Climate Responsive Seed Technology to Enhance Pulse Production in Water Risk Hotspots
Food is the single most important determinant of human health and global increase in the consumption of non-meat proteins is one of the current goals to sustainably enhance food security, mitigate the risks associated to climate change, and meet the increasing demand for food production in climate hot spots. In this context, the Moroccan AgroFood system is developing policies to increase production of crops—such as legumes—to meet the strategic goals identified in the Plan Maroc Vert, which is poised to not only enhance Moroccan food security, but also farmer’s wealth. Legume crops are in fact important staple crops to combat malnutrition, alleviate poverty, improve human health, and enhance agricultural sustainability. Chickpea is one of the most important legumes in the world with global interest and demand for food and as a cash crop. Chickpea plays a particularly important role in Morocco—within a predominant cereal-legume cropping system—by delivering multiple services in line with sustainable crop production.
With this project, we will build on the success of our initial UMRP project (2017-2022) to develop an integrated technology that will allow farmers in arid climates to enhance chickpea yield and soil health by delivering consortia of beneficial microorganisms in the soil. This technology has the potential to positively impact agriculture in arid regions; an increase in pulse cropping would result in enhanced soil health, production of healthier food and decreased cereal monocropping, which is known to be too intensive to be sustained in the long term. Our technology will consist of a chitosan-based coating system that is designed to address challenges in encapsulation, storage and deployment of rhizobia in arid climate, also addressing soil salinity, heat and water stress. The use of chitosan as seed coating material brings merits of material circularity, mitigation of environmental impact and scalability; we will develop a new method to extract chitosan from shrimps’ shells, alleviating the need to discard this seafood industry waste and upscaling it into an advanced biopolymer for precision agriculture. Collaboration with PIs at UM6P will lead to the test of the technology in testbeds in Ben Guerir and Laayoune.
UM6P projectTeam
Professor Manal Mhada
Professor Lamfeddal Kouisni
Professor Abdelaziz Nilhayne
Sfia Baha, Ph.D. student
Hajar Salaheddine, Ph.D. student
Mohamed Saou, Ph.D student