Lincoln Agritech Limited Smart Ideas funded projects

We will take an innovative approach to enhance carbon sequestration and improve soil health and plant growth in the native reforestation of cleared land. We will assemble communities of microbes, ‘SynComs’, which sequester carbon and support plant growth.We will demonstrate the effectiveness of our SynComs by inoculating them into the roots of native seedlings in plant nurseries and then delivering them to reforestation sites on Banks Peninsula when the seedlings are planted.Our research addresses critical gaps in our understanding of how soil microbes contribute to carbon sequestration and which microbial functions are under-represented or absent in degraded soils. We will identify and isolate microbes with specific carbon-sequestering pathways from native plant associated microbes, enabling the assembly of consortia that have evolved to thrive in association native plants.Our research will be impactful for reforestation efforts in New Zealand, where over one million hectares of land has been identified as suitable for native forest restoration, including significant areas of Māori freehold land. By supporting native seedling growth and improving soil health, our SynCom approach can maximise the benefits of reforestation efforts and assist New Zealand in meeting its climate change goals.The research will be undertaken by Lincoln Agritech in collaboration with Lincoln University, AgResearch and Chinese Academy of Science researchers. Plant nursery industry and local iwi representatives will ensure our research is practical and ensure our new microbial communities are made available to achieve our climate change and reforestation goals.

We will develop a new way of protecting plants against fungal disease, by exposing plants to the inactivated variants of the disease-causing fungi. Fungal diseases can cause huge damage to crops, for example, in 2022 80% of New Zealand’s passionfruit crops was lost. The most common method of protecting crops against fungi is use of synthetic chemical sprays. However, legislation and consumers are increasingly demanding reductions in chemical residues and fungi are becoming resistant to synthetic fungicides, driving a search for more sustainable solutions.

Our novel approach will make fungi unable to cause disease by changing the bacteria that are associated with the fungi. We have discovered that the degree of disease which a fungus will cause in a plant is related to the bacteria living with the fungus. If you change the bacteria, it seems that you change whether a fungus can make a plant sick. We will test this concept by removing and changing the bacteria in a fungus that infects brassica plants, for example, broccoli, cabbage. We will coat seeds with the altered fungus, then try to infect the seedlings with the original fungus to see whether our new products have protected the plant from infection.

Our team from LAL, Scion, Utrecht University and the Foundation for Arable Research are experts in plant pathology, microbiology, next-generation sequencing, microscopy, mātauranga Māori and commercialisation of new horticultural products. We will trial our products in the field with horticulturalists and work with the agricultural products industry to commercialise our new approach. Such fungal bioprotectants will help protect NZ growers and also provide export revenue from an ongoing stream of new products designed to protect plants against disease-causing fungi.