Lori Hoagland

Department:

Horticulture and Landscape Architecture

Research:

I study agroecology to help support local and sustainable food production systems. I am especially interested in learning how to manage beneficial plant-soil-microbial relationships to improve nutrient-use efficiency and prevent fertilizer loss, reduce the need for pesticides to control crop diseases, and prevent the uptake of toxic heavy metals into edible produce to protect consumer health. Most of my projects are conducted on-farm using a participatory research approach. This helps determine how local soil and environmental factors influence plant-soil-microbial relationships while also leveraging local knowledge and empowering farmers to help develop more sustainable management practices.

Current Projects:

Tomato Organic Management and Improvement Project (TOMI) https://eorganic.info/tomi. The long-term goal this large multistate, multidisciplinary project is to overcome the challenge of crop diseases in organic farming systems by: 1) identifying soil management practices that promote populations of native soil microbes with pathogen suppressive activity, 2) identifying factors that can better support the survival and efficacy of biopesticides which contain live cultures of pathogen suppressive microbes under field conditions, 3) developing new open-pollinated tomato varieties that have genetic resistance to the most virulent pathogen strains and produce fruit with exceptional flavor, 4) identifying mechanisms mediating differences in responsiveness among tomato germplasm to beneficial microbes that induce systemic resistance to pathogens, and 5) developing new tools and breeding strategies to integrate selection for beneficial plant-soil-microbial relationships into tomato breeding programs.

Contact:

Email: lhoaglan@purdue.edu
Link: Website/profile of Lori Hoagland