Microbes Helping To Improve Crop Productivity: Plant-associated microbes not only provide several agronomic benefits but also furnish promising antimicrobial mixtures

Nearly 1 billion people go hungry every day, and providing food for them is one of the great challenges facing humanity, a challenge that continues to grow. Arable land and water for irrigation are limited resources, while the productivity gains from the Green Revolution are now mostly part of the status quo. Moreover, the financial and environmental costs of using fossil fuels to ship foods and fertilizers around the world are becoming prohibitive. Plant breeding and engineering crop plants with newer genetic technologies continue to improve yields or other traits, but are expensive, slow, and applicable mainly to the most widely planted crop species. Further, genetically modifying each and every agriculturally valuable plant species to grow optimally in many different environments does not appear practical. Thus, we need less costly, more sustainable approaches to improving productivity of a wide variety of plant crops.