PLANT & TURF HEALTH CARE

Mycorrhizal Fungi – Renewing an Ancient Partnership with Crops

You can learn a lot from nature. Millions of years ago, plants and mycorrhizal fungi formed a strategic partnership in order to survive harsh environmental conditions. Today, we can leverage that ancient relationship to dramatically affect our landscape's ability to survive and flourish.

Photograph of an actual Mycorrhizal Root System	Same Root System with Mycorrhizal component graphically removed

Urban landscapes can be harsh environments for your plantings. Construction damage, poor soil quality and fertility, lack of water - all affect a plant's ability to survive. By adding mycorrhizal fungi into the soils of your urban landscape, you are leveraging a tried and true ancient relationship designed by nature to overcome these stressors. Mycorrhizal plants use available water & nutrients more efficiently under both good and challenging conditions, resulting in hardier, stress tolerant plants. Even under optimal conditions, they still efficiently mine the soil and develop to their full potential.

Millions of years ago a symbiotic partnership developed between plants and mycorrhizal fungi dwelling in the soil among plant roots. Both faced many natural stresses, and to survive each needed something the other could provide. The fungi needed sugars plants could manufacture for them as food. The plants needed greater root reach and numbers to draw in more nutrients so they could grow stronger, and stronger.

Mycorrhizal fungi began to serve as a secondary root system, organizing and extending themselves far out into the soil with tubular structures that extract mineral elements and water from soil and transport them to the roots of their host plant. The fungi in turn live off the plant's sugars translocated to them by the roots.

Trees and plants with thriving "mycorrhizal roots" systems are better able to survive and thrive in stressful environments, such as the nearly biologically sterile soil conditions modern agricultural technologies have created for crops. Mycorrhizal fungi still exist in farm soil, but their numbers have been greatly diminished over decades of tillage, fumigation, chemical applications, fertilization, and too often, drought.

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