of history we have four research program areas and you can see the four there natural resources and the crop production food safety and quality and then also animal production that group is comprised of over 1,800 PhD scientists with a total of 8,000 total support staff and I've likened those support staff and those teams those the scientists leaders um the leaders being sort of like endowed chairs at universities they have full funding for five-year increments and then that funding goes through review and they get more funding um support and so they don't have to compete for grants although they can but their their funding is supported for these five-year efforts so it gives us really a wonderful opportunity to investigate problems on long-scale time periods in the organization there are approximately 690 projects across those four program areas and about a 1.4 billion dollar budget and for the US we are located I don't know if you can see the dots we're located in approximately 90 different locations around the country and this gives us a very diverse perspective on all of the different agricultural production systems in the nation we also do partner extensively with our international partners but these locations give us very different ecotypes to look at in different production systems and embedded within those are a number of soil ecosystem efforts so again I'll be sharing four efforts of hundreds and we're looking at how soil ecosystem management may improve yields how they respond and may be resilient to climate stress and how they enhance carbon sequestration so I'm going to move on quickly I'm going to dive in deeply but this is what I call the ghost of soil management past it's what did the previous cropping system do to the soil ecosystem and how does it influence it and so there's a greenhouse study done to evaluate historical rotations effects on disease resistance and not looked at fusarium grimanearium and the data are dense and I'm going to summarize it what do these plots mean if you look on the far left top you can see the previous crop impact on the particular this is corn in this case on the fungal communities and these diverge along this line here with the sunflower and soybean on the lower left and as it turns out that increased productivity those communities because of their previous community their previous cropping system changed the soil microbiome and such that those fungal communities enhanced productivity and then a field study we looked at whether corn or wheat impacted the rhizosphere of a soybean production system and here we haven't detangled yet what the impacts mean on the soybean productivity but we definitely see a segregation on this in this case it's bacterial communities between the previous crop so we're trying to understand this cropping systems impacts on the soil ecosystem and then what we're trying to do is how does that impact the productivity and nutrient yields another study this is done across the United States you can sort of see the yellow pins the soil health assessment initiative and we looked at the product systems or production systems in response to stress and other indicators using microbial sequences looking at particular genetic assemblages so you can see the bacterial genes and community abundances were correlated to soil health and what we looked at were several different indicator types soil organic matter composition aggregation nutrient cycling and they can see the topics in the middle what we're trying to find and then what gene markers we use to assess those soils and then also look at how the productivity was and their stress responses we also looked at disease suppression whether or not they're antibiotic genes being expressed as well as stress resiliency and how those were also being expressed in response to stress and so the findings were in the study between ARS and the NRCS that there are correlations between what we're seeing as far as the gene abundance and activity across these different locations and stress very large study as some of the speakers alluded to earlier we're also of course wondering about stress and lack of rainfall and how that's affecting our crop production so in this study using maize under full irrigation or limited irrigation we see a divergence in the communities along this gradient from full irrigation to limited irrigation so we see the community changes and we're still not sure what this means as far as the impacts and how we can manage that but that's the goal and then my last slide is on what happens with deep carbon sequestration during an extreme drought and looking at different switchgrass stock types different genotypes and funding what do they do to the soil microbial community and so we use carbon-13 enrichment we looked at a deep core process and a number of different markers for different types of genes and what we found was in the two different types the cantilell in the summer switch grass types similar amounts of carbon deposition but really different usages by the different communities associated with those different um genotypes and you can see how that changes with soil depth with in the summer switchgrass the saprophytic fungi being much more important and then the cantilell the grand negative bacteria when we're trying again to detangle what does this mean can we manage this for better carbon sequestration for enhanced ecosystem services again that's four of our talks four of our efforts but I now want to move into how do you interact with us and how can we interact together the natural resources and sustainable agricultural systems division of ars we have locations at 55 of our 90 labs and you can see some of the numbers there and then my national program the soil and air national program has 19 locations and we invite participation from around the world around these soil questions then we have networks within the us and these are also expanding globally our grace net effort that's being reviewed currently right now for expansion our ltar network our antibiotic resistance network that was spoken to before our climate hubs our biochar our soil biology our wind erosion network as well every year you should say that again every five years each of our national programs goes through review we have listening sessions and we have an opportunity for stakeholder input national and international this is a wonderful time to engage with us and have your inputs recorded and then how we respond to that in our next five-year plan and the way you can do that is you can contact me my information is there but then I can also put you in touch with our other national program leaders across our groups so I thank you for your attention I realized that was fast a little bit of a snapshot but I really wish to engage more globally on these important questions for soil ecosystem understanding management and then what we can do to hopefully promote the ones we want to go forward with our better production better climate resilience better carbon sequestration and I'm finished thank you very much thank you mr nebel thank you very much for your presentation and for all the view of usda activities thank you very much and I live now the floor to mr ras if I pronounce it correctly who is presenting a presentation titled a coordinated research enterprise and agricultural soil microbiomes and soil ecosystems across I'm sorry I'm sorry I beg your pardon so mr ras understanding impact of soil biology on crops the key to sustainability of permit systems I'm sorry again mr ras you have the floor thank you very much sorry it will be marita res gesler okay i'm sorry okay marita res uh gesler thank you I have your name sorry yes hi everyone can you hear me all right yes okay great yes we do so all right so hi everyone so in my presentation I will show you how we work with farmers farmer association and science to understand our impact on soil biology and why it is important so this doesn't work so a quick presentation a quick introduction to myself so I work with my father he's a farmer in France for over 30 years now and he's a consultant for farmers interested in conservation agriculture I joined him now three years ago to develop the courses for farmers and the biological analysis we propose so through my work and my interests I could say I have kind of one feat in science and one feat in farming and that's what we are going to show you today so this is a little bit an example of our work with farmers we try to put together and sum up the findings by scientists or specialists or farm opinioners to disseminate then these practices to other farmers who are willing to have sustainable soil management oops so we do this through courses field days or individual consulting so our goal as farmer is to improve our management to get healthy plants for and with healthy soils for healthy food so we try to find new techniques we get inspired from farmers all around the world thanks to networking and internet and the new techniques also come from scientists and specialists like Kinsey, Christine Jones, John Kempf, Ingham Pfeifferd and Rikowski and a lot of other people this way we have a double competency in science and in agricultural systems so theory and practice that we try to conciliate we know the soil has been depleted with our way of farming the tillage plowing chemicals and intensive production the focus was always on quantity rather than quality and this really has to change but we farmers we need tools to monitor what we are doing we have the big principles we know what we want to follow so no till living plans diversity etc but everyone has to find out a way to apply it to its own farm environment and conditions because every situation and every farm is different farming is an entire system that is influenced by the environment so what is working out one year with one farmer isn't necessarily working out for his neighbor and therefore it is more than essential for every farmer and producer to check its impact on his own soils and production so we try to give them tools some are pretty well known like chemical analysis but the last few years have highlighted the need to change our soil management and to take more into account the soil biology so what we are talking about here therefore we are using a tool that has yet to be more disseminated and it's the soil chromatography it has been developed in the early 50s with Pfeiffer and then by the Leucke family who is now dispensing courses on how to do it and how to read it since then as well as the last few years some studies have been carried out some colleagues constantly dating the method but some don't so we try now at our farm to compare the results to an analysis with microscope and to chemical analysis so the soil chromatography is actually a simple way to get a lot of qualitative information on soil biology the oxygen levels in the structure the bacterial and the fungal and sorry the bacterial and the fungal activity and it's actually quite simple to read if you have learned how to do it you look at the color of the structures and the different areas to give you an easy example to understand this is a stone so it has no life in it and this is a pasture so it's biologically active so now if you if you keep these two pictures in mind for the next one you see that even if you don't really know how to read it and what to look at you see there are some differences so these samples used we are taking on a trial three samples same sampling date same field same rotation but different soil management even without knowing really what you have to look at you can easily guess that the best one is the no-till and cover crop because the plowing really actually looks like the stone we just saw so this is one way we have today to look at what we are doing to our soil biology and if you look at what it looks like on the soil you have on the left the conventional tillage and on the right the conservation agriculture so no-till and diversity so the way of farming matters and it is really important for us to be able to assess we know the concepts we know we have to put life back into our soils and especially fungi so we have to be able to check the biology in our soils and especially if it does work as a farmer I don't really know what to do with the information microbial biomass I don't know if it is going to work to decompose organic matter to create humus to structure and to provide nutrition to my plants it is important to look where we are and how it is evolving even if I don't know exactly what is in my soil I don't really care as a farmer as long as is it as long as it is working and producing good plants thinking we are doing the right soil management isn't enough we did our work at our farm the first chromatography eight years ago so we had around 15 years of conservation agriculture yes it was the beginning of it and we did a lot of mistakes but still we thought we should should not be so bad but well we little did we know after 15 years of no till and cover crops we discovered that our soils weren't doing that good on the biological side it didn't respond as we thought there was a lot a big lack of diversity and fungi and air was missing in the structure and three years later we had big improvement even if not perfect it was better because we were able to look at what we were doing so what changed in those three years we tried to have always lean plants on the field food for biology not only crop residues but really living plants and we got more interested in chemical analysis of soils and plants that that's what we were looking for diversity of living plants all year round and of course this brings to the aspect of no till so there you have the three key principles of conservation agriculture with all the benefits around agronomy environment and economics of course they have to be adept monitored assessed and farmers and consultants have to learn how to do it properly in their own regions and that is why it is interesting to have the farmers associations why not with scientists or specialists to sum up what has to be done what worked what did not work and why we have to understand where we have to progress in order to give the right tools and management guidelines to all the other farmers and this is where this agriculture gets interesting because you actually have as a farmer to think again what to do and how it and you need therefore to be able to check if you do right so to come to sum up the long term aims the goal should be for the farmer associations to work hand in hand with science we both sides have to or need to work together science and and farmers there is still a lot work to do and we need to transform the scientific findings in agricultural practice useful for farmers so please let's work together thank you for your attention thank you very much for your presentation thank you for the timeline thank you very much and thanks also for the interesting results and clearly exposed thank you very much and now we have miss Costa from Portugal who is going to present soil functioning relates to land use in a sustainable managed managed agro-silver pastoral ecosystem so miss Costa the floor is yours thank you i've been thoroughly enjoying the previous talks so before i start i want to say i completely agree with miss gassler and mr joshie that we need to work together i'm coming from a science perspective i'm going to talk to you about soil functions as perceived through our bio indicators that we use in a in a sustainably managed agro ecosystem combining agriculture forestry and animal husbandry our study was conducted in the Bejozu globally important agricultural heritage system designated so by the FAO it's the only globally important agricultural heritage system we have in Portugal and it was one of the first ones established in europe it's all revolving around production of the barrosin cow that's beef cattle that grazes freely in these meadows that we can see here this is a land a typical land sharing regime there's lots of ecological infrastructure around like these stone walls this these pastures are permanent pastures maintain soil throughout the winter even in freezing conditions because locals divert water from streams that you can see there they divert them to to circulate throughout the fields this is all rain fed but they keep this sort of traditional irrigation system in the pastures now the cattle is not outside all the time and it goes into stables people collect shrubs from the forest from the woody areas around here for animal bedding and once that's used then it gets composted in piles and this compost with lots of manure integrated it's it is spread in agricultural fields so small fields for horticulture that people have been using them to produce you know whatever horticultural crops for their families so it's a nice closed almost closed system where biomass is being transferred and nutrients are being transferred between the natural component the pasture component and the agriculture component of this agro ecosystem now this has been well characterized above ground we know about how the system works in sustainability and resilience to impacts biodiversity above ground biodiversity of the flora in this in these meadows and the birds and all sorts but we know very little about what's going on in the soil and how soil functions in soil biodiversity are being impacted if at all by these human activities in this sustainable agro ecosystem so as scientists we did what scientists do we went to the field and collected samples from the three different components so we've got samples from the natural component the pasture and you can see it's flooded here it's very easy to maybe you can't see it very well but it's sort of semi flooded meadow marsh field and agricultural plots so we've sampled the three components and we were using nematodes as bio indicators nematode communities as bio indicators of what's going on in the soil we do this because you've been shown even in the symposium actually even a few minutes ago miss gassler was showing you a soil food web diagram and if you look at the soil food web and this is a very simplified diagram but no matter where you start if you start with plants you'll have nematodes feeding on plants if you start with organic matter that is decomposed by fungi and bacteria these are eaten by nematodes too and the nematodes themselves are then preyed upon by other nematodes so what this means is you know nematodes are everywhere they're very abundant they're very diverse in soil their their response to impacts is very well characterized and they're in different trophic levels in the food web and that means that if you know what's going on with nematodes you know a lot about what's going on in in soil functions in soil processes now if you go about characterizing your nematode communities in these soil samples you end up with a very large spreadsheet of data and of course you need to make sense of it to try to understand what's going on in your soil and here we see in this plot we've summarized the nematode communities of our agriculture natural and pasture components into just one data point in this plot and this plot is measuring food web complexity or food web structure in regulation points across the the self-regulation or natural regulation of this complex food web and nutrient availability on the y-axis so expectedly it was nice to see that in this sustainable system all our data points for any of the components ended up in this part of the plot that combines structure stability complexity with nutrient availability so these are overall stable systems but if you go about looking at these areas this is activity these areas of these rhomboids around the data points are areas of activity dedicated to structure or regulation or to enrichment and you can see in the agricultural system this is a very much smaller rhomboid so much smaller activity the least activity in structure in complexity and it's also not well balanced you can see these green and blue rhomboids are sort of square like and this is more spindle or diamond shaped this is an unbalanced system so they're all very well very fine stable but the agricultural system seems to have some problems in in nutrient use efficiency still exploring the nematode information you can know where where the nutrients are allocated into the different levels of the soil food web and you can categorize then in this radar plot you can look at where not nutrients are allocated in pests and pathogens and then in omnivores and predators so higher traffic groups and in decomposers and these provide direct indications of the services provided by the soil so you can see that on the right hand side where you have the regulation services those are more prominent in natural systems and in pastures so there's more complexity there of the food web and in the decomposition side of things you can see that it's maybe all systems have a active decomposition which is crucial in in soil systems decompositions is crucial service in recycling in mineralizing nutrients trapped in organic matter so that they can be used by plants again but as plants use these nutrients of course they they grow and they produce lots of biomass and that attracts pests and pathogens that then provide this herbivory disservice okay so if you look at the plot then here we see that agricultural systems agricultural components of these of these systems have more pest and pathogen pressure than all the other components so interestingly let me just go back interestingly you see that pasture also has more these this is on a log scale so this is magnitude it's actually quite a difference from here to there so pasture also has a lot of herbivory but there's more regulation and in agriculture you don't have as much regulation and that's probably why the pests and pathogens disservice is being increased so just to conclude yes there seems to be some mirroring below ground of what's going on above ground for sustainability so keep in mind all the three components were relatively stable although yes although perhaps in the agricultural system because there's there's more there's this a lower nutrient use efficiency and less regulation it's more prone to herbivory but keep in mind this is the same system when we're talking about what's going on above ground and below ground we sometimes have this temptation that the separate systems they're the same and we need to keep that in mind when we are designing strategies for soil management we need to design strategies that are aware of what's going on in the soil but that are applied to the whole system so I'm just okay thanking my funding I've added these nematodes as part of the ecosystem as well and thank you for listening thank you very much for your very clear presentation thanks a lot and we move now to the last presentation we are in time happily and to the last presentation of the this second slot and of our session also and I call Mr I'm not sure of the pronunciation Kula Suria from Sri Lanka I was giving a talk about the utilization of soil microbial diversity for crop production in Sri Lanka and uh is Mr Kula Rosia I'm sorry and I beg your pardon for my pronunciation you have the floor I don't think she's here she's not here no she she had trouble signing in and I don't think she managed is she okay this is Mr in my agenda okay I tried to to work out with her but I don't think she managed okay for for the time being I I do not have specific questions if I'm correct I have there's a couple of comments on on yes how the if there is to everybody I'm not they're not specific I don't know who of your presenters want to answer if there does exist an overall indicator a simple one if I understand correctly this comment that can be used at farm level so cheap and easy to to interpret because of course science is not so near to farmers especially in some regions of the of the world so I don't know if there is anyone want to address this comment can I comment on this Constanza yes um yes that usually there isn't a single indicator that works we are using nematodes as bioindicators and they do give us a lot of different hints about what's going on but usually it's best to select a few now what we need to develop and it's something that we need to do together as well is to try to figure out you know we can go to the lab and do all sorts of analysis and some are incredibly expensive and others are cheap and but they're time consuming so we need to figure out some sort of correlation or relation between what we're observing in the lab and what we can observe in field in the field that that correlates to those same results so that you can we can yes we can take samples to the lab and try to provide mechanistic information or knowledge about what's going on but it's easier perhaps for day to day following of the field conditions to try to come up with something that you can observe in the field like so compaction like easy things like putting a wire through soil to assess compaction looking at plants and turgid scents of the leaves something like that we need to work together yeah sorry maybe that doesn't help very much but you're correct they probably yes I was a bit misunderstood there is not only one but in you know a general view yes more holistic let's say view so thank you very much for you I'll add comment Mr. Nebel yes thank you Sofia we agree it's there's so many different complexities of soils we are trying to do two things one is to work on tools that are regionally relevant with different production systems in different parts of the world and due to the soil and the climate some different indicators will be more powerful than others and so we've probably could just sort of develop one standard set of suite of methods but those always don't correlate well depending on the production system and so within the global soil partnership there's a real interest in developing standard methods that can be used and the suite of those have been proposed for the world through the UN FAO GSP but yeah coming to agreement on those and then what a farmer will trust and then what a farmer will be able to use to really make decisions that's a real challenge and I think this is a great opportunity for us to come together and have those dialogues and try to come to a closer solution so I agree thank you for that Sofia thank you and there is another comment another question overall about the the smell of the soil so is is it she knows farmers who smell the soil to assess the overall quality and do you does anyone know if the if and how the scent of the soil has some information about biodiversity quickly that often has a correlation to the instructive mysees and i know my seeds the geosmin odor that you often smell when you take that but boy that's a great question and if there was a simple handheld gas chromatograph we can we could correlate when you do disrupt the soil and what volatiles are being released my knowledge I don't know if that's been examined it's often looking at color or compaction or other tools interesting topic if we could develop something simple for that I I don't know there is a comment about the relations with plants but i'm not sure that I understand correctly so about analysis of soils versus the plants yes there was also another comment about about the chromatograph if also for plants I don't know I don't I'm not sure that I understand correctly the sense of the of the question yes of course the microbiome is as correlated to the production of biomass so finally to the photosynthesis I don't know if there is any particular research or study from your side linking vegetation and plant characteristics to soil biodiversity if no one's commenting maybe I can add a little bit on that even from Vim van der Putten's work and he was presenting on the plenary session yesterday it seems that overall crop diversity not just yeah not just diversity of crops that you're growing but the diversity the genetic diversity and adaptation of the crop itself seems to be important in promoting in interacting with the rhizosphere microorganisms whatever they may be you know microbes or even insects and sort of mesophana the more diverse plant above ground community that you can see above ground that means different roots below ground as well and that means different specificities of food for what's below ground as well for all these microbes for all these organisms in the rhizosphere that they're very it's a redundant usually perceived as redundant community and if anything can be done by lots of different organisms but usually they're very specific they can have food preferences the more diverse your crops the more diverse the food will be for all these organisms the more complex and long food chains you can have the more natural regulation you can have and that leads to the over yielding effect that you can if you google it over yielding effect by diversity by crop diversity yeah there's a question I think for Miss Gessler because it's about soil chromatography and she asks if it's appropriated for general public farmers with training probably in your presentation you said something similar but if you want to add something yes so I'm not sure I did understand the question right but I'm gonna say we use the chromatography to look at the impacts of our practices on our farm and we propose this analysis to other farmers who would like to use better soil management practices so we use it to as a tool for consulting um yeah I don't know if it is no okay the question was if the the farmer needs to require reagents or a lab setting to do chromatography oh sorry they do no actually it's quite simple um ourselves we are just farmers we're just farmers we don't have a lab we just learned just learned how to do it and how to read it and then if you if you do it right I would say everyone can do it if he learns how to do it thank you and another question for you where can we learn more about how you interpret your results um yeah so we did a lot of courses with the Lübcke family in Austria I'll say it right you can find some paperwork about it there's a lot of paperwork in uh German and a lot of paperwork that is not using the right interpretation or like it's uh it's learned by the Lübcke family so I would say the best is to look at the work of Pfeiffer or the work at the from the Lübcke family um we have someone who Karsten who raises hand oh sorry oh sorry I'm sorry I was looking at the chat okay thank you sorry thank you very much giving me the audience you see the question what is the situation of the soil can be always studied directly by your senses so I have a five step sense proof of the soil and I do this in Africa or Asia or South America everywhere I I am in projects the first you are doing is to take a look around where are you landscape all the things you have to be aware of the second one you take a look directly on the soil in front of you third step you touch it with your hand you feel something like warmth like humidity think like this it's your trust your senses then you go inside the the soil with your hand how deep can you go you know the most important what we need in the soil this is not to be trained in the schools and the university this is air in the soil because there's no life without air in the soil even if you have unerope living beings of course you don't want to have them for the plant uh cultivation so then you when you are inside you can see you can differ it the the sense of touching it just uh in front of the soil or if you go inside to get something or warmth something like this is away from your your eye senses and then you take it and take it out and smell it you can smell everything you can learn this trust your senses I would like to say second all this picture forming methods they will prove your senses so for me the first one is prove it by your own senses second step with picture forming method and third step analysis like having it down to the DNA or everything you would like to have thank you thank you I'm sorry I have to to stop now with the conversation I have two other hands I will come later because we have the the presentation the uh foreseeing presentation plan the presentation from from Ananda from Sri Lanka she should have reached the meeting and and is that correct colleagues from FL is she in yes this year so please uh Ananda you go ahead so the the title is utilization of soil microbial diverse diversity for crop production in Sri Lanka Ananda are you there I'm uh I'm still trying to panic okay am I am I in I don't see my name I don't see myself I'm trying my best to connect for the last one hour I don't know why why what happened I can hear you I can hear you you can or you cannot I can hear you and we can hear you can I start sharing the presentation we see you Ananda I am sorry there's uh in these days everything is not very easy Ananda can you unmute yourself is is he unmuted Julia okay I mean he can unmute himself okay now I can see my presentation and my picture can you all see me thank you very much sorry for the what happened you have 10 minutes for your talk and I will recall you at nine minutes yeah can you all can you all see me or you cannot yes we can thank you go ahead my presentation has come so shall I start yeah okay can you see my presentation on the screen yes can you hear us uh we can I can hear you now okay thank you okay right thank you greetings from Sri Lanka presentation on behalf of the National Institute of Fundamental Studies Sri Lanka together with my colleague Professor Gaminis and we are going to talk on the utilization of soil microbial diversity for crop production in Sri Lanka it's our own experimental work that has been going on uh can I pass the slide uh yeah I I want to change the slide it's not just ask me and I'll do it uh let me see it's not to work here uh yeah okay fertilizers and soil fertilizers thank you for helping you might have to do that continue to do that well we all need that short term crops which are for all annuals have to be given a rapid supply of nutrients and this of course needs uh is satisfied by applying chemical fertilizers that particularly nitrogen phosphorus and potassium however the continuous use of such fertilizers are not given for strainable high yields but on the other hand led to environmental pollution which had resulted in an increase in environmental health problems this happening in our country as well so it's therefore necessary to explore the alternatives that are available for eco-friendly agriculture and that is what this presentation is all about next slide please I cannot take it from here if you can yeah thank you now the Sri Lankan scenario is that we don't produce any for chemical fertilizers at all we import all our fertilizers and also provide it to farmers under a heavy subsidy for political reasons as a result in fact now the fertilizers are given free to farmers so this has led to excessive use of fertilizer and increased environmental related health problems like chronic kidney disease of uncertainty etiology cardiovascular diseases cancer and blue baby syndrome the government has therefore now realized that and they are looking for alternatives and the this presentation reports on our efforts at the NIFS natural Institute of Fundamental Studies to provide bio fertilizer so bio inoculants as alternative to chemical fertilizer next slide please now what are bio fertilizers they are different from all the other conventional fertilizers because they do not provide nutrients to plants from their biomasses or they do not live as substrates they're live microbial entities that grow with the host and obtain nutrients from other substrates for instance if you take nitrogen fixing microorganisms or legume rhizobia they obtain nitrogen from the air from an outside substrate convert it and provide it to the plant so bio fertilizers are live microbial inoculants and this presentation will describe our efforts on developing rhizobia bio fertilizers for legumes and biofilm bio fertilizers for other crops including plantation crops the next slide please now here the methodology was of course I can rush through this because it's conventional we isolate the rhizobia on standard media and then purify them then on the other hand for the other non legume crops including rice corn and other vegetables non legume that is something novel that the NIFS developed my colleague Professor Garmini Senirathna he developed multi microbial biofilm bio fertilizers in other words fungi and bacteria isolated from soil put together in specific media to form biofilms and these are used as inoculants they associate associate themselves intimately with the root systems of plants of targeted crop plants and increase the nutrient use efficiency tremendously in this manner it has been shown that we can reduce 50 percent at least 50 percent of chemical fertilizer used all three major chemicals nitrogen phosphorus and potassium and all these isolates came from Sri Lankan indigenous soil micro biodiversity the next slide please all this is a quick glance through the system where you see the isolated rhizobia semi-mass culture packaging them in sterilizable autoclaveable carrier material which is coconut soil dust coming from the coconut industry which is available very cheap in Sri Lanka and then they are covered in commercially attractive covers this is particularly showing the this is for vegetable beans similarly we have wasabi and mung bean and other this is all what the farmer has to do is to take the seeds that is planting and cover it with the the cover of all the seeds in the carrier-based rhizobium inoculant and then the farmers themselves plant the seeds under our guidance that is how we went on how we popularized it among the farmers in the field next slide please this is the same thing we are testing with vegetable bean fasciolus vulgaris and ground nut arachis hypogea laying out the fields vegetative state and this is the work similar work done with farmers in the we get the farmers to do work under our guidance so that if the work is successful it is successful the farmers take it up very quickly unlike doing demonstrations trials ourselves next slide please this is of course we also introduce our inoculants for a porridge clover which is of course done all over the world but for the Sri Lankan it was the first time that these are the coated seedling clover seeds and machine applied and then once the crop is grown and crop harvest is obtained we do that we straight away spray the the inoculant grown as a liquid fertilizer next slide please here are the results we are going to show next slide this is this all these experiments the department government department of agriculture conducted the field experiments using our rhizobium inoculant for soybean this slide show and they gave us this photograph which they themselves took was a very successful work and all the locations showed a luxuriant growth of soybean and and profuse nodulation here is the root system with so many nodules per plant some of these plants carried more than 100 nodules so they were very effective in terms of inoculation next slide please this is with vegetable beans these are the inoculate plants growing beautifully and these three locations of course these are three locations in the central mountain regions the red column shows the yield in terms of chemical fertilizers added green column shows inoculation the with inoculation without chemical nitrogen this is the control same three here and in this case you see the the isa response to nitrogen whether it is added as chemical or as inoculant but the inoculant yield is marginally statistically may be the same marginally above the chemical anyway this means that there is a potential for these inoculants to replace the use of nitrogen chemical fertilizer completely you can replace 100% next slide please excuse me you have just one minute for conclusion so if you can skip to the main conclusions this is the same thing it shows that thank you next slide please this with vegetable bean this with ground nut all this next one I think I want to rush through to the next one biofilms these biofilm bio fertilizer therefore rise here this is this massive growth with the biofilm and comparatively less growth with chemicals next slide please these are the statistically we got with biofilms 2307 average kilogram so acre as compared to a chemical fertilizer 1916 average in 82 locations filter has done and now next slide please the government has accepted this is with the maize next slide please with biofilms you get carrot potato strawberry all these gave with biofilm bio fertilizer you should reduce you can reduce the application of chemical fertilizer all three NPK by 50% without any loss in fact slight increase in yield and with rice we are having fantastic results next slide please so this is with tea next slide we can skip through because our time restrained we are conclude rhizobium biofilms are supplied annually now for about 10,000 acres of legumes our country doesn't grow so much of legumes and biofilm bio fertilizers have been very successful field trials amounting to 15,000 acres done with rice in 80 locations and the government this this season we are going up to 100,000 acres and the government has approved providing biofilm bio fertilizers to rice farmers under the fertilizer subsidy screen so even the biofuel slices are not going to be given to the farmers under a subsidy this means that biofuel slices can be recommended with confidence for low cost eco-friendly agriculture and support the government's efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals of the united nations reducing nitrogen fertilizer by 50% and other fertilizers very easy thank you very much for your kind attention i am sorry for rushing but we have finished our our slot time and i think that the zoom mechanism is quite rigid and controlling so thank you very much thank you very much for your presentation very exhaustive and i'm sorry that we have no much much time no no no more time for discussion and so i if uh well i i want to thank all the speakers for the pitch for your presentation they were very interesting and very very different from each other which is which is very interesting and so i i thank you all all the attendants and and i beg your pardon for the and this some some technical problems but we are dealing with this zoom machines and all the connection from all over the world so thank you again and stay connected with global soil biodiversity thank you very much for moderating the session thank you very much and i see you in the next day's exobi 2021 thank you bye bye thanks to all the speakers and then to all the attendants thank you very much