Agricultural Chemicals in Crops and How They Shape Soil Microbiome

The use of agricultural chemicals, such as pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers, have great importance in increasing worldwide crop yields and securing food supply by providing means to control pests and replenish soil nutrients using inorganic fertilizers; however, their intensive use leads to severe hazards to the soil ecosystem, such as soil health degradation, toxic residues accumulation, and crucial ecological balance disruptions. This chapter systematically reviews the mechanisms of action of important agrochemicals, their environmental fate and human health effects, combined with the typical analytical methods used for their detection. It also considers the deeper influences of these compounds on the soil microbiome and provides critical assessment of shifts in diversity of beneficial microbial biofilms, expansion of resistance gene pools and ensuing omics-level changes—transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic—that comprise microbial community response to chemical stress.