Efficient soil microorganisms: A new dimension for sustainable agriculture and environmental development

Sustainable agriculture is vital in today's world as it offers the potential to meet our agricultural needs, something that conventional agriculture fails to do. This type of agriculture uses a special farming technique wherein the environmental resources can be fully utilized and at the same time ensuring that no harm was done to it. Thus the technique is environment friendly and ensures safe and healthy agricultural products. Microbial populations are instrumental to fundamental processes that drive stability and productivity of agro-ecosystems. Several investigations addressed at improving understanding of the diversity, dynamics and importance of soil microbial communities and their beneficial and co-operative roles in agricultural productivity. However, in this review we describe only the contributions of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) and cyanobacteria in safe and sustainable agriculture development.

Research highlights
► An ideal agricultural system is sustainable, maintains and improves human health, benefits environment and produces enough food for increasing world population.
► The utilization of biofertlizers can decrease the use of urea-N, prevent the depletion of soil organic matter and reduce environmental pollution to a considerable extent.
► Cyanobacteria and PGPR are excellent model systems which can provide the biotechnologist with novel genetic constituents and bioactive compounds having diverse uses in agriculture and environmental sustainability.
► PGPR and cyanobacteria offer an environmentally sustainable approach to increase crop production and soil health.