Multifunctional Soil Biodiversity: Unlocking Potential for Healthy Croppin Systems

MultiSoil’s goal is to co-create, test, and demonstrate practices that improve soil and plant health factors and thus maintain soil functional biodiversity. This in turn helps control crop pests with less chemicals. Agricultural field soil needs support to continue to function as a living system, to recycle nutrients, hold water, and maintain diverse communities of soil organisms that form beneficial associations with plant roots and help control plant pests. Agroecological farming practices are based on the knowledge of local ecosystems whose processes can be used to support farming measures . Therefore, many means need to be combined to achieve a resistant system. Soil organic amendments, microbial inoculants, and diversified cropping systems are co-developed with local actors into innovations to complement Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices. Their site-specific effectiveness is analysed, and sustainability is assessed in 6 European pedoclimatic zones. MultiSoil is created with farmers and implements a multi-actor approach to ensure continuation of the good practices after the project timespan. MultiSoil contributes to Horizon Europe’s Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” specific objectives by reducing soil pollution, enhancing restoration, and improving soil structure to enhance soil biodiversity and crop production.