Dr. Mariangela Hungria, a microbiologist from São Paulo, has been named the 2025 World Food Prize Laureate for transforming how crops get their nutrients. Instead of relying heavily on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, her work harnesses soil bacteria to feed plants naturally.
Nitrogen is essential for plant growth, but manufacturing synthetic fertilizer is energy-intensive and expensive. Hungria focused on biological nitrogen fixation, a process where microbes convert nitrogen from the air into forms plants can use. She studied rhizobia, bacteria that live in nodules on legume roots, and showed that inoculating soybean seeds annually could raise yields by up to 8 percent compared to synthetic fertilizer alone.
Over four decades at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, known as Embrapa, she helped scale these treatments nationwide. Today, her microbial inoculants are used on more than 99 million acres (40 million hectares) of farmland in Brazil. The impact is enormous. Farmers save an estimated $25 billion per year in input costs, and the shift away from chemical fertilizers avoids more than 230 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually.
She also pioneered commercial strains of Azospirillum brasilense, bacteria that improve nitrogen uptake and stimulate plant growth. Combining these microbes has doubled yield gains in some soybeans and common beans. Her latest work restores degraded pastureland, increasing grass biomass by 22 percent to support cattle production.
When Hungria began her career, few believed microbes could compete with industrial fertilizers. Today, Brazil’s soybean production has grown from 15 million tons in 1979 to a projected 173 million tons in the upcoming harvest.
Her work shows that feeding the world does not have to mean exhausting it. Sometimes, the smallest organisms can drive the biggest revolutions.
Learn more:
"Dr Mariangela Hungria Named 2025 World Food Prize Laureate." FarmingFirst, 2025
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