Novel Growing Media and Stand-Alone Substrates for Sustainable Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

Unfavorable conditions for sustainable agriculture, such as decreasing arable land, increasing urbanization, water shortages, and climate change, exert pressure on farmers and may represent a deplored disadvantage for human and environmental health safety. One of the most promising approaches to undertake this challenge is called “sustainable intensification”, which attempts to combine increased production without damaging its supporting ecosystem by following innovative procedures. Examples for this approach are soilless culture systems and combined sustainable growing ecosystems, defined as the cultivation of plants in systems without soil, but instead using growing media characterized by different constituents or stand-alone substrates, which represent fundamental materials for plant growth, development, and yield.

Of all of the organic materials, peat is one of the most used substrate constituents in horticulture and floriculture. Nevertheless, peat is a limited resource with a huge demand, and the extraction of peat bogs determines deleterious environmental impacts. Different organic materials might play an imperative function in decreasing the carbon footprint of the horticultural and floricultural farms by completely or partially replacing peat-based substrates. Also, inorganic substrates might play an important role as support materials in integrated growing closed ecosystems. For instance, coir, wood fiber, and compost are some large-scale organic materials that are already used as an alternative to peat, whereas innovative organic materials, such as waste and digestates, Sphagnum moss, biochars, and hydrochars are still in their examination stage. Thus, increased knowledge on the new materials and relivable closed growing ecosystems used as potential growing media constituents, stand-alone substrates, or innovative growing procedures is crucial in order to improve the environmental sustainability of the horticulture and floriculture sectors.

The general idea of this Special Issue is to afford an international base for revealing the underlying physico-chemical, agronomic, physiological, and ecological mechanisms of the new organic and inorganic materials used as growing media constituents or stand-alone substrates for horticulture and floriculture productions, with the aim of improving their productive, qualitative, and human–environmental health and safety traits. Thus, submissions of research articles, reviews, short notes, and opinion articles reporting novel scientific findings on the aforesaid topics are welcome.

Prof. Dr. Claudio De Pasquale
Dr. Leo Sabatino
Guest Editor

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• growing media
• organic, biodynamic and sustainable agricultural procedures