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Native fungi amendment shows promising results in organic crops
LAWRENCE — Over the past two growing seasons, University of Kansas researcher Liz Koziol has measured the harvest of tomatoes, peppers and other crops to see if adding locally native mycorrhizal fungi to the soil makes a difference. Her work has demonstrated how such local fungi boost growing systems and can transform landscapes.
Scholars expand documentation of endangered African language
LAWRENCE — Since becoming interested in endangered languages, University of Kansas linguist Philip Duncan has tried to use his “outsider” status to support communities in their language reclamation and revitalization efforts, whether they are from rural Mexico or, as in his latest publication, in West Africa. The assistant teaching professor in KU’s Department of Linguistics is co-editor and co-author of a new book titled “Ikpana Interrogatives,” part of the Oxford University Press series of Studies of Endangered Languages.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Kirsten Bosnak, KU Field Station, 785-864-6267, [email protected], @KUFieldStation
Native fungi amendment shows promising results in organic crops
LAWRENCE — Can fungi used in restoring native landscapes boost organic crop production, too?
Over the past two growing seasons, University of Kansas researcher Liz Koziol has measured the harvest of tomatoes, peppers and other crops to see if adding locally native mycorrhizal fungi to the soil makes a difference. She’s about to enter season three.
“These fungi are beneficial microbes that spend all their time collecting soil nutrients that help plants grow more quickly, produce more fruit, survive water stress and even defend themselves against pests,” Koziol said.
“But not all mycorrhizae are the same, and some agricultural soils are lacking in beneficial fungi. In this study, we amend organic cropping soils with super-beneficial mycorrhizae to see if they can be used as a tool to make farmers’ work easier.”
Koziol, assistant research professor at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research, has spent more than 12 years collecting mycorrhizal fungi, which live around plants’ root systems, from nature and isolating them in the lab. Her studies cover dozens of inoculation trials in different settings, including native restoration trials, cropping systems and greenhouses.
Her work has demonstrated how local mycorrhizal fungi boost growing systems and can transform landscapes.
In Koziol’s current crop study, she’s teamed up with local growers Scott Thellman of Juniper Hill Farms and Chris Black of Kaw Valley Cannabis.
Results so far are encouraging. Field and greenhouse trials at Juniper Hill showed consistently improved performance across organic crop varieties inoculated with the native fungi. Testing of 15 varieties in the field showed a weight increase of 13 to 54% in tomatoes and 3 to 12% in peppers. Greenhouse chard, basil and peppers all benefited, too.
Thellman said his crew was so impressed with the findings of the trials that they’d begun to incorporate more mycorrhizae into their starter fertilizers in the greenhouses and in the field.
“We hope to collaborate more with Liz in the future and bring more native mycorrhizae into all of our production systems, both organic and conventional,” he said.
Hemp plants inoculated with the mycorrhizal mixture showed an overall 15% improvement in the concentration of CBG (cannabigerol)—a nonpsychoactive compound that some medical studies indicate may have therapeutic potential in treating various diseases.
The project is supported by a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation Partner in Innovation program, which encourages entrepreneurship. Koziol’s startup, MycoBloom LLC, created before she came to KU, produces native mycorrhizal fungi as a soil amendment and provides them to prairie restoration practitioners.
Given the success of the current research trials — along with the interest of ag producers in the products — Koziol is likely to commercialize a product specific to organic crop growers. She would work with KU’s Center for Technology Commercialization via Mycobloom and sign a commercial license with the center.
Mycorrhizal fungi already are used in agriculture, but Koziol said there are drawbacks to the products on the market. Typically they contain the same one to five species, which represent a very small fraction of the total species pool. Individual fungi species vary in their effect on nutrient uptake and other benefits, such as disease resistance and alleviation of drought stress.
In addition, these fungi can be locally adapted to their home soil nutrient and precipitation levels, so they may not be as effective where they are introduced.
Another downside to the current fungi products is that the industry standard for producing them is cultivation in the lab, on Petri plates under sterile conditions — which means they don’t experience soil for many generations of cultivation. Koziol said that recent evidence indicated that this method of culture can result in fungi being less able to help crop nutrient uptake or becoming “weedy” and parasitic, actually harming the crop.
Two KU faculty members are part of Koziol’s study in a supervisory capacity. Jim Bever, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and a senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research, is co-principal investigator on the grant and supervises the research. Wally Meyer, director of the KU University Center and senior research associate at KU’s Institute for Policy & Social Research, supervises the entrepreneurial training that the grant supports for Koziol.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Scholars expand documentation of endangered African language
LAWRENCE — Since becoming interested in endangered languages, University of Kansas linguist Philip Duncan has tried to use his “outsider” status to support communities in their language reclamation and revitalization efforts, whether they are from rural Mexico or, as in his latest publication, in West Africa.
Duncan, who is an assistant teaching professor in KU’s Department of Linguistics, is co-editor and co-author of a new book titled “Ikpana Interrogatives,” which is part of the Oxford University Press series of Studies of Endangered Languages.
Ikpana is a language within the Kwa family, spoken by about 7,000 people in southeast Ghana. It can also be classified as one of the Ghana-Togo Mountain Languages spoken in that region.
The book documents the typical grammar and intonation of question phrases in the language, documentation which can be of use for Ikpana community members as well as the broader linguistics community.
By extensively documenting Ikpana questions in this way, the author/editors wrote, they are also working to broaden “our understanding of the nature of human language.”
Duncan and his colleagues spent the bulk of their time over two summers working with Ikpana speakers in two of the eight Ghanaian townships and settlements in which they are concentrated. They talked about how questions are formed and iterated, working together to detail grammatical properties and contexts of use.
When asked if he speaks Ikpana, Duncan said, “I think it is very important for a linguist not only to study languages but also to learn how to use them, because I think you engage with it differently. But as an outsider who is a non-Indigenous person, trying to be an ally and working with Indigenous communities on their language efforts, I believe it’s not my choice to say, ‘I’m going to learn this language simply because I’m studying it.’ So I take it as an invitation … because I see language as tied to sovereignty. It’s not my sovereign right to speak the language in that way. It’s an invitation as an outsider to be able to interact with the language in ways that community members deem appropriate. … Good scholarship is essentially predicated on things like respect, relationship and reciprocity.”
Duncan said he and his colleagues consulted with the now deceased Ghana-born scholar Kofi Dorvlo and built upon his previous efforts to document Ikpana.
Initially based in the regional capital city of Ho, the scholars fanned out each day during their fieldwork. Eventually the team relocated to Logba Alakpeti and Logba Tota.
“We would meet as a group and plan out the stuff that we wanted to get, datawise — typically starting out to orient us to the language in simple words and phrases, and then building into more complex structures like questions over time,” Duncan said. “We also asked if people were willing to share Anansi stories, which are folk tales about a spider, trickster figure that are very common across communities in West Africa.”
It was during these conversations, Duncan said, that the researchers’ outsider perspective sometimes proved useful.
“We were learning so much from the speakers who are giving us their time and their knowledge and expertise,” he said. “Sometimes it’s fun when we ask something, and we don’t know what’s going to happen … People might say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not going to be possible.’ And then it’s like, ‘Wait a minute! Actually, that sounds perfectly fine … let me think about that a little bit more.’
“It was great, because then we would get several speakers conversing with one another … going back and forth … like, ‘We can totally say that. I remember I said this the other day.’ It’s great to have those kinds of moments where we’re practicing what … we’re trying to document.”
Duncan said he is pleased with “Ikpana Interrogatives.”
“One goal is hopefully to provide materials and descriptions that people within the community can potentially latch onto, to build other materials that might be relevant for pedagogical materials or other kinds of things … that really promote the continued use among community members. That’s one thing that I feel is important about our project — that even though we’re coming in with goals as outside researchers, hopefully we are producing some stuff that will respect and also be of benefit to community members.”
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