Biofertilizers: an advent for eco-friendly and sustainable agriculture development

Agriculture is facing multiple challenges as it has to produce more food to feed the growing global population. There is still an adequate bridgeable gap in the production which is yet to be exploited. The potentially huge eco-clean market will contribute to the overall development in sustainable agriculture mainly for more efficient production and environment-friendly approaches. Biofertilizers are considered to be promising tools in the agriculture ecosystem as it mitigates the pitfalls of chemical fertilizers. In addition to the restoration of the microbial flora of the soil, biofertilizers improve the overall health by adding essential nutrients viz. nitrogen, vitamins, proteins, and enhance the water-holding capacity of the soil. Biofertilizers act through microbial-driven processes, where a consortium of living cells mobilizes the unavailable nutrients in the soil and induces plant growth. The biological nature and the beneficial outlook of the biofertilizers makes it a prerequisite in sustainable farming. Hence, there is a need for an emphasis on the significance of the biological inoculants in the impending years. In spite of these, biofertilizer production and commercialization are underutilized and needs a focus on their large-scale production aspect. This review focuses on the use of microbial strains as biofertilizers and the important roles performed by these beneficial microbes in maintaining soil fertility and enhancing crop productivity through mechanisms such as nitrogen fixation, phosphorus solubilization etc., along with their formulations, and the current state-of-art global scenario on biofertilizer market towards sustainable agriculture. © 2022, The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Society for Plant Research.