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Biofertilizers provide "eco-friendly" organic agro-inputs. Rhizobium, Azotobacter, Azospirillum and blue-green algae (BGA) are perhaps the species with the longest history of use as biofertilizers. Rhizobium inoculant is used for leguminous crops. Azotobacter can be used with crops like wheat, maize, mustard, cotton, potato, and other vegetable ...
In addition to being a model organism for studying diazotrophs, it is used by humans for the production of biofertilizers, food additives, and some biopolymers. The first representative of the genus, Azotobacter chroococcum, was discovered and described in 1901 by Dutch microbiologist and botanist Martinus Beijerinck.
For thousands of years, humans have used selective breeding to improve the production of crops and livestock to use them for food. In selective breeding, organisms with desirable characteristics are mated to produce offspring with the same characteristics. For example, this technique was used with corn to produce the largest and sweetest crops ...
Through the increasing use of nitrogen fertilizer, which was used at a rate of about 110 million tons (of N) per year in 2012, [132] [133] adding to the already existing amount of reactive nitrogen, nitrous oxide (N 2 O) has become the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane.
Conventional farming methods use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to safeguard crops from pests and diseases. However, these chemical agents have adverse environmental impacts, contributing to environmental pollution. The use of agricultural chemicals has been linked to the decline of plant and animal species, as well as harm to ...
Diazotroph fertilizer is a kind of biofertilizer that can use nitrogen-fixing microorganisms to convert molecular nitrogen (N 2) into ammonia (which is the formation of nitrogen available for the crops to use). These nitrogen nutrients then can be used in the process of protein synthesis for the plants.
This symbiotic relationship is exploited by humans in agriculture. In Asia, Azolla plants containing Anabaena species are used as biofertilizer where nitrogen is limiting [8] as well as in animal feed. [9] Different strains of Azolla-Anabaena are suited for different environments and may lead to differences in crop production. [10]
Environmental biotechnology can simply be described as "the optimal use of nature, in the form of plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and algae, to produce renewable energy, food and nutrients in a synergistic integrated cycle of profit making processes where the waste of each process becomes the feedstock for another process".