Home-Scale Agrobiology

Often when we think of plant breeding, botany, or scientific research, we think of white lab coats, university labs, and expensive academic degrees.

There are a host of projects that not only are not being researched formally on any significant scale but are wholly necessary for the future of holistic agriculture, sustainability, and human health.

The good news is you can do a lot of them on your own at home with no formal training and without spending millions of dollars!

With that, let’s explore the concept of home-scale agrobiology:

This list isn’t complete by any means, but these are concepts I think need to be explored more and despite some minor efforts to study them, more research is needed:

Soil & Plant Health

Soil Microbiome

We always need more people studying the soil life and how it interacts with the surrounding environment. This can allow us to grow more effectively and better understand the consequences of industrial farming so we can find alternatives.

This sounds highly complex, but some study can be done at home! Tracking bacteria, nutrient content, and Ph levels can be very important contributors and can all be done at home with soil testing kits, Ph meters, and microscopes.

Polycultures & Plant Guilds

If you have significant land area to work with, this can be a huge idea to explore. There is some research about certain plants that work for pest management, but for the most part this is not a very well-developed space.

In particular exploring how polycultures can be beneficial and economic on a large scale is worth doing research on!

Natural Fertilizers

There is so much being done on a home garden scale with home-made fertilizer but refining this and figuring out the most efficient way to extract and intake those nutrients and the best recipes to get the most out of your farm or garden have huge applications and can be studied even in a backyard garden.

Bacteria Breeding

Selectively breeding bacteria is something that even apartment-dwellers can experiment with!

Certain bacteria can be selected to be more efficient at nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation, or converting waste into usable compounds.

I’ve heard the example from plant breeder Shane Simonson of breeding bacteria that are capable of consuming tannins in acorns to bypass the leaching process. This would make acorns a much more practical food source on a commercial scale!

There is information out there on YouTube about this, so I highly recommend looking into it!

Crop & Plant Breeding

Perennial Staple Crops

There is a huge need for developing perennial staple crops! One big step in the right direction over the last decade or two has been the development of kernza, a perennial wheat that doesn’t require as much input as conventional wheat or other grain crops.

I would love to see perennial rice, perennial corn, and perennial sorghum developed in the near future since it could reduce overall soil tillage and build nutrients while reducing costs and chemical applications.

For more, I highly recommend the Going to Seed Podcast, Joseph Lofthouse’s book Landrace Gardening, and the Going to Seed Forum

Cold-Hardy Fruits

Because of the way we eat in the Western world, it might be worth breeding super cold-hardy versions of crops we normally get imported. Yes, it would be awesome if people would all eat locally and only what’s in season in their climate but that’s unlikely to happen in the short term.

I am currently working on breeding cold-hardy citrus for my Midwestern climate (which is a long project but very fun) and someday hope to change the scene by introducing a citrus that can grow up here without protection and replace most imported citrus!

That’s one example, but I would love to see hardy bananas, hardy mangoes, and cold climate sweet potatoes among other things!

Disease-Resistant Crops

As I’ve mentioned in other articles, there is a serious problem with our seedless fruits becoming prone to certain diseases and pests.

By growing things from seed and locally adapting them, we can start to breed resistance into these crops and make them more resilient for future generations to come!

Bananas are a huge problem right now, but seedless grapes, watermelon, navel oranges, pineapples, potatoes and garlic are all foods under threat if we continue to exclusively propagate them rather than reproduce them.

For more information, check out my article on seeds

Mentor Grafting

This is a very obscure topic that needs more research, but a study from 2014 seems to imply that genetic plant hybrids can be made via a specific grafting technique rather than through reproduction.

This has very cool applications because hybridization might be possible faster than previously thought, and with a wider range of species than previously thought.

Here’s a paper on the subject for those interested: Hybridization by Grafting

This could use all kinds of experiments and exploration even on a micro scale. Proving this true could open the door for all kinds of new discoveries!

Specialty Projects

Fungi & Mycoremediation

Growing and breeding fungi to clean and enhance soil health is a pretty easy and worthwhile cause to pursue.

Biomaterial

Not only do mushrooms make great food, they also can be used for creating building material and have a lot of excellent potential in manufacturing and packaging industries. The issue is we need more people experimenting with this!

Algae, plant starches, plant proteins, and bacteria cultures all have great potential for fabrication.

Related to this is fiber crops. There are so many materials that make excellent textile fibers, but we haven’t yet gotten to a point where they are commercially viable (stinging nettle, dogbane, milkweed, tree barks, hemp, mycelium, kenaf, bamboo, agave, banana, yucca, etc). This could be improved through processing or breeding and would be pretty easy to start on a farm or collective of farms!

A great resource is any of the biomaterial groups on Reddit or Facebook, the Nettles for Textiles group, and the Fungal Materials & Biofabrication group on Facebook.

Nutrition Studies

As you regular readers know, this is super important to me! We need more research on the general nutrient content of wild fruits and herbs. It’s all good to have indigenous knowledge of how to use medicinal plants but having specific nutrient contents for each plant can dramatically help to prove a lot of this medicinal knowledge and popularize herbal remedies.

In addition, finding out the right ways to process different fruits, herbs, and vegetables to maximize nutrient intake is vital!

Algae Crops

There are actually a number of people researching various aspects of this, but algae have huge potential as a medicine and food crop, but also in cleaning waterways, providing fodder for animals, fuel crops, packaging materials, and even as an indirect energy generation crop!

For more information, I recommend William Padilla Brown’s book Practical Phycology

Biogas Production

Experimenting with biogas and finding the most efficient crop would be a boost to homesteaders everywhere, especially if you could find a good replacement for propane for generators!

Again, this could be improving the process of turning it into fuel or breeding a better crop to use as fuel with existing technology.

I would personally like to see an extremely low-tech way of producing homemade fuel on a small scale.

Electroculture

Say what you will about one of the most controversial gardening techniques of the past few years, I have yet to see any formal study done on the effectiveness or refinement of techniques for electroculture.

For those who don’t know, there are various claims about sticking a pole wound with copper wire into the ground to stimulate plant growth.

The issue is that there are all kinds of claims being made, often conflicting ones so that makes it easy for people to latch onto the most outrageous and assume it doesn’t work whatsoever.

It may not work, it might work well with the right technique, but either way it needs to be explored and have some kind of official findings!

I know that one was a lot of words, but I really think there’s so much potential for work that can be done by decentralized groups and individuals that is not being done by establishments or institutions!

Let me know in the comments if you intend to experiment with any of these!

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