Policy Paper: Improving Soil Health in the UK why a microbial approach is indispensable in attaining sustainable soils?
Soil health plays a vital role in enhancing food security, building climate resilience, reducing environmental transmission of pathogens and AMR, and in supporting biodiversity. In 2023, AMI hosted an event at the John Innes Centre in the UK on ‘The Power of Microbes in Sustainable Crop Production’. The event focused on the impact of microbes in national agricultural settings and food security. Event discussions identified potential microbial solutions to deploy in support of national scale soil regeneration and emphasized the benefits of promoting a nation-wide microbiome approach to soil health. Although efforts towards taking such an approach are still in their infancy, available evidence shows a microbiome approach holds promise, and as such its potential is explored throughout the Sustainable Microbiology publication.
AMI and the wider microbiology community recommends taking action by:
- Considering the opportunity of taking a nation-wide microbiome approach to soil
- Deploying microbial solutions to improve the UK's soil health, whilst exploring and building the basis for a national microbiome approach
Find the Sustainable Microbiology publication here and our executive summary below.
