DNA Sequencing Soil Microbes: What It Reveals About Your Farm

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top regenerative farmers and experts to discuss how we can help people regenerate God's creation for future generations. You know, have you ever described a simple subject or a topic as, well, it's not rocket science? Yeah, me too. But what if I were to tell you that what is going on in the soil right below our feet is way more complicated and fascinating than rocket science? Well, I'm not actually going to tell you that, but our guest today, Dr. Laura Kavanagh, who is both a rocket scientist and a bioinformatics software engineer, is going to explain why the soil is way more fascinating than rockets.

0:43 I'm here with our friend Laura Kavanagh. Laura, we've known each other for a number of years. You are now the chief science officer with AEA, Advancing Eco Agriculture. So very excited to have this conversation with you here today. And we're actually here in North Carolina at Union Grow Farm where we first met. Yes. And so let's give our audience just a little bit of background into maybe a little bit of how we met, but also how the progression that you have come to to become the chief science officer with AEA.

1:17 It's quite a wandering story, Keith. Like most people's lives or many people's lives. Let me just take a quick step back, but I won't take too long, don't worry. But I started out in engineering and had my education in engineering. The last thing I thought about was farming really and actually had a career in the space program and space shuttle program at the Johnson Space Center. But after that program was winding down, I decided to go back to school and get my PhD in genetics and genomics at Duke. And after that I ended up taking a position with Syngenta to study genetics and plants and do a lot of work on GMO and so on. And that was a really exciting career and I loved that except over time I came to decide that the GMO approaches we were using they just weren't long-term solutions. Nature's always working to overcome any single silver bullet and it always does. And so I just thought I don't want to spend my life working on something that I know is only temporary. And so I started really thinking what would be a long-term solution? How do we really grow plants sustainably? And the more I studied that question, the more I came to realize that the soil.

2:38 Microbes, the plant soil microbe interaction is really the long-term powerful solution. Obviously, it's been here for millions and millions of years and it survived all of these environmental fluctuations. So that's really where the solution lies.

2:55 As COVID was coming up, I ended up getting laid off from Senta. And actually through a series of unusual coincidences, I met an amazing person named Martin Crompton, who is the head here at Uni Grove. And he and I got connected and then I came here as a soil health expert to work at this vineyard that was just getting started and really focusing on regenerative farming and through that I ended up coming to a number of conferences on regenerative farming and that's where I met you at the regen nexus conference and Martin being the amazing connector he actually gave me a chance to speak at the conference. I was talking about the DNA sequencing that I was doing of the soil here and how I wanted to bring that to regenerative farming.

3:46 Another amazing coincidence was that John Kemp was in the audience and when he heard me talking that struck up a conversation with us and then our conversation, we got super excited when we were talking together because we had so many common excitement about the soil microbes. And so then one thing led to another. So now I'm the chief science officer at A.E.A.

4:10 I think it's a great testament to those Nexus conferences because the word nexus, you know what I mean? It's a coming together. It's a place where people connect and that's what it's all about. And this is like the ultimate example. Now, we can't guarantee that everybody will get a really great dream job being there, right? But that's just a great example of the type of connections and the type of people that come to these events and the connections that are made. So it is, it's a really powerful event because it just brings people of the same mindset together that network. You don't have ideas but when you're with people with similar thoughts and thinking it's like the ideas really come together and that creativity. And Martin's a great one for bringing people together. So yes, Martin's an amazing connector. Lots and lots of fun. I love to tell the story when the first time we came here like four years ago to Union Grove, Martin was so excited that we were coming and I was going to be able to tour around and everything and on our way here, he had

5:07 To call me and say, 'Keith, I've got COVID. I can't even, I can't hear.' Right. So he was pretty bummed out. But I'm back and we're touring around and just having a great time here in North Carolina. I got to have all the fun meeting you. That's right, Trip Martin. Poor guy. Yes. So anyway, with all that great background, you're probably the one person in the world that can say soil health, it's not rocket science, way harder than, you know, both. Yeah. So it's actually much harder. Yeah, more, you know, biology is always going to be much more complicated than physics or chemistry. But it's exciting. Oh, yeah, it's exciting. I know. It's funny. I have a friend who when they heard that I was going to be studying soil and farming and they're like, you know, you used to work on the space shuttle program and now you kind of like you work on dirt. Is that kind of disappointing? And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. This is the most unbelievably exciting complex universe under the soil. It is not disappointing at all. It's as complicated as space.

6:14 Yeah. And that's, I think that's a fascinating perspective. And so your specialty within this soil health realm, because we each kind of have our own little, you know, niche that we carve out, we're really good at yours is DNA and DNA sequencing. So you're really looking at the building blocks of how all of this is working. Talk just a little bit about how you got started down that path and where it's led you to the lab that you've set up with AEA and where that's going. Right. It is just really this deep discovery that nature's really set up an unbelievably robust complex system already and that we don't really need to come in and create it. It's a difference in our mindset. Humans, we want to, we think we need to create something, we want to build a house, we have to bring everything and build a house. In the world of farming, it's actually already, everything's already there. And this DNA sequencing I can use to go in and reveal that universe that's hidden. And particularly in the last 15 years or since World War II and the fertilizers became very popular, they seem to have a very awesome effect initially, but over time they kill the soil life and then we lose all the benefits of that life, which is the soil aggregation, water holding capacity, just keeping the soil together. All of those things start to go away and then we have to bring in more and more.

7:45 And more. So it's important that we show farmers just conceptually we've lost the idea in the last 50 years that it's really the life in the soil and that interaction with the plants. We have to have that dance between the plants feeding the microbes, the microbes feeding the plants to really get solid farming that's going to last for hundreds and hundreds of years.

8:08 And the DNA sequencing and some of the latest technologies are so powerful and the costs are coming down and it's this convergence of all these technologies all the computer capacities we have now and AI like all the pieces we need to really start unravel this are all converging right now and so it's a super exciting time and we want to bring that through advancing eco agriculture.

8:34 What's really awesome with working with someone like John Kemp is he has all the agronomic knowledge and then we've had folks doing sequencing of soils, but it's connecting that with the agronomic knowledge. So when John and I get together and we're able to bring both of those strengths together, I think that can really move farming, help reveal what we need to do and they'll help guide things.

9:02 And then the work that green cover is doing looking at the seeds and growing them in regenerative environments where the seed already comes with a really beautiful fabulous powerful microbiome in it. So you have to have that seed that starts with a powerful microbiome and you have to have a soil that can sustain that microbiome and let it grow. You can't just take microbes and chuck them on a dead field and grow. They have to like you couldn't put a bear in the middle of a desert. They have to have a habitat.

9:33 They have to have a habitat. Yeah. So you optimize the starting point with the seed. Then you optimize that habitat by maintaining seed and living roots in the soil as much as you can. And that's the way and I want to dive into that just a little bit. But before I do that, so yesterday I was speaking at the North Carolina Soil Health Coalition, one of their workshops, and I'm doing another one tomorrow.

9:55 But one of the speakers there at this conference, he said a quote. I've just been thinking about it and I can't even remember who he quoted, but this was I think he'd heard his grandpa say it or something, but the quote was in nature when you kill something, you inherit its job. And so when we're killing all these microbes and we're killing the biology.

10:22 Because of the way that we've farmed or even the weeds. We just now have inherited the jobs that they were there to do. That's an awesome quote. And that's what we've been doing in agriculture because as we not intentionally sometimes we like the weeds we intentionally kill but the microbial population has been an unintended consequence of the way we farm. But we've now inherited the job that they were put there, they were created to do, right? And that comes at great expense. It comes, we can grow really big crops, but there's no profit left because we're paying so much to do the job and we can't even do we can only do a thousandth of what they're doing. We can't get the soil to hold water. So now we're just in these super brittle situations where I plant the seed, I have to get this rain right now and at the right times or the whole crop. We've lost the resilience. We've lost complete resilience. So anyway, I just think that quote was just fascinating to think about.

11:25 True. But as we bring them back now, we have fewer jobs to do. Exactly. And that's the whole point of regenerative agriculture is having fewer jobs to do because we have the biology doing the jobs they were created to do, and your technology, your science, the lab that you set up is giving us a little peak behind the curtain of some of that that's going on. It does. And I just get so excited, Keith, because I get this data sometimes and I just can't I just can't even believe how many microbes are there. So, can you give us an example of a soil sample that you do a DNA test on? What kind of numbers are we talking about?

12:10 I mean, I'll see 10,000 species. 10,000 in a single soil sample. In a single soil sample, like the size of your tip of your pinky. Not 10,000 organisms. There's trillions of organisms. I don't measure trillions. I mean, I'm sure that what I'm able to see with this technology, even though it's our most advanced technology, is still only a tiny portion of what's there. You're just estimating. Even with that, like I like what you said. You're just pulling back the curtain. I could see 10,000 things and I could see worms. I could see microarachnids. I could see bacteria. I could see fungal species. There's like the whole breadth. There's just it blows my mind. Wonderful. Is that 10,000 that you can identify? And then are there other things that are kind of a—

12:58 Good black data that you don't even know what it is yet? Absolutely. I mean, right now we think we might have been able to classify. I don't know how you classify the percentage of something you don't know but they estimate like 1 to 5% of what's in the soil we actually can identify. Now what we do is we identify—I can't identify the exact species but I can identify that it's in a family or something because the DNA is common across those kinds of things. So we classify a lot of things but in a very high level. So instead of saying that's a black bear, might say it's a bear or it's a mammal. I mean, just you can go up the tree. Yeah. But yes, we know so little about so 10,000 that you know of but there's likely many many more. Oh yeah. And we'll continue to learn about that. You'll develop the libraries to identify those down the road.

13:52 That's another thing I'm excited about is with this data we can actually start to do genome assembly it's called. So you see all that DNA and you could start to, even though all those genomes are mixed together, you could still piece things together. So we, the more we sequence, the more we'll be able to reveal what's there and the more we'll understand the patterns and so you're doing that with soil samples, but you're also going to be able to do this with seed as well, right? That's one thing I'm particularly looking at right now because I think the seed is key to starting a good regenerative plant. You have, just like with a child, it's always best when they're early development is critical. Yeah. So the same no doubt is for seeds. So looking at the seeds and seeing are we getting rich microbiome encoded inside the seed from the parent, I think be super important.

14:45 Yeah. Yeah. Because that's, you know, that leads into nutrient density. The more a plant can get nutrients from the soil, it's using that barber system with the microbes to get those nutrients, that means the humans us get more nutrients. So it's not just like this theoretical interesting question, it is and we can do that with fewer inputs, fewer less expense more. Exactly. We need to lean on nature. Nature's figured this out because you don't survive if you don't figure it out, you don't live in nature. You're gone. Yeah. So the fact that it's still here, it's figured out. Now, this summer when Christine Jones or this past summer when she was here, she made the

15:28 Comment that a single seed can have up to 9 billion microbes, you know, in it and on it. And that number just stunned us. And I've heard other people say that since. And so again, your technology will allow us to kind of start getting a peek at that and really start to be able to ascertain how microbially healthy is our seed. I can send it into a lab and get a germ test, but that doesn't tell me anything about the onboard biology, right?

16:02 And I think we're even though we're very early in our knowledge of what's really happening because DNA sequencing technology, I think the very first one they won the Nobel Prize was in like the 70s. This is just brand new in human knowledge. But it's showing us that there's so much more there than we ever thought. And we don't need to know the 11,000 exact species. We just need to know there's a lot of species there. And what's fascinating is I've gone in and I've looked at like regenerative farms.

16:39 You know, go look at Rick Clark's farm and pull out some soil and then a 100 feet away go to a neighbor's farm and it's like night and day. There's almost no living organisms in that neighbor's soil. It's not the environment. It's not the macro environment. It's not the soil type. It's our management of those systems. And you don't have to know a bazillion things about microbes and every single one that's there and every single thing they're doing, but you know, when you walk in a healthy ecosystem in a forest and there's all these animals and living things and plants, you're in a healthy ecosystem and you go over here and there's nothing. You don't need that much information. You just know that environment is not healthy and this one is.

17:27 Yeah. So this data is going to be really cool. You know, say we've got 10,000 species, we've got X number of species of microbes in or on my seed. But a lot of the people who I think will be listening to this podcast are going to say, 'Okay, great. But how is this practical for me as a farmer? What kind of actionable recommendations can you make for me from this?' You know, right? Will your test also be saying here's what you should do to improve it or here's what you can do to get to the next step, you know, how will farmers be able to use this to really improve what they're.

20:37 Can we correlate that with nutrient density and some other things? Are we really getting that plant to uptake these nutrients we're applying or how is all that working? Well, and yes, I mean this is opening up a whole Pandora's box of things we could follow up on. The correlation between these microbial communities and nutrient density. And so it's really exciting to know that this is still in its infancy stages, but it's going to lead to lots of really cool things right down the road.

21:14 As we learn to leverage the value of nature and the power of nature, we don't know how to do that. So we can use this to kind of help guide us trying these different things. How is nature actually enhanced the most in which treatments? We're going to find surprises.

21:30 Well, and I'm super excited about this because we've always thought that a lot of our seeds are grown by some of our best customers, some of our best regenerative farmers that we work with. They're growing some of the seed that we sell. Rick Clark, for example, is growing some of our buckwheat. We've just got great farmers growing these things. So we've always thought that our seeds are better because of who and how they've been grown, but now we'll be able to put some quantification to that.

22:00 Exactly. Yeah, and so that's very exciting for us to know that that's now a possibility that we can start saying, 'Yes, this seed was regeneratively grown and it's better and here's the proof. Here's why.' Because so most farmers see seed to seed. It all looks the same.

22:16 Yeah. But now you can actually measure and that's super important because that's going to be from the beginning if they're interacting with micro. Yeah. So we're really excited about being able to work with you getting some of our seeds tested and stuff.

22:30 And so I know that a question that a number of people will have is, okay, well, great. This sounds super good. I'd love to be a part of it, but is this going to cost 300, 400, $500 to sample? Can I really afford to do that? And I know again you're just in the early stages of this, but can you give just a little indication of what you think the testing will cost? Yeah, I think it's very important. It has to be accessible in a cost point or else no point to it because nobody's going to be able to do it and especially if you want to do it.

23:01 Over the course of a growing season, you'll need to be a price point. We're trying to shoot for something like 150. I want to get it down to 100. We talked about a number of things that contribute to cost that really have nothing to do with the technology around, you know, shipping and things. So we want to get that down, but we want to make this really accessible.

23:21 I also have, as I mentioned before, this big dream to not just be for farmers anymore. I want it to be for people who have a garden. I want them to understand that these microbes are so important. I want a homeowner, someone who grows their own garden to be able to measure their soil. You're talking about helping people develop a regenerative mindset. Yes, exactly, to really get that there's really living things in there. When I get my data and I see 10,000, I mean sometimes I just sit at my computer and my jaw just drops and it's like is this even possible?

24:06 So amazing, it's mindblowing. I want to go back to that cost thing because I want to make sure people understand that part of that package is you're shipping them a box with cold packs because we're talking about living DNA. So you can't just throw it in a box and let it sit on the dash for two days. It has to be frozen. It has to be sent with priority shipping so that it stays frozen and cold. That's all part of that fee—you're providing the packaging, the cold packs, all of that is part of it and the return shipping. We're going to be paying for some convenience, but it's also making sure it gets done right.

24:51 It's important that you don't get your sample and then it changes a lot. That's all part, and because of that, the more samples that someone would send in at the same time the more cost effective it would be because we're not having to pay that shipping on every sample. You send it in and that's what's kind of cool because you could take a sample this month and stick it in your freezer and you could take a sample next month and stick it in your freezer and you could send it all at the same time. So you don't have to collect it all at once. If I'm doing a before and an after, as long as I'm willing to wait, I can collect my before, stick it in the.

25:28 Freezer, do my treatment, pull my after sample, and send them both in at the same time. Yes. So there's ways to try to keep the cost down. Yeah, that's super important. John and I have talked about that. It's no value if it people don't have access to it, right? Yeah. And so we'll continue to see that come down and and that's one thing I've always appreciated, working with John and A.E.A., you know, I we feel like they have a very similar mindset to Green Cover and that, you know, we're thinking like farmers. You know, we both come from farming backgrounds, right? Right. Right. We're thinking like farmers and it's like, wow, that's too expensive. How can we cut that cost or how can we make that better?

26:11 Well, that's why I was so excited to get connected with John. Because I've known about this technology and I worked in an agonomical company, Senta, but I was I didn't have my hands in the dirt and I didn't, you know, when I get this information how do we translate that into a very practical Yeah. And so that's why working with John is well, I remember that first conference you came to you were like, yeah I have a DNA sequencer it's like who is this lady I know I brought that out at the table and everyone's like what is she talking, but this is just the logical extension of that technology that you've developed, which is just super cool to be able to bring that in an affordable manner to farmers and again to help us make practical informed decisions to grow right, not only healthier food but also doing it in a more profitable manner right, and I think that's the goal of both AEA and green cover is to help farmers facilitate that yeah.

27:17 And it's rare that there's been such a win-win kind of proposition. I mean, regenerative farming is financially a good thing for farmers but it's good for human health, it's good for the environment. We need stop putting these chemicals out in the environment. Nobody's a bad guy here, but the more chemicals we put out, the more fertilizer, the more damaging we are to the whole environment. It's just a win-win for everyone. And when you kill those things, you inherit that job. You problem. Then it makes our job not only harder, but more expensive.

27:51 Well, this has been a great conversation. Here's my suggestion. I'm going to say that Green Cover, we'll send in some samples of some seed. We'll send in some samples of some soil.

28:02 I think it'd be really interesting. We can have a follow-up podcast episode where we can talk about some of those results. That'd be wonderful. We can even make the analysis available to people. Then we kind of discuss it. People can look at it. We'll pay the expense of doing that, but then people can get a little peak into what some of the results and what kind of recommendations. Yeah, I think that would be a really fun thing, a fun followup episode to do.

28:27 So, be wonderful. Well, any closing comments, Laura? I'm just so excited about the regenerative movement. I have kids and I want them to live in a world where they can be healthy and the environment's healthy and it's been rare that we've had a chance to really impact, you know, not just the United States, the whole world.

28:49 Yeah. And I'm glad there's a lot of leaders in other countries. You know, in the United States, farmers have been kind of locked down and some mindset and some incentivizing that kind of keeps them locked in, but there's other parts of the world that can still act in and move generative farming forward. So, and this community is such a sharing community. That's what we see at the Nexus events all the time is people are just so willing, open to share and you know, very few secrets. Very few secrets. And that's the beauty of it. I can do my own system and I can give you all the information. It doesn't take away from me. It's more like lighting a candle. You just don't give away any secret picture for it.

29:32 Yeah. So, yeah. Thanks, Keith. I thanks for thanks for sparking this candle and we'll all light ours off in that. So, sounds great. Thank you so much. My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska, but we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops.

30:04 That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.