Newswise — The International Alliance for Phytobiomes Research is pleased to announce that United Soybean Board (USB) has joined the organization as a sponsoring partner.
The Phytobiomes Alliance is a non-profit research consortium that facilitates and coordinates national and international research projects on phytobiomes to accelerate the sustainable production of food, feed, and fiber for all. The term “Phytobiome” refers to a plant growing in a specific environment, and all the geophysical and biological components that interact with this plant. The vision of the Alliance is to provide agricultural producers with analytical tools to help them determine the best sustainable solutions for their crops, while ensuring profitability.
“As soybean farmers, our involvement with the Phytobiomes Alliance is critical to ensure that our growers have access to predictive analytics to better understand the right mix of crops, management practices and inputs during the growing season,” said Don Wyss, Indiana farmer and supply action team lead for United Soybean Board, an organization that represents the half-million U.S. soybean farmers. “The focus of the Alliance aligns closely with USB’s goal to invest in technology that ensures sustainable solutions and environmental resilience of the U.S. soybean crop.”
“We are very excited to welcome United Soybean Board to the Alliance,” said Dusti Gallagher, the Alliance Deputy Director. “They are our first producer-run and governed organization to join our consortium of academic and private industry partners. Having agricultural producers actively engaged in identifying and addressing research and technology gaps within plant-based agriculture is crucial to our success. They are the foundation of what we are trying to accomplish with systems-based, multidisciplinary, results-oriented research.”
Lisa Weaver, Supply Program Manager with USB contracted through Smithbucklin, will join the Alliance Coordinating Committee. This Committee identifies research, resource and technology gaps, establishes priorities, and develops strategic plans to achieve address those challenges.
Understanding the complex interactions within phytobiomes systems is critical to ensuring sustainable global food security in the next decades, in the context of population growth, climate change, the necessity to preserve biodiversity and natural resources, while ensuring grower profitability.
Later this year, from 8 to 10 October, agricultural producers and scientists from academia and private companies will gather in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, for the 2024 International Phytobiomes Conference. This unique event is an opportunity for stakeholders from diverse disciplines to come together, share their expertise, present their research and develop collaborations on cutting-edge and innovative science within the phytobiomes space to address today’s agricultural challenges.
About the Phytobiomes Alliance
The Phytobiomes Alliance is an international, nonprofit alliance of industry, academic, and governmental partners created in 2016. The goal of the Alliance is to understand, predict and control emergent phenotypes for sustainable production of food, feed and fiber on any given farm. The Phytobiomes Alliance is sponsored by Syngenta, Eversole Associates, INRAE, United Soybean Board, Valent BioSciences, Colorado State University, FarmBox Foods, Ginkgo Bioworks, Mosaic Biosciences, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NewLeaf Symbiotics, Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, Pivot Bio, Purdue University College of Agriculture, Trace Genomics, the Waterloo Centre for Microbial Research, Aphea.Bio, and AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. To learn more about the Alliance, visit phytobiomesalliance.org and follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/PhytoBiomes and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/internationalphytobiomesalliance
About United Soybean Board
United Soybean Board’s 77 volunteer farmer-leaders work on behalf of all U.S. soybean farmers to achieve maximum value for their soy checkoff investments. These volunteers create value by investing in research, education, and promotion with the vision to deliver sustainable soy solutions to every life, every day across the three priority areas of Infrastructure & Connectivity, Health & Nutrition, and Innovation & Technology. As stipulated in the federal Soybean Promotion, Research and Consumer Information Act, the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service has oversight responsibilities for USB and the soy checkoff. For more information on the United Soybean Board, visit unitedsoybean.org.
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