Growth Stimulation, Nutrient Quality and Management of Vegetable Diseases Using Plant Growth-Promoting Rhizobacteria
Vegetables play an important role in human nutrition. And hence, to produce quality vegetables is a major challenge for growers. In order to optimize vegetable production, growers quite often use a heavy dose of agrochemicals without considering the delet
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Almas Zaidi, Mohammad Saghir Khan, Ees Ahmad, Saima Saif, and Asfa Rizvi
Abstract
Vegetables play an important role in human nutrition. And hence, to produce quality vegetables is a major challenge for growers. In order to optimize vegetable production, growers quite often use a heavy dose of agrochemicals without considering the deleterious impact of such chemicals on vegetables. Researchers have tried to minimize the use of agrochemicals in vegetable production vis-a-vis to develop resistant varieties, but all such approaches have been unsuccessful. The excessive use of agrochemicals can be replaced by “biofertilizers” especially plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) for producing safe and healthy vegetables without posing any threat to the environment. Moreover, as a biocontrol agent, PGPR will be useful in the management of vegetable diseases. In this chapter, some successful stories of PGPR applications in growth stimulation of popularly grown vegetables are described. Also, the disease suppressing ability of PGPR is considered and discussed. The strategy of incorporating low cost rhizotechnology in vegetable production system is likely to reduce dependence on chemicals applied by vegetable growers.
16.1 Introduction Vegetables play an important role in human health, and due to increasing health awareness, there is greater demand of quality vegetables. To fulfill the rising demands of consumers, growers have substantially increased the use of fertilizers to harness optimum vegetable yields (Abayomi and Adebayo 2014). Regular and unbalanced dose of fertilizers in vegetable productions (Guo et al. 2011) have, A. Zaidi (*) • M.S. Khan • E. Ahmad • S. Saif • A. Rizvi Department of Agricultural Microbiology, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 V. Kumar et al. (eds.), Probiotics in Agroecosystem, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4059-7_16
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however, led to decrease in soil fertility, human health (via food chain) problems, ecological risks, and poor quality and lesser vegetable yields (Olowoake and Adeoye 2010). So, to counter such destructive challenges, there is an urgent need to find an alternative option to boost the production without any threat to vegetables. In this regard, PGPR along with (Bhadoria et al. 2005)/without (Sharafzadeh 2012) fertilizers have been used against vegetables such as tomato (Ramakrishnan and Selvakumar 2012), potato (Naderi et al. 2012), cabbage (Turan et al. 2014), cucumber (Isfahani and Besharati 2012), brinjal (Fu et al. 2010), okra (Kumar et al. 2014a), onion (Reetha et al. 2014), and mint (Kaymak et al. 2008). Another important problem associated with vegetable production is the incidence of diseases such as damping-off disease of cucumber caused by Pythium aphanidermatum (Elazzazy et al. 2012), wilt of brinjal caused by Ralstonia solanacearum (Chakravarty and Kalita 2012), and tomato wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum fsp. ly
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