Strain technology – key to the future of China’s microbial fertilizer

The statistics from the Institute for Control of Agrochemicals,Ministry of Agriculture (ICAMA) shows that up until April 2013 there are 1816 microbial fertilizer products having been registered in China by above 850 enterprises covering an applied land area of 150 million Mu of vegetable, crop and fruit tree.

As guided by government industry policies, China’s novel fertilizer like organic fertilizer and microbial fertilizer has been growing rapidly; presently microbial fertilizer output has reached 9 million tons per year with an annual production value of Yuan 15 billion while export has significantly increased in respect of quantity and varieties.

Microorganism strain technology is a key technology that will decide the future of microbial fertilizer. At the present time, nearly 1000 erterprises are producing microbial fertilizer, but very few enterprises possess the core technology – strain research and application. Many enterprises just rely on purchase of strains for mixture and then sell them, there is a lack of knowledge of strain’s process property (resistance to heat, acid and alkali), function characteristics (disease resistance, growth promoting, stress resistance, enzyme spectrum, phosphorus-dissolving, potassium-dissolving, nitrogen fixation) and the shelf life of product; also there is a financing shortage for input into strain technology-oriented quality system, employment of research team, sourcing of hardware and software, which is the main bottleneck restricting the future development of microbial fertilizer industry.