Breeding pole beans for intercropping with maize

Funding

Ministry for Rural Areas and Consumer Protection Ba-Wü

Duration

2018 – 2021

Research partners

Industrial partners

Sativa Rheinau AG

Team

W. Leiser

In 2017, maize was grown on a total of 2.5 million hectares in Germany. The rapid expansion of maize cultivation in Germany has led to increasing criticism. The most common criticisms are the loss of soil fertility and biodiversity due to maize cultivation. To meet these challenges and make maize cultivation more sustainable, alternatives need to be found. One such alternative is mixed cropping of maize and faba beans. Maize and beans are linked by co-evolution in their countries of origin in North, Central and South America. They have been grown together and selected for each other for more than 2000 years. It is therefore promising to breed the two crops back to their original ability to be grown together. Mixing maize with beans has the potential to combine yield, biodiversity and soil fertility. The maize acts as a high performer, the bean brings useful biodiversity for insects and ground-nesting birds to the crop and provides a flexible source of nitrogen. In addition, the risk of erosion is reduced in this system because the bean protects the bare ground. If the mixed cultivation of maize with faba beans can be brought to practical maturity, it can be expected that this cultivation system will be adopted on a large part of the current silage maize area and that the associated ecological advantages can be exploited on a large scale. The mostly large maize fields would create large contiguous biodiversity refuges for birds and insects, and herbicide use would be drastically reduced due to the herbicide intolerance of the bean.