Microbial fertilizer leads the new direction of fertilizer industry development.

It is undeniable that the application of chemical fertilizers has played a good role in improving the per unit yield of grain, ensuring the supply of agricultural products, and solved the problem of feeding the growing population.

However, the long-term excessive and unreasonable use of chemical fertilizer has made the cultivated land on which we rely for survival "getting thinner and thinner", losing its due vitality, and has brought severe challenges to the ecological environment and the quality and safety of agricultural products. Today, traditional agriculture, which is over-reliant on chemical inputs such as chemical fertilizers, is no longer sustainable.

A few days ago, at the "China's first Bio-bacterial Fertilizer Innovation and Application Summit Forum" held in Baoding, Hebei Province, Li Jun, director of the microbial Fertilizer and Edible Fungi quality Inspection Center of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that microorganisms are the breakthrough to solve the problem of sustainable development of agriculture, and microbial fertilizers will become the new direction of fertilizer industry development in the future and the inevitable choice to support the sustainable development of China's agriculture.

"China uses 7% of the world's arable land to feed 22% of the world's population." Behind this miracle is "intensive cultivation" on limited arable land. Because of the large population and little land, our arable land cannot be fallow and rotation as in developed countries, and we do not have the opportunity to recuperate.

In order to ensure the effective supply of food, Chinese agriculture has entered the era of chemical agriculture since the 1970s. At present, China is the largest producer and user of nitrogen fertilizer in the world, accounting for 30% of the total use of nitrogen fertilizer in the world, and the utilization rate of fertilizer is very low, and the utilization rate of nitrogen fertilizer is only 35%. The use rate of chemical fertilizer per unit area in China is twice that of developed countries, and the utilization rate is only about half that of the United States.

Li Jun said: due to the long-term unreasonable use of chemical fertilizers, which destroyed the vitality of the soil and led to a decline in the productivity of cultivated land, the returns for chemical fertilizers in China decreased sharply: in 1975, 25 kilograms of grain were produced per kilogram of chemical fertilizer, and by 2005, only 10 kilograms of grain were produced per kilogram of chemical fertilizer, a decrease of 50 percent and 60 percent over the past 30 years.

Analyzing the reasons, Li Jun said that excessive and unreasonable use of chemical fertilizers (especially nitrogen fertilizers) led to soil acidification, consolidation, decrease of organic matter content, imbalance of functional microbial flora structure; coupled with pesticide and herbicide residues, heavy metal and antibiotic pollution, the soil was overwhelmed. With the long-term use of a large number of chemical inputs, the soil is in a "sub-healthy" state and loses its vitality; the unhealthy soil also leads to a decline in the quality of agricultural products.

With the advancement of China's urbanization, cultivated land is decreasing year by year, water resources are seriously short, cultivated land productivity is declining, and the ecological environment is deteriorating. How to ensure the sustainable development of agriculture in the future will be a major issue for China.

With the improvement of people's living standards, we should not only have enough to eat, but also eat well. Nowadays, the safety of "on the tip of the tongue" has become the focus of public attention. Li Jun believes that to protect people's health, the source is to protect the health of the soil. Microbial preparations and microbial fertilizers can eliminate toxic and harmful substances in soil, decompose organic materials such as straw, and enhance soil vitality. it plays an irreplaceable and unique role in ensuring soil health and improving the quality of agricultural products and promoting the sustainable development of agriculture.

Practice has proved that microbial fertilizer can increase crop yield, improve quality, enhance crop stress resistance, improve chemical fertilizer utilization efficiency, improve soil activity and other functions, which has attracted wide attention in the world. American scientists even proposed to "feed the world with microorganisms".

In recent years, China attaches great importance to the development of biological fertilizer industry. The "Biological Industry Development Plan" issued by the State Council defines biotechnology as one of the strategic emerging industries for future development. Biological fertilizer is listed as one of the major biological products in the "12th five-year Plan for Biotechnology Development Plan" issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology. In view of the outstanding problems of excessive use of chemical fertilizer, low efficiency and declining quality of cultivated land year by year, the industrialization of new and efficient biological fertilizer was carried out with the main goal of reducing the application amount of chemical fertilizer and improving the quality of cultivated land. Up to now, the projects followed by the state to support the industrialization of biological fertilizers are close to 1 billion yuan.

It is understood that at present, there are three main types of microbial fertilizers in China, namely, agricultural microbial agents, bio-organic fertilizers and compound microbial fertilizers. At present, there are more than 950 microbial fertilizer enterprises in China, with an annual output of 10 million tons and an annual output value of 15 billion yuan. As of June 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture had registered 2015 products. In recent years, the annual application area of microbial fertilizer in China is more than 100 million mu, most of which are used in vegetables, fruit trees, traditional Chinese medicine, sugarcane and other cash crops.

Compared with foreign countries, the research and development of new functional bacteria, scientific and reasonable technology, improvement of product quality, reduction of production cost and stability of application effect are still urgent problems to be solved in China's microbial fertilizer industry.

Li Jun believes that in the future, products such as mature bacteria for organic materials, soil remediation agents, rhizobium agents and phosphorus-solubilizing agents, functional bacteria agents for cash crops such as fruit trees and vegetables, bio-organic fertilizers, and drought-resistant bacteria will become the focus of research and promotion.