Duration

48 months starting from February, 1st, 2026

Consortium

INRAE: EMMAH, DISCOVE team leading the project, SAS , ECOSYS, LBE
CIRAD : Recyclage et Risques
Veolia agriculture
Centre d’expertise en analyse environnementale du Québec

Funding

Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

Objectives

Recent evidence suggests that PFAS reach agricultural soils through (i) irrigation with contaminated water, (ii) the use of pesticides belonging to the PFAS class, (iii) wet and dry atmospheric deposition, and (iv) the recycling organic waste products (OWP) as amendment, a virtuous practice that improves soil properties and contributes to circular economy.

To date, international and national evaluations are lacking to accurately evaluate PFAS contamination levels, sources and fate in agricultural settings. An integrated assessment of PFAS contamination in agriculture is thus needed. There is also a strong need to increase our ability to predict trends in PFAS behavior and consequences, such as their accumulation in the soil, leaching towards groundwater, uptake by crops, and toxicity to the soil fauna, in particular earthworms that are key organisms involved in several soil functions.

To meet these challenges, the overall objective of FluorAgro is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the sources, fate and effects of PFAS in agricultural soils, and to increase our capacity to predict the fate of these substances in the soil-water-plant continuum as well as their impact in these settings.

More precisely, in FluorAgro we will:

1. perform a comprehensive assessment of PFAS sources in agricultural settings, at two complementary scales (field, watershed). We will characterize the time and spatial evolution of PFAS concentrations in various agroecosystem compartments in long-term observatories of the SOERE and ORE networks. These sites will encompass a range of agro-pedo-climatic contexts and practices. This will provide a representative picture of PFAS occurrence and dynamics according to soil usages and contexts.
2. renew our way to study PFAS fate in the OWP-soil-water continuum by investigating the distribution of PFAS in the different organic matter compartments of OWP as a function of the OWP types and processes used to produce them. This will help identify ways, at process level, to modify the interactions between PFAS and organic-matter which play a key role in the fate of PFAS once they are applied to agricultural soils. We will then investigate the mechanisms controlling the fate of PFAS in soils by carrying out rainfall experiments onto soils monoliths from plots amended with OWP. The PFAS load in the leachates will be determined both in solution and adsorbed to colloids, to evaluate the role of colloidal particles on PFAS transfers, a mechanism largely overlooked to date.
3. assess PFAS bioaccumulation in plants and earthworms. We will adapt for PFAS a biotest, the Rhizotest, to assess and standardize the measurement of PFAS phyto-availability in soils and use it to hierarchize the main biogeochemical drivers of PFAS phyto-availability, while accounting for rhizosphere processes. PFAS concentrations in agricultural soils are at least ten times smaller than lethal concentrations for earthworms. We will investigate whether PFAS have sublethal effects on earthworms representative of natural soils, and the benefits for earthworm communities of OWP amendments compared to unamended soils: will the organic matter brought by OWP compensate for the burden associated with the PFAS it may content? How could this impact population dynamics?
4. expend this knowledge to other molecules and contexts and contribute to the creation of references by (a) evaluating the levels of contamination by PFAS in crops including grains, legumes, meadow, forages, and sugar cane, providing key data to, in fine, evaluate consumer exposure; (b) increase the genericity of mechanistic models of PFAS fate in structured soils, by considering overlooked processes such as colloid-facilitated transport and preferential gravity driven flow in macropores; (c) use the TyPol tool to extrapolate the knowledge gained experimentally on over 80 target molecules to other substances.