Introduction
Recently, the main problem around the world agriculture is the loss of soil quality and fertility. Due to loss of organic matter (OM) and decomposition of different chemicals to the agricultural soil and productivity of agricultural crops reduces. Currently, other major problems are random industrialisation, urbanization and cutting of natural forest. Additionally, the poor agro-waste management practices increase the greenhouse gas emissions, random chemical use directed to loss of soil quality and fertility along with the loss of soil biodiversity (Abhilash et al., 2016). Furthermore, the overgrowth of population around the world required more quality food in limited fertile soils. For achieving this target to feed the human being needs change in current agricultural process and practices around the world which highly dependents on the chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides ( Bhardwaj et al., 2014). The uses of chemical directly affect human health and global environment as well as soil fertility (Mukherjee et al., 2020a). Therefore, priority should be given to the use of plant growth promoting microorganisms (PGPM) as biofertilizers both for the food security and sustainable crop production by improving soil health and fertility as an eco-friendly approach to conserve degraded land. Application of the organic manures along with the inorganic fertilizers help to increase the soil organic matter, soil structure, improved soil nutrient, helps to maintain the soil cation exchange capacity and soil biological activity and diversity, and restoration of soil (Dubey et al., 2020; Singh et al., 2020; Saha et al., 2008). Though chemicals fertilizers and pesticides are important input for agricultural sector to get higher yield, but unbalance and excess application of these agrochemical affects the soil properties, crop productivity and causes a serious health issue, land problems such as soil degradation (Hepperly et al., 2009).
Therefore, an integrated application of biofertilizer as microbial inoculum in the agriculture field to minimise the agrochemical use under sustainable agricultural practices must be needed. Application of PGPM either with seed treatment, soil application, and foliar use help to reduce the pathogenic infection as well as induce plant growth promoting activities (Mukherjee et al., 2020b). Till date a lot of microbial inoculants are available in the market and the number of commercial microbial agent’s increased spontaneously as different studies have been conducted to verify their effectiveness (Berg, 2009). Among all the microbial cultures, the plant growth-promoting microbes (PGPM) are well studied and known to promote the soil health development, induce available soil nutrient and help in plant disease suppression (Mukherjee et al., 2020c and 2019; Verma et al., 2014).
The application of seed endophytic bacteria in sustainable agriculture is a burning approach but very limited studies are conducted on it (Mukherjee et al., 2020b). Harnessing seed microbiome is considered as a viable emerging approach to sustainably increase agriculture productivity, soil sustainability and land development. While research studies showed that the use of bio-inoculants didn’t show good results in field conditions due to lack of indigenous strains and different agro-climatic zone. Recently, it was proposed that if the bio-inoculants were developed either from plant endophytes, core microbiota or with the crop microbiome, the result showed significant outcomes with the application of bioinoculants, (Mukherjee et al., 2020b; Qiu et al., 2019). However, most of the evidence for seed microbiome came from the molecular approaches and very few extensive field level works have been done with the isolated seed microbes. The main functional role of these seed endophytic microbiota is very poorly known. Currently, such types of evidence are very less and needs systematic evaluation of the seed microbes to support this argument. In order to manage all the agricultural resources along with the improving soil health and quality, yield and stability of agri-products, the present research study was conducted on chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) at pot and field condition in Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
This study was conducted with common market available chickpea (variety P-362) which is a very important daily consumable protein, nutrient rich pulse crop worldwide. In India, it use as a multipurpose crop for human consumption as well as fodder (Yadav et al., 2017). Therefore the sustainable management of chickpea crop in India is very essential to attain the target of environmental sustainability. In this present study we use chickpea seed endophytes for improving the crop production and soil quality. Our study tried to investigate the potential role of chickpea seed endophytes on (1) Chickpea (C. arietinum L.) crop growth, yield, (2) the soil health and nutrients (both physicochemical, biological properties), (3) the relation between the crop production and soil fertility.