A phosphate-processing soil fungus didn’t improve lentil and chickpea growth in recent trials conducted in the brown soils near Swift Current, Sask.
JumpStart, a commercial product from Saskatoon inoculant maker Philom Bios, contains the fungus Penicillium bilaii. It was first developed by Agriculture Canada at Lethbridge.
The fungus takes phosphates that are otherwise unavailable to plants and makes them soluble in the soil. This makes them available to the plants and reduces the need to apply phosphorus fertilizer.
Yanti Gan, of Agriculture Canada in Swift Current, said his three-year trial has shown no positive effects on lentils or chickpeas from the inoculant treatment.
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When the fungus was combined with rhizobia inoculants in Philom Bios’s Tag Team, the effect of the rhizobia was “strong, but it was equally effective when we treated the crops with the rhizobia inoculants without the (fungus component).
“We looked at everything. No yield improvement, no plant population increase, no plant or pod improvement. We didn’t see taller plants. No improvement to harvestability,” Gan said.
“Other crops like oilseeds and wheat may benefit from this fungus, but these don’t, at least in this soil.”
Garry Hnatowich, a senior agronomist with Philom Bios, said the results likely apply only to the soils on which Gan’s tests were done.
“We think the fertility of those soils was such that there wasn’t a phosphate response by the crops. As a result, there wasn’t a response to the JumpStart.”
Hnatowich said more research is needed in soils that have shown strong lentil and chickpea crop responses to phosphorus.
Philom Bios was one of the funders of Gan’s study.
Gan said the trials were initially designed to examine the effect of the fungus in hopes that producers could avoid placing the “usual 20 pounds of (phosphorus) that they need to grow pulse crops. I can’t say that it is or isn’t necessary to put down (phosphorus) now. But we know that pulse crops do need some (phosphorus) available to them in the soil and that the JumpStart didn’t have any effect on chickpeas and lentils in the brown soil of our trials.”
