In August, the Gates Foundation and the United Kingdom's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office awarded a $2.83 million grant to Legume Technology, a British biotech company. According to AgFunderNews, with the increased funding, the company hopes to offer farmers in Africa a safe, affordable method of improving soil fertility and crop health.Â
Over the years, the overall soil fertility in Africa has worsened, largely due to the overuse of chemical fertilizers, which have increased acidification.
To combat that problem, Legume Technology has spent the last two decades developing bacterial and fungal microbial biofertilizers that can capture nitrogen from the air and keep it in the dirt for the crops to suck up — essentially creating natural alternatives to chemical fertilizers.
Part of the company's new initiative is to overhaul its packaging, creating smaller packages of biofertilizers for more small-scale farmers.
"Within that small bag will be a microbe that has the power to transform the lives of millions of African smallholders by making their crops grow bigger and better, with more productive harvests, without any environmental side effects," said Bruce Knight, a trained microbiologist who co-founded Legume Technology and serves as its managing director.
In recent years, farmers have found it increasingly difficult to maintain crop yields. This is mainly because our planet is overheating due to air pollution from burning dirty energy sources.
The overheating has caused shifting climate conditions and unpredictable extreme weather events, which have combined to make some regions inhospitable to crops that traditionally grow there.
As such, it has become more important to have new technologies that make it easier for farmers to grow crops and ensure food supplies — and to be able to do so without relying on chemical fertilizers. Fertilizers have been shown to come with several downstream side effects that degrade ecosystem health over time.
"Biologicals are the future of agricultural productivity," Knight told AgFunderNews.
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