interviewsFebruary 8, 2023
A scientific development of the National University of Quilmes will serve to analyze the soils of the entire planet, another great achievement of the national universities for the world. Luis Wall’s scientific team developed an index capable of determining biofertility, which will be used by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in soils throughout the world. He detailed it on Radio 10.
How does the division of the FAO work in relation to the study of soils and how were they linked with the University of Quilmes?
The FAO is the division of the United Nations that deals with food and agriculture issues worldwide. 12 years ago it created a division called “The Global Alliance for Soil” because the FAO -like many other organizations- understands that the soil is the place where food originates and the use of the soil by humanity throughout throughout history has led to their degradation. The FAO now has the objective of studying the soils and finding diagnostic tools for them in order to find a way to manage them by producing food while preserving them.
How is your relationship with the subject?
I have been in university for many years and I have always studied the interactions between bacteria and plants, this happens in the soil. Over time I found out what no-tillage meant in agriculture, the impact it had had in Argentina with the expansion of the use of transgenic soybeans and the problems it brought with it in terms of soil degradation. That connected me with agricultural producers in 2006 where there was a call from the Ministry of Argentina that sought to establish priority areas for knowledge development in the country: we presented a project coordinating 11 institutions and 3 private sector organizations related to agriculture to study soils and their biology because in general they are handled from a chemical point of view. That is why we are used to talking about fertilization, but the soils are something else and that something else is beginning to be understood in recent years.
What dimensions do we not know, for example?
In a teaspoon of soil live 10 billion bacteria, about 200 meters of fungi, there are 1,000 million viruses and all this makes the soil work in relation to plants, the atmosphere, the soil and the seas. It is where the gases in the atmosphere are regulated, the soil has to do with global warming. The most interesting thing is that the solution is in the soil, if we start to manage it in a more conscious way, we could surely improve climate change, especially improve our food.
What studies do you have in Argentina?
Studying the country’s soils, we studied the lipids, we analyzed the percentages of fatty acids in the soil and I proposed as a working hypothesis to study those acids. There is a great diversity of lipids and there are methodologies that allow us to have a collection of the different acids that gives us a fingerprint and with that, soils of different quality can be distinguished.
By doing a little analysis of the data, we found the way to pass that fingerprint on a lipid index of the soil, in a value that increases if the soil is healthier and less if it decreases. That number says if the soil has a lot of worms, microbial action, carbon, that information reached the ears of the FAO, we had a personal interview and I told them what I discovered that was not published to find a way that the knowledge is not taken away others.
