FABALOUS - Faba Bean Biotic and Abiotic Stress Tolerance for Improved Yield Stability
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Short description
Faba bean (Vicia faba), a legume yielding high-quality, protein-rich seeds, also serves as a vital phytosanitary crop, benefiting pollinators and enhancing soil fertility. By leaving a significant nitrogen surplus in the soil, it plays a crucial role in sustainable crop rotations, particularly in organic agriculture, positioning it as a potential "soybean of the North" for food and feed. However, biotic and abiotic stresses reduce both faba bean yield and its year-to-year stability. Strengthening breeding activities is therefore essential to develop more resilient cultivars. Yield stability is especially compromised by abiotic stress during reproductive stages, a challenge expected to intensify with climate change. The FABALOUS project seeks to improve yield stability under combined environmental stresses, a critical step towards establishing faba bean as a consistently productive crop for farmers. Part C of the FABALOUS project is assessing abiotic stress impacts on Faba bean using both container and field experiments. The field experiment is exploiting thermal gradients created by the KNW-OPT project’s near surface ground source heat pumping platform at a site near Bad Nauheim (see photo and also the separate KNW-OPT project page).
This figure shows details of the field trial at Bad Nauheim exploiting the thermal gradients both above and beyond a near surface ground source heat exchanger that is providing both heating and cooling for 450 residential units of which the first row of modern apartments is visible at the top of this picture. Project duration Staff involved John Clifton-Brown, Jakob Santner, Niklas Tengen, Fawad Khan, Waqas Qasim
Collaboration partners - Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen
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