An Israeli company discovered a way to increase agricultural crop yields by means of fungus. And as an amazing, unforeseen bonus, the soil to which the fungus is added sequesters more greenhouse gases than the most advanced carbon-trapping systems on the planet
Netta Ahituv. Jun 21, 2024
As in other stories of progress, in the case of agriculture, too, humanity has profited greatly from science-based technological developments, even as, at the same time, it has also lost a great deal – above all, nature’s wisdom to create life in a host of mutually nourishing, interdependent forms that enrich the world. In our rapid march toward a future full of process-accelerating machines, we have become blind to many of nature’s harmonious interconnections, without which the cyclicity of existence is flawed.
No one disputes that the agricultural revolution improved food security in the world, and for that we must be grateful; but at the same time it led to scorched, lifeless land, deforestation, an atmosphere bursting with greenhouse gases, a loss of biodiversity and the processed-food pandemic, which requires only crops that are easy to grow and profitable to cultivate.
Among the array of things we have lost because of the techniques of modern agriculture, we can note mycorrhiza, which refers to the symbiotic relationship between mycelium of certain fungi and the roots of most plants. Myco is the ancient Greek word for fungus, and rhiza means root. Fungi grow faster than plant roots, and the inner space of their mycelia (the filaments they extend belowground) is broader – two attributes that facilitate their absorption of nourishing nutrients from the soil. They also possess the ability to break down these minerals into tiny components and nourish the plant with them.
It doesn’t end there: A plant that interacts with a fungus is better protected against disease and against infection by harmful fungi. In exchange for all this abundance, the plant imparts to its fungus sugars that it creates via photosynthesis.
When we walk through natural brushland, we are actually stepping on a wondrous super-entity that manages within it a perfect system of reciprocity. Where there are plants in nature, there are also fungi – provided they are not killed. Modern agriculture makes considerable use of pesticides, which kill multiple forms of life, many of them beneficial. This is compounded by tillage, the practice of overturning the soil at the end of each season. Both actions kill mycorrhizal fungi and get in the way of their amicable relations with plants. Farmers may wish to eradicate the bad fungi, those that might wipe out their farms, but along the way they can end up eliminating almost all the life that exists belowground.
For the past decade, an Israeli company called Groundwork BioAg, based in Moshav Mazor, near Petah Tikva, has made it its mission to restore the “good” fungi to the world for the benefit of agriculture. Farmers who apply mycorrhizae to the seeds they plant are seeing an increase in crop yields, plants that are more durable in the face of weather and water distress, a diminished need for fertilizer and a bonus of healthier farmland that will retain its fertility into the coming yea
The international scale of Groundwork’s activity is surprising: The company sells mycorrhizal fungi to hundreds of thousands of farmers in 17 countries, accounting for some 15 million dunams (3.75 million acres) of farmland worldwide. Among the countries affected are the four great granaries of the world: the United States, Brazil, India and China. And among the crops that are benefiting from Israeli mycorrhizae are the four that are dominant in human nutrition: corn, soy, wheat and rice.
Corn vividly exemplifies the need for mycorrhizae. Like all forms of life on Earth, corn too needs phosphorus to grow. Without the addition of mycorrhiza, however, corn is capable of using only 15 percent of the phosphorus it is given through fertilizer. The remainder seeps into the soil, contaminating both it and the groundwater. But with the addition of mycorrhizal fungi, corn plants exploit 90 percent of the phosphorus they receive and do far less damage to the soil.
In addition, corn is sensitive to dry periods – a dry spell is liable to stunt its growth. However, if such a period occurs while the crop is maintaining reciprocity with mycorrhizae, the fungus protects its host by transferring water into it. This is done by “killing” part of its own mycelium and rerouting the water from it into the corn. A photograph on a wall of Groundwork’s lab shows two corn roots from a farm in Brazil that went through a particularly dry season – one is depleted and sad looking, the other appears robust and happy. Not surprisingly, the first was grown without mycorrhizal fungi, the second with them.
The company was founded in 2014 by Dr. Yossi Kofman, Dan Grotsky and Danny Levy. Kofman and Grotsky are experienced entrepreneurs who decided to invest their efforts in sustainable projects. Prior to this, Levy studied mycorrhizal fungi in the laboratory of Prof. Yoram Kapulnink, at the Volcani Center for agricultural research, near Rishon Letzion. Effectively, Groundwork’s knowledge and technology with regard to mycorrhizal fungi had their origins in the Volcani Center.
Groundwork BioAg has a staff of 75, who represent a range of disciplines: chemists, agronomists, biologists, algorithm specialists (the company makes use of artificial intelligence) and also field workers who handle the plants on whose roots the fungi are grown. Physically, the company covers an extensive agricultural area, divided into six farming sites. The atmosphere combines the quiet of a moshav – a cooperative farming community – and the bustle of a highly active workplace. We were given access to the labs, where Groundwork conducts its research and development, but not to the hothouses. “Our production method is a trade secret,” Grotsky, the company’s chief growth officer, explains.
Mycorrhizae are the main track we know to sequester carbon in the soil; all that’s needed is to restore them to their place alongside the roots of plants…. What we want to do is to transform agricultural land from a source of emissions to a source of absorption.Dan Grotsky
Production involves the use of a circular economy, notes Inbar Morag, the company’s “carbon business lead,” meaning she is responsible for the carbon market activity of the company (more on that later). “We repeatedly recycle our soil substrate, and the water resources also undergo a recycling process,” is as far as she will elaborate. “It’s a special process, which is not often seen in our industry.”
Groundwork’s fungi grow on plants but reach the consumer in a powdered or liquid state. The farmers, or the company from which they obtain their seeds, add a small quantity of the powder or liquid to the existing seed treatment protocol before planting. “Today almost all the seeds in the world arrive coated with something, be it pesticides, hormones to help them grow or nutritional substances,” Levy, the chief technology officer, observes. “So in order to enter the big markets we needed to present mycorrhizae in a form that would make it possible to coat seeds with it.”
On a computer screen, which is connected to a microscope, Levy shows a corn plant root that is hosting mycorrhizal fungi. What resembles a microscopic cluster of blueberries turns out to be the spores of the fungus, with thin, elegant filaments – the impressive mycelia – branching between them. “We work with endomycorrhizal fungi, which don’t form mushrooms and therefore aren’t eaten, they only have mycelia,” Levy says. “A famous mycorrhiza that is eaten is the truffle, the first cousin of our endomycorrhiza.”
‘Educating’ farmers
Groundwork’s product dovetails with a global movement known as “regenerative agriculture,” which, as one might infer, aims to enhance soil quality worldwide. Indeed, the focus here is on the soil – not necessarily organic, pesticide-free crops, but the application of techniques that restore, or at least don’t kill, the ground’s natural life. At present, regenerative agriculture is in use in about 1 percent of the world’s farmlands, but is expected by 2050 to be the basis for a fifth of the world’s crops. Regenerative agriculture, Morag notes, “reduces the amount of fertilizers, requires less tilling of the soil, enables the soil to renew itself and uses bioproducts such as mycorrhizal fungi in order to enhance soil health.”
Using the fungus doesn’t require farmers to revise their existing growing protocol, only to add it to the seeds. It may sound simple and straightforward, but one of the difficulties the company faces entails “educating” farmers. Whereas farmers in India know what mycorrhiza is and how important it is for plants, Levy relates, their American and Israeli counterparts are less accustomed to relying on biological solutions, preferring instead chemical-based options – in other words, “to kill everything.” “So we need a lot of marketing in those countries,” Levy says.
Another difficulty that has cropped up recently is related to the company’s homeland. Grotsky travels abroad frequently in an effort to introduce more and more growers and agricultural companies to the wonders of mycorrhizal fungi. Not long ago he returned from a presentation to a big company, which expressed considerable interest. “I finished the presentation and we were about to set a date for an initialization meeting, when one of the managers asked offhandedly, ‘By the way, where are you located?’ When I told her, Israel, she said, ‘Sorry, that won’t fly with our board.'”
Setbacks do not discourage the Groundwork personnel – they are continuing to spread their mycelia around the planet. A few years ago they realized that fertile soil has another significant advantage, beyond the fact that it sustains the plants that grow in it: its ability to carry out carbon sequestration (removal and storage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere) at a high rate. It’s true that plants perform photosynthesis and thereby remove CO2 from the air, but fungi sequester it in the soil, and in an era in which we need to get rid of as much CO2 as possible and as rapidly as possible, soil that sequesters the gas is a boon to humanity.
The Groundwork team was curious about how much CO2 is sequestered in fields where their mycorrhizal fungi were in use. What they discovered surprised them. For every four dunams (one acre) of mycorrhizal cropland, one to four tons of CO2 will be sequestered in a year. Multiplying by the 15 million dunams where the company’s product is in use globally, it turns out that 4.5 billion kilos of the gas is sequestered annually (based on the low estimate).
Farmers register for a Groundwork program, plant seeds coated with the company’s mycorrhizae, and after a year and a half they receive a check for their share of the amount the company made from selling credits for the carbon units sequestered in their land.
To understand how high a rate this is, a comparison can be drawn with the world’s largest carbon dioxide sequestration plant, built by the Swiss firm Climeworks, which began operations in Iceland in May, following a lengthy and very costly construction process. The plant is forecast to sequester 36 million kilos (79.3 million pounds) of CO2 a year, at a cost of $1,000 per ton. A tiny fungus outdoes the technology hands down. It’s also cheaper and is capable of doing the same job for $100 a ton. According to the company’s calculations, they will sequester a gigaton (a billion tons) of CO2 in the earth over the coming decade. “I don’t know of any other company in the world that is capable of doing that on our scale,” asserts Grotsky.
Prof. Tamir Klein, from the Plant and Life Sciences Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who studies trees and their relationship with fungi, agrees with Groundwork officials’ estimates. “The addition of mycorrhizae of a certain type could have a dramatic effect on carbon sequestration in the soil,” he says. In a test that he and his staff from the Weizmann Tree Lab conducted in a forest as part of their research, they found that certain mycorrhizal fungi bring about a two-fold or more increase in the concentration of sequestered organic carbon than other types of mycorrhizae.
“Soil is a highly complex system; we need to learn how to control the composition of its fungi for the benefit of sequestering carbon in the soil,” he says, adding that he welcomes the entry of mycorrhizae as a category in the carbon market. “Because the present state of agriculture is so bad in many places, every improvement in the health of agricultural soil and in restoring its ability to sequester CO2 is significant. In addition, mycorrhizae can upgrade the plant’s nutrition and protection.”
The carbon biz
That high potential has led Groundwork to enter the carbon market lately, selling carbon credits. How does it work? Companies that spew CO2 into the atmosphere, such as those that mine fossil fuels, manufacture computers or vehicles, or even banks and tech giants, all need to reduce or offset their greenhouse-gas emissions. So as not to exceed their permitted national quota for emissions, and because their production will always emit some greenhouse gases, they need to purchase carbon credits. In other words, they emit greenhouse gases, but officially this is offset by the purchase of carbon credits from companies that offer ways to eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere.
Underlying this market is the notion that there are items whose production process is clearly polluting, but which we all benefit from – such as cell-phone manufacture – and so it’s welcome news that there are other processes that are capable of sequestering carbon. Let’s offset the two in order to try to reduce the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thereby not fall into the deep pit of climate catastrophe, but only remain at the blazing edge we have already reached. Along the way we will also reward those who are working to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Verra is an international organization that sets the world’s most popular standard for voluntary carbon credits. Last year, the organization announced that henceforth it would approve trade in carbon credits from carbon-sequestering biological products: bacteria and fungi. As such, they opened the door to an additional source of income for farmers, who can now sell credits from their carbon-sequestering soil. Groundwork pounced on the opportunity to manage the sale of carbon stocks for the farmers who are using their mycorrhizal inoculants.
What does this entail for the farmers? They register for a Groundwork program, Rootella Carbon, plant seeds coated with the company’s mycorrhizae, and after a year and a half they receive a check from Groundwork in the sum of their share of the amount the company made from selling the credits for the carbon units sequestered in their land.
Sledge Taylor, a farmer who grows cotton across large areas of Mississippi, relates, in a written exchange with Haaretz, that 10 years ago he decided to treat his soil by covering it with living plant matter, brush that grew in the soil between the cotton plants. He soon saw a considerable improvement in the quality of the soil. In the wake of a talk he attended about mycorrhizal fungi, given by Dr. Christine Jones, an Australian who is one of the world’s leading experts in this field, he understood what had happened in his cropland: He had effectively enabled the fungi to return.
He then contracted with Groundwork. He now purchases mycorrhizal products from them and also joined the company’s carbon program, which he says constitutes one of the most rewarding methods available for farmers to be paid for sequestering carbon in the soil. Grotsky anticipates that also for the company itself, the sales of carbon credits will at some point surpass the revenues from the sale of their products.
Grotsky and Morag believe that farmers will soon receive an annual payment that exceeds their investment in purchasing mycorrhizae. “My estimate is that next year we will have carbon flotations of tens of thousands of tons, and in the year after that of hundreds of thousands of tons.” He adds that according to a recently published study, in areas of natural lands worldwide, mycorrhizal fungi sequester carbon at a rate of 13.1 gigatons a year.
“There’s no reason that agriculture shouldn’t do the same thing,” suggests Grotsky. “Mycorrhizae are the main pathway we know to sequester carbon in the soil; all that’s needed is to restore them to their place alongside the roots of plants. One of the problems that brought us to this pass in terms of the climate crisis is that a great deal of CO2 is released from agricultural land that is being worked. Healthy soil is full of CO2, because carbon is actually life – the basis of every organic molecule, part of every living organism.
“When you kill the life in the soil,” he continues, “you are really releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Since the Industrial Revolution, farmlands have led to the release of 785 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a rate that is almost equal to the emissions from fossil fuels during that same period.
“In other words, agriculture has made a huge contribution to the climate crisis. What we want to do is to transform agricultural land from being a net carbon emitter to a net carbon retainer. That will make it possible to solve two problems, which are really one and the same: the climate crisis and the soil crisis.”