A team of researchers based in Europe used the Canadian Light Source to understand how to make fertiliser nutrients more available to rice plants
Rice farmers depend on phosphorous fertilisers to maximise their yields of this major staple food, which helps nourish more than half of the world’s population. However, there is a finite supply of the nutrient available to be mined.
Using the ultra bright light of the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan, German researchers examined soil samples from paddies in China, in the hopes of learning how silicon can reduce the need for phosphorus-based fertilisers and make rice farming more sustainable.
Joerg Schaller and colleagues discovered that silicon, which is also known to play a key role in growing rice, can replace phosphorus in soil and mobilise it to be available for absorption by the plants that need it. Phosphorus binds to iron in soil, rendering it unavailable to plants.
“If all the building places are occupied with silicon, there is no space for phosphate to bind (in the soil). It means you need only half of the fertiliser,” said Schaller, who is with the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF).
By taking multiple soil samples from rice paddies that have been used to cultivate rice for between 50 and 2,000 years and examining them using scanning transmission X-ray microscopy at the CLS, Schaller and his colleagues were able to better understand how and why silicon and phosphorus bond to the soil. The wide range of paddy soils gave Schaller’s team a precise look at how long it takes soil to be depleted of silicon and saturated with phosphorus.
“It is really valuable (to be able to study so many samples),” added Schaller. “Rice cultivation, they’ve done it for a really long time, it is really interesting to use such samples.” Since phosphorus is critical to the growth of rice and so many other crops, finding a more sustainable solution to promoting rice growth — like using cheaper and more available silicon-based fertilisers to prevent phosphorus saturation — is critical for the world’s food supply.
“This is really important for humankind,” Schaller continued. “If we could decrease the need for phosphorus fertilisation, this is a really important thing.”
