Method Technique Advantage Disadvantage References
Soil inoculation Granular/powder; liquid inoculation; immobilized microbial cells Prevents damage to seeds and cotyledons/ Reduce the destructive effects of fungicides and pesticides Needs specialized tools for using and larger rates of inoculants; needs s more storage area and transportation; costly method (Romeiro 2007)
Root inoculation Foliar spray; root dipping Microbial inoculation of seeds in high concentration It requires a lot of microbial inoculation and is time consuming and expensive (Fernandez et al. 2012, Ullah et al. 2017)
Seed inoculation Seed bio-priming and Seed coating Cost-effective, accurate and useful for improving the properties of seeds Reduction of microbial inoculation survival (Ammor et al. 2008, Piri et al. 2019)