Plant something different next season: rotating sorghum crops brought tired soil back to life

Grow the same crop in the same field, year after year, and the soil quietly wears out — its nutrients drain away, the tiny living things that keep it healthy dwindle, and harvests suffer. Researchers at the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China tested the oldest fix in farming: change what you plant. They grew sorghum four ways — on its own every season, or taking turns with potatoes, with common vetch (a plant that pulls nitrogen from the air into the soil), or with green pea shoots. Every rotation left the soil better off than sorghum alone. Potatoes gave the clearest boost to soil nutrients, vetch most enriched the soil's bacteria, potatoes most enriched its fungi, and the rotated fields hosted busier, better-connected communities of microbes, including more of the bacteria that feed plants nitrogen. One honest limit: the potato rotation did not shake off Fusarium, a common soil fungus. The study is published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

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