Prof. Manish Raizada from the Department of Plant Agriculture was featured by more than two dozen PostMedia News outlets this week. He recently published a study on how to help plants produce their own all-important nitrogen.

Plants need nitrogen to grow but can’t produce it themselves, Raizada says in the story.  Certain microbes produce it for them.

Raizada and his U of G team of researchers have identified a number of specific microbes that do the job very well. Feeding those microbes to plants may reduce the need to feed nitrogen fertilizer to crops and would be a much more environmentally sustainable approach, he says.