Graduate student Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana
High tunnels are equivalent to simple greenhouses, but crops are transplanted directly into field soil rather than sterilized growing media. One of the major vegetable crops produced under high tunnel systems is tomato. Due to its high value, growers are producing high tunnel tomatoes as monocultures with no introduction of crop rotation strategies, which is economically beneficial in the short term. However, over a longer time period, serial monocultures increase the risk of soil-borne pathogens and diseases specialized on tomato, resulting in a decrease in yield and soil health. Integrating crop rotation into high tunnel management could be a way to alleviate some negative plant soil feedback, with the help of community analyses we will be able to correlate management strategies to shifts in microbial communities to identify key players in the microbiome.
