Agronomic Practices to Improve the Nutritional Quality of Crops under a Changing Climate

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Soil fertility and nutrient management can influence crop quality and thus, human health. Bioavailability of micronutrients, especially zinc, in cereal grains is generally low, which can result in malnutrition deficiencies in humans whose diets are primarily cereal-based. As a world-leading producer and exporter of cereal products, Canada is facing the essential and urgent need to manage soils for crop nutritional quality and health. Appropriate agronomic practices can assist Canadian farmers to grow cereal grains with high protein and micronutrient bioavailability and low risk of potentially toxic trace elements. These nutritional quality indexes are already considered as a premium value in the marketplace or likely included in the future. The more frequent extreme weather conditions of drought or flooding resulted from climate change make it more challenging due to the interactive effect of environment and genotype on crop nutritional quality. Practices such as diversified crop rotation and organic food production systems are thought to improve crop quality compared to monoculture or conventional systems. However, a quantitative analysis at the national or global scale has never been done. Past studies indicate significant genotypic variation in grain zinc concentration in Canadian wheat germplasm. This program will test if modern wheat varieties, that double the yield of old varieties, can sustain high variation in nutrition quality, and whether zinc accumulation during grain filling is determined by direct soil uptake or translocation from the vegetative organs. This Discovery Grant program is a key milestone along the journey of my laboratory toward its long-term goal of understanding nutrient cycling in soil-food-environment-health nexus and developing best management practices to ensure food and nutrition securities under the changing climate. Over the next five years, my research program will quantify the impact of crop rotation, organic farming and fertilizer management strategies on crop quality and human health from a food consumption perspective. The research will further develop effective soil fertility management to enhance nutritional quality. This will be done through a series of field and greenhouse studies combined with the cutting-edge isotope tracing technique, state of the art methodology in meta-analysis and human health assessment tools. The outcomes of this program will advance the knowledge of how soil fertility management affects nutrient bioavailability through interactions with environment and genotypes, and foster practices to improve cereal grain nutritional quality. The research will allow two Ph.D., two M.Sc. and five undergraduate students to receive interdisciplinary training in novel technical skills in soil fertility, plant nutrition and human health. The research findings will assist the Canadian grain industry in continuing world-class production standards under the changing climate.