Abstract

Regenerative agriculture (RA) uses nature-friendly farm practices to nurture soil microbial communities. This study compared the fungal communities in RA plots with those in conventional agriculture (CA) and barren land (BL) plots (comprising completely barren- BL and with Eucalyptus – BL-Euc). Two crops – finger millets and vegetables (tomato/beans) were considered here. The RA farms identified for this study used diverse organic mulch applications such as farm manure, cow dung, cover-crop mulch, green-mulch, vermicompost, and so forth, for soil management. Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) amplicon sequencing analysis of soil DNA samples obtained from RA, CA and BL plots was done to identify fungal composition in each of the study plots. The fungal communities in RA finger millet and RA vegetable were compared with respective CA finger millet and CA vegetable and with BL plots. The fungal community in finger millet and vegetable RA plots showed high levels of diversity as well as species evenness.