Let's talk about organic agriculture, agricultural innovation, farming production, greenhouses, and horticulture-basically, all the stuff that goes into making our gardens and farms more sustainable for the future. And here's a key point: soil doesn't just need water and nutrients to be healthy. It needs oxygen too!
Sometimes, the soil doesn't have enough oxygen for plants to grow well-like right after a flood, for example. That's a big problem for farmers, right? Well, researchers over at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain are working on fixing that. They've started doing a bunch of agricultural tests with new oxygenation technologies for irrigation water. The goal? To help crops grow better when the soil doesn't have much oxygen.
This project isn't just UPCT, though. Two companies from Murcia-Novagric and Juan Azcue-are in on it too. And it's all part of a European project called Hort2theFuture, with the code 101157434.
So, what's Hort2theFuture all about? It's funded by the European Commission, part of the Horizon Europe program. The main idea is to tackle the sustainability challenges that European horticulture is facing right now. Think things like using less peat, making better use of fertilizers and pesticides (so we don't waste them), and keeping soil healthy with more eco-friendly practices.
This project is gonna last four years, and people from 11 different countries are working on it-all coordinated from Copenhagen. There are 28 European partners total, led by the Copenhagen Business School. That includes universities, research centers, and companies from across Europe-like UPCT in Spain and NOVAGRIC, which we mentioned earlier.
They're also setting up Living Labs in Germany, the UK, and North Macedonia. These are like real-world test sites where they'll try out all the new solutions with the people who actually use them-farmers and growers. That way, they can get feedback and adjust policies to help everyone adopt these more sustainable practices easier.
Now, what exactly are they testing? They want to see how these oxygenation technologies help with root growth for crops like broccoli and radishes, especially in compacted (super hard) soil. They also want to see if it can help control plant diseases in pepper greenhouses, where roots often get suffocated because there's not enough oxygen in the soil.
María del Carmen Martínez, a professor in the Agronomic Engineering Department who's leading the tests, says companies are really looking for solutions to the occasional flooding that happens during heavy rain. That flooding makes fungal pests and diseases way more common, which is bad for crops. So the research is trying to figure out if adding oxygen to irrigation water can help keep those fungal diseases under control.
The tests are already underway, too! They're doing them in plots at the Tomás Ferro Food Experiment Station in La Palma, at the Agricultural Demonstration and Transfer Center in El Mirador, and even in commercial greenhouses in Almería.
Another big part of the project? Finding new substrates (that's the stuff plants grow in) for horticulture that are cheap, reliable, and easy to make on a large scale-so they can actually be sold and used by farmers.
They're also testing new sustainable substrates for hydroponic crops (that's growing plants without soil). The goal is to make substrates using raw materials from Europe, which are better for the environment and have a lower carbon footprint than the peat that most people use right now.
Belén Gallego, another professor in the Agronomic Engineering Department at UPCT who's coordinating the project there, says they're not just checking if these new substrates work for growing crops-they're also looking at the environmental and socio-economic impacts too.
Let's talk funding: The Horizon Europe program is giving 6.5 million euros to this initiative, and 9% of that goes to UPCT. The project started in June 2024 and will go on until the summer of 2028. It's funded by the European Commission, and it lines up with the goals of the European Green Deal and the EU Soil Mission-so it's all about making European farming more sustainable.
