Testing Soil Microbes with the Microbiometer

0:00 Welcome everybody to number six of our biological webinar series. A few housekeeping rules: everybody is muted and your video is blocked. If you have questions feel free to type them in the Q&A box and there'll be time at the end of the webinar here to answer those questions.

0:20 With that Keith, I'll let you introduce our speaker today.

0:26 All right, well thanks Dylan. It's our pleasure this afternoon, or this morning depending on where you're at, to have Laura Decker on. Laura is the president of Prolific Earth Sciences in the Microbiometer. Laura and I actually were on the same panel, a regenerative agriculture panel. We spoke at a conference in Washington DC back in October or November, and so I got the pleasure to meet her there and we were able to visit and found that we have a lot of things in common, both with a really great interest in soil biology but also the tool that her company has is really an innovative test that is being utilized by people all over the world.

1:17 Laura's company is developing products and methods that allow soil stewards all across the world to determine the impact of their regenerative practices on soil health. And one of the nice things about the way they have it structured is you don't have to send it into a lab—you can use your cell phone to determine that microbial biomass, which is really important because in some of these countries where they work, they do a lot in Australia and India and South America. They just don't have access to some of the labs that we're fortunate enough here in the United States to have access to. So one of the cool things is their product is opening up that testing and the way to assess soil health to people all across the globe.

2:07 So Laura is going to talk about the importance of soil microbes and how they fit into the whole system. And if you've joined us for a lot of the sessions that we've had so far, this is going to fit in really nicely with some of the composting sessions that we've done, making your own compost. And Laura is going to restress some of those points. And then again towards the end, she will be sharing a little bit about the actual Microbiometer testing kit that you can get and use to do that. I know Laura is originally from New York where the company is located, but she now hails from the Pacific Northwest—she lives in the Seattle area—and so she gets a lot of frequent flyer miles traveling back and forth.

2:51 So I'm glad my commute's not that far, Laura. So thank you for joining us, welcome, and I will let you take it from here.

2:55 Oh great, well thank you. I had to forget my little kickbox, so I had to grab that. I think I'll start first of all. Thank you everyone for tuning in. This is a really neat series on how to change practice and try different practices in terms of going regenerative. I have a little presentation that talks about soil biology. I found that it helps to level set when we start talking about soil testing and soil microbes, a little bit about the science. There's certainly a lot more out there, so I think some of you might find this too basic and some this might be new. But we're going to go through it and then we'll talk about the microbiometer.

3:45 So we're going to talk a little bit about understanding the role of soil microbes in agriculture and in soil structure and soil health. As Keith said, my name is Laura Decker. I'm the president of Prolific Earth Sciences. We are a very small company as many companies are in regenerative and family-based agriculture. We are located in the Hudson Valley of New York. We're just four people and we do all our own manufacturing and shipping, and we are pretty committed to the economy of the Hudson Valley. So we do as much sourcing of supplies and labor as we can from the local areas.

4:27 So symbiosis—the first thing we're going to talk about is the symbiosis between plants and microbes. One of the things that conventional agriculture has done over the past 100 to 150 years is start feeding plants directly through chemistry. But really plants are designed to be fed through biology. It's not that there's not fertilizers, but really the natural or more normal system is for bacteria and fungi and all kinds of nematodes and worms to

5:04 Be working in the soil with the plants in a symbiotic relationship. So the bacteria and the fungi work together. Bacteria are quite small, they have very little DNA and they can only manufacture certain compounds, but they need a lot of things to live. So what they do is trade. It's just sort of, I like to think of it as a cool medieval village, you know. Bacteria A will make a certain compound, bacteria B needs that compound, but bacteria B makes a compound that A needs, and so they trade back and forth, right? That's sort of one entity.

5:42 And then the plant is the same thing. So plants need nitrogen and all kinds of things from the soil, but the plants feed the soil microbes in the soil, and the microbes in the soil feed the plants. So one of the things in the cycle you can see on the picture is nitrogen fixation, phosphate uptake, ethylene regulation. And it is a little too scientific for me, someone else made it, but you can see in this plant, this is the rhizosphere, the area around the roots, okay? We know that roots stimulate bacterial growth. And that root growth will create more surface area for bacteria.

6:32 So this is just a real quick picture that shows what you do when you supply chemical nutrition to plants. So this is a control plant right here, and these are the plants. This is underground and above ground. If you give it phosphate chemically, you can see that the root growth is a lot less. If you give it nitrate, which it loves, you can see the root growth is significantly less. And there you go through, and what that is, significantly, is plants when they expend energy, do it only if they need to do it. So they have a lot of roots and a lot of root hairs if they need to mine those microbes to get nutrition. If they're getting the nutrition chemically through an input, they don't expend the energy to make those root hairs, right? Because they don't need to. It's just sort of like all biological beings are quite conservative in terms of their energy.

7:33 But we do know that roots, right, underground roots, is a big part of building soil structure and putting soil organic matter into the soil. So if over years and years you do not promote good root growth in the soil, there won't be decomposing root growth, which is food for microbes and plants, okay? Healthy soil is dependent on the microbial community for lots of things, and there's a lot more information on this on the web.

8:04 Plant required minerals and nutrients, right? We know that they trade nutrients back and forth between them, and that microbes make chemicals in the soil bioavailable to plants. So there's often like phosphate, phosphorus, a lot in the soil, but plants can't get to it directly. They need the microbes to make it available to them. Digestion of litter, so that's all those roots that are in there. The microbes will recycle those and turn those into soil carbon and soil structure, okay? So soil structure, I have a whole slide on that, is one of the most important things that soil biology does. And we know that soil structure increases water holding capacity, protection from erosion, and keeps the soil naturally aerated. And also plants and animals—this is a really cool science if you want to get into it—sort of talk to each other about the conditions. There have been studies that have shown that if certain pathogens come to a plant, they'll release hormones. The microbes in the plants will release hormones to deter those pathogens.

9:15 And microbes also sequester carbon into the soil. About 60 percent of a microbes body is sort of carbon, and when they die that carbon goes into the soil. Both is sequestered carbon, which you know is becoming a big thing economically and environmentally, but also that sequestered carbon becomes carbon stores for microbes to be able to consume when things are lean, right? So it's sort of like filling the freezer for the soil, if you will.

9:42 Here it is, soil carbon stores. Soil organic carbon (SOC) is broken down plant material, essentially. There's two kinds: soluble, which is fresh. That's sort of like very readily available broken down plant material, close to the surface, right? If you've ever worked with compost, really good compost, it boosts your soil because it brings some fresh soil organic carbon to the soil. So to give your plants and your microbes.

10:11 A big boost. And compost also contains usually a lot of microbes, so you get sort of two benefits. And then they're stored, which is also called stable organic carbon. And that's the carbon that's sort of harder to reach—it's carbon from dead microbes, it's litter from plants. And that is really what makes your soil resilient. If you have stored stable organic carbon, it takes a very long time to build stable carbon in your soil. And it can get depleted rather quickly through tilling, burning, and things like that. So it's one of those things that unfortunately is hard to get but easy to lose.

10:57 So here's a little picture of the process of building both fresh soil organic carbon and stable. So when we talk about adding inputs, a lot of them start with fresh and then they work to build the stable organic carbon in the soil, building a balanced microbial community. And this is why there's so much content online and why there's so many really interesting webinars like these. It's really, there's no formula yet—maybe they'll come up with one. It depends on your soil, climate, the crops we're going, and the history of what's been going on with your soil. But we do know that the goal is to create optimal conditions in your soil for microbes to thrive and then the plants that you grow on it to also thrive.

11:47 The microbial community can do this if given the right food and conditions. So again, when we talk about a lot of inputs and amendments, what we're talking about is not necessarily feeding your plant directly but indirectly through soil microbes, creating soil structure, healthy soil to then feed those plants. And then feeding microbes enables the microbial community to start rebuilding the cycle of healthy soil.

12:19 We also talk a lot when we talk to people about microbes—you know, what kind do I have? Any bad microbes or good microbes? And that's kind of a hard question. There's, I don't know—sometimes I say millions, sometimes I'd say billions. I'm not sure how many different kinds of microbes there are in the soil, but there's a lot. We have not DNA sequenced them. We certainly know the ones that cause a lot of problems in the world. But we do know that of the many microbes that there are, that diversity is the key to having resilient soil.

12:53 We talked before about how microbes symbiotically depend on each other. So the more and in general we say the bigger your community is, right, the more diverse. Just like a medieval village, right? They grow up, there's farmers, and then people specialize, right, and they trade back and forth. Same thing. So the goal is to have as large a community as you can, not just so you have lots of microbes out there working, because you have lots of different microbes out there feeding different micronutrients to the plants, protecting from different pathogens, and building soil structure modules.

13:29 And also some of the microbes can be virulent, right? It's called quorum sensing. I don't think I go into this slide, but there are some microbes that are normally pretty good, but if they get together with the wrong friends, they'll sort of attack. Quorum sensing, if you have a big diverse population, will prevent microbes—or sort of problematic microbes—from growing to a level that they can attack plants and other microbes.

14:07 Solution. So that's why obviously we're all here. We talk about the solutions to improving soil health and soil structure and natural soil fertility are chemical fertilizers, microbial inputs and biostimulants, and of course cover crops, right, which is a big one. So chemical fertilizers, you know, they're expensive and over time, overuse of them depletes the microbial population, right? We do know that if you put chemicals into the soil that are readily available for the plant, the plant will stop feeding the microbes and start the vicious cycle of deteriorating the soil. We also know that chemical fertilizers have done a ton for the world food population and they are quite effective. So that's why regenerative agriculture is so appealing to so many people because it stresses judicious use of these.

15:04 Microbial inputs are also a great way to do it. Mycorrhizal fungi is one of people's famous. Most of the time, when people just put microbial inputs into the soil, if their soil is such that—

15:21 It cannot support microbial life. They will sort of live and die. Research is ongoing, but it's unclear also how much microbial populations vary by location and crop. So a one-size-fits-all works in some places and not others. But again, a lot of the inputs that are there now have a combination of both microbial input and food for those microbes, like compost and cover crops.

15:50 Cover crops are one of those things that if anyone working on soil health could wave a wand, we'd say everyone does cover crops. It's the mantra of ecoag, which is no bare soil. It keeps roots in the soil, keeps down erosion, it keeps the soil carbon cycle going, and it keeps those microbes alive even in winter or when things are bare.

16:14 Biostimulants are another one. They work because they provide better conditions for microbes to grow. They help perpetuate a system that reduces reliance on chemical fertilizers. There's lots of different names for them. These are things that will feed the microbes and work with the soil structure that's there.

16:36 So here's where we come in. I'm here to talk about my company, the Microbiometer. We do know that soil microbial life is incredibly important. People know that fungal content is really one of the big drivers of soil structure and also in crops that you eat—wine, cannabis, berries—fungal content does a lot for taste and quality.

17:02 One other thing why the founder of our company, Judith Patrick, started it is she saw that the tests out there were mostly lab-based or respiration-based, which she thought was problematic. The Microbiometer is a kit. It's designed to be portable. You test field-moist fresh soil and you use your cell phone to read the results. It's designed to sort of mimic microscopy.

17:30 Our test card has a small window to look at, and that's much larger than you would look at through a microscope. It's a very fast test. It takes 20 minutes. You can do it in the field, although most people take the soil and do it at home. There's no lab, and you use your cell phone. It stores all the results.

17:53 The reason that people use it in the regenerative world is to be able to baseline where is their soil in terms of microbial life and where is it going? As I use different practices or different products, am I improving the soil microbes through time? Am I gaining a real understanding of both the growing changes in the microbes, the seasonal changes, and how they react to different cover crops, different inputs, and even different kinds of compost?

18:23 It is a tool that gives people data. It is not a recommendation tool. You don't take the test and be told what to do with your soil. We don't do that. We're not agronomists. That's where companies like Green Cover come in to help you understand what you should do to make things better or how to tweak your existing practices.

18:46 We manufacture and ship this directly. It's fairly cost-effective. A starter kit is 135 dollars. And as Keith mentioned, one of our big missions is to go more into small-scale farming. We're doing a partnership now in Africa.

19:05 A lot of the food that's consumed on this planet is grown by small-scale farmers in India and Africa and places like that. This is a tool that's readily accessible to them to start rebuilding natural soil fertility, improve the environment, improve the quality of food, and also improve the finances of farming. Farming is a business for people, but it's also how we all live.

19:32 If people can reduce expensive fertilizers and use more economical processes to have the soil naturally feed their crops, they will be more financially and food secure.

19:49 Here's my little slide. I'm Laura at Microbiometer. I said we're a pretty small company. We love to talk to growers and people who are using the kit and app in the field. That's sort of my canned presentation. If we want to have a discussion afterwards.

20:12 We do have a couple of questions here that we could go over. Can you compare the results you get from a Microbiometer test to what you might see on a PLFA test?

20:30 You'd think it'd be easy right to test stuff. And that's right, it's like I want to see how many microbes are in my soil, it should be as similar as just stepping on a scale.

20:42 PLFA measures certain products or certain chemicals and substances inside microbes. So we don't correlate with PLFA because we don't have a window into what microbes have what chemicals.

20:59 And our soil person is not here, and I'm not sure people who use PLFA if it's on dried soil. One of our big tenants is that when you're looking at soil microbes you are looking at living things, so you do not want a long period of time between taking the soil out of the ground and testing it. So you don't want to send it somewhere for two days because two things might happen: some things might die, but some things might do better in a little Ziploc bag, so you would have either too high or too low. And we also don't think that drying, killing microbes, and reconstituting them makes any sense at all. In order to see what was there, you don't kill everything and then see if it'll come back to see what was there.

21:48 So PLFA is not used that much, particularly around the world. The other test that's out there is the Haney test, the respiration. And respiration is mostly used in the United States; it's a test the USDA likes a lot.

22:08 The Haney test is incredibly useful, but it measures respiration, which is the rate at which microbes sort of breathe, respire. And you can have dormant microbes that aren't actively producing carbon and they wouldn't show up on Haney. You could have very chill happy microbes that have a low metabolism that read low, where you've got very stressed out microbes that are working really hard with high respiration. So we think that it tells you something about the soil, but not necessarily the total community.

22:47 That's not to say it's not a good test. When Judy designed it, she was a microbiologist, so she loved microscopy. So what she wanted to do is say, how can we, without arming everyone with an expensive microscope and also reading slides is incredibly difficult, how can we figure out a way to mimic it. And one of the things I'll say about the test is when you have especially really good soil, the microbes are tied up in the soil particles. So the first thing you have to do to test soil microbes is to separate them from the soil particles. So we have a funny little science experiment: you take the soil, put it in a salt solution that helps break up the bonds between the soil and the microbes, and we whisk it in a very controlled way to try to separate them, so we get a microbial soup that we put on our test card that then gets read.

23:41 So if you leave the solution too long, it's salt water and all the microbes will die, so it's a very specific time test. But it doesn't correlate with PLFA because we didn't go into the science of what it does. We've had a lab, Earth, correlated to their microscopy; they have a PhD there who does microscopy. And so we've correlated with microscopy and with carbon fumigation extraction at times, which is a very complicated, crazy, dangerous method of testing soil that only academics do. So I wouldn't think anyone out there would do that because you can explode things.

24:30 So when you go ahead and make the solution and put it on the test card, what is it actually telling you then? What the microbial solution will do when you put it on the postcard—the card has a specialized membrane that will sort of wick away the water and leave on the test card the microbes. This test is designed for naturally occurring soil, not crazy engineered soil, not hydroponic soil, but really god-given soil. And what we felt here are my test cards, here they are, they're very little. The membrane will wick away the water and the microbes will be on the membrane. And we know that microbes and fungi pick up pigmentation naturally in the soil, which is why hydroponics is not a good fit for our test, and we have an algorithm.

25:21 App that we worked on for years and years that reads the color of it. You can see there's a grayscale around it and returns a result of it. We actually returned microbial carbon which is similar to biomass and it's a number right. We'll turn you a number from zero to about three thousand, three thousand being you know only people who sing to their cannabis soil at night right in little pots.

25:52 And you use it not to compare to Haney or PLFA or anything else but to compare to the soil over time so we call our test a benchmark test. I assume as time goes on microbial test will get a little bit more standardized but we on purpose didn't use the same metrics as Haney and PLFA because we didn't want people to think that you know each method is a little different and it uses different things. But you know in our mind thinking about how to measure microbial soil the big thing was tested as soon as you can and test it while they're still alive and our test also picks up dormant spores which is important in the winter.

26:38 On that number that's just kind of like a you know I guess how does that where would you see maybe a modern agricultural? Is that fungal or more bacterial? So yeah, so a lot of the times under 200 rating is considered fairly poor soil, okay? Agricultural soil is normally between 200 and 600, 600 being good and sort of boutique container soil can be as high as you know twenty five hundred three thousand but that is not anyone growing anything significant.

27:15 Agricultural soil a lot of people strive for a one-to-one fungal to bacteria ratio. And again it's not one fungal being to one microbe, it's sort of mass right because fungi are much bigger than microbes. But people who are going often grapes and berries want to hire higher funko content or people who are using microbial or mycorrhizal fungi inputs. When they use the test sometimes they'll test it before they put the mycorrhizal fungi down and then they'll test it a couple weeks later to see if it goes up the ratio.

27:55 We have discovered when we first designed the test we had access only to US soils so we didn't worry too much about under 200 because we were like that's just poor soil. We've discovered that a lot of the world is very poor soil so we're working on adding to the algorithm a much more robust reading at the lower end so people right if you're below 200 you still want to get there so we want people to be able to look at the trends over time at the lower end. So we are we're working on improving that lower end reading just because we didn't put a lot of time into it at the beginning.

28:31 And then we do have a couple people asking you know questions about how many tests can your kit do and what is the availability of resupply and yeah so this is our starter kit. We designed it to be pretty robust. I'll tell you if you fly with it you get stopped by TSA. And the starter kit is $135 and it contains all the sort of reusable things you'd need and then the refills are really this salt packet which is just a sodium solution, it's totally safe.

29:13 And the test cards, so when you order a starter kit it has 10 tests in it. We also throw in five for people just to play around and get used to it because you do have to get the technique down and then you order refills right. And the refills run between ten dollars a test to about six dollars seventy-five a test depending on how many you order but you only need to have one starter kit.

29:43 And then the app is free so the app we don't do any subscription we don't take your you know children's names or anything as collateral. The app has video instruction, written instruction, timers in it to make sure you do it right and it stores all of your information so you need to be on a network to download the app but you can read a test offline which you know if you're on a remote farm or in Africa somewhere that's what you do. And then the results are all stored to the cloud so that you can download them into Excel, combine them with other data and all that stuff. So the app is really good. I have a picture of it. Well everyone has an app but it's a very nice app, it's free to download.

30:30 Called microbiometer reader, you do need it to take the test. You really should open an account, but it doesn't require anything mysterious. Just put an email in there. It enables you to compare results over time and you can name your samples so you know where it came from. It'll also GPS locate where you took the test, so it'll help you go back to the same spot every year.

31:00 That kind of brings us to a question from Jenna here: how often should we be testing these soils? Well, we're like, let's just make a test and then see how people use it, but of course people want guidelines. What we say is people need to think about what they're trying to do with their soil. The first thing we recommend is people sort of baseline throughout the year, right? The seasons are different. So get a feel for it. One of the most important things in this test, in most soil testing, is consistency. In a field things will vary, but go to the same place, because you're more interested in the change than the absolute number. If you go to the same place every year, you can see the change, as opposed to if you go to a different place at a different time of year, you'll get two changes: one geographic and one seasonal.

31:59 We recommend that people use it initially to get an understanding of what's going on beneath the soil and then to use it to evaluate practices. For example, if you put down an amendment in December, nothing's going to happen in two weeks, but if you do it early in the season, usually a week or two will show a burst of microbes. The other thing we encourage people to do is understand the natural changes in the growing cycle and the seasons, and then understand that when you use an amendment or an input, they'll often give you a big boost of microbes right away, but really what you want is sustained growth. You want to say you got new compost, right? You test the soil before, test it a week or two after, and then test it a month later to see if that is still going on, because that's the real indication that the product is working on your soil. On our website we have information about it and some links to other sites that'll help you understand it.

33:08 With these tests, are they detecting the presence or the amount of mycorrhizal fungi, or just maybe fungi family in general? We don't differentiate, so we're not going to tell you what kind of microbes there are, good or bad, or what kind of fungi there are. It's total fungal content. Mycorrhizal is just the kind that most growers love, right? If you are doing an amendment, it's normally mycorrhizal, but we don't differentiate between the types of microbes. We're probably not going to because the diversity in the microbial population and the rate at which they mutate is really fast. Two microbes can have a DNA difference of twenty percent, which is the difference between you and a cricket or something. It's really big. And it's so big because they don't have very much DNA. Their denominator is small, so that's how the math works out.

34:12 It just gives you a total number. Again, it's a way for you to gauge things over time, not to do it once and done. Which is why, as we work on manufacturing—we're still a fairly new company, we've only been selling about four years—we're trying to drive the costs down so growers can really test much more often.

34:37 Do you have any examples of how farmers have used this information and then maybe changed or improved their practice after utilizing this? Do they have good results? Well, we have worked with a lot of different sites, and on our website we have a lot of information. A lot of amendment companies have been using it to sort of show and prove to their users how it's working and almost to work as a compliance tool, right? If you say to someone, look, this product will work—like cover crops, right? We know cover crops are amazing, they do all kinds of things for the soil. But if you go to someone who's ever cover cropped and you say if you spend the time and the money to put down this cover crop and then roller crimp it in a year things will be better, well that's a long time and a lot of money.

40:24 Trying to come up with a better scale for them so they don't feel like they're getting bad scores. But there you know two or three hundred is pretty good. And that's just, you know, soils are different around the world they can sustain different amounts of microbial life. You just can't make a soil in Australia look that and perform the same as the soil, you know, or something like that.

40:49 Yeah yeah I think that kind of votes well or true with like organic matters too, you know. And the other thing is we have not for compost teas and extracts, fungal the bacteria is not available. There's a lot of validation and testing we do and we just have not been able to get to that yet. So if you test compost teas and extracts you will not get a fungal to bacterial ratio that is only available for soils and composts.

41:20 I will say something about compost. The compost world is really exciting and interesting and it's terrific. There are some people out there putting some really weird things in compost. That's not good or bad, our test again is designed for God-made soil right. If you are making a very cool compost with lots of things that don't normally occur in soil you could be interfering with the natural tests. So I always warn people, I'm like look if you have all kinds of things, particularly things that are heavily pigmented into your compost, you should be a little bit careful. We also tell people the real measure of the effectiveness of a compost is if over time it improved your soil microbial content right, not that the compost itself. Although that's a good quality test. I mean if you have the world's most amazing soil compost and you throw it on concrete it's not going to make the concrete fertile right.

42:18 But you want to test actually the soil after it gets worked into the ground, okay.

42:28 Yeah you kind of brought up you know a lot of sales in Australia. Norm here is asking about the prices on the website. Is that for I guess you know how does that work when it comes? Africa in particular is what he's asking. In Africa yeah, so again we're four people and we're struggling. But if anyone out there is terrific in tariffs let us know. The kit is 135, it ships free to us anywhere you want to go right from us. We don't use Amazon, we just do it ourselves. And then we ship flat rate internationally for 40. International it depends on where you're going can be different because of tariff and Customs. So for example in Australia, which especially with COVID took a long time to get there and Customs, we have a few non-exclusive distributors that have stock there. And it's much easier to get there now because our distributor paid the customs and the shipping and everything. It's not 135 for a starter kit.

43:34 And then we have some people in Europe as well. Although we will send directly, but it does create problems. Getting to India and Africa has been a little bit harder for us in terms of sort of direct access. Usually if someone's, a lot of the times our test kits in Africa are because there's NGOs or groups in the United States that are going there and so we ship them to them and they bring them because they get, you know, through it all. But we're hoping to work on that. So we do ship all over the world. We don't ship to Russia or China just because we, that's too complex for us. And we do have a hard time in South America because some of those tariffs are like 200. And it makes people very upset when they buy a 135 starter kit and get a 400 customs bill.

44:34 Imagine. A lot, you know, we're a very small company. If you write, I'll put my slide back up. But if you go to our website microbiometer.com and you hit like email us, you email the entire company, all four of us with questions. We also have bulk pricing so if there's companies that want to arm sort of their sales people with these to show users or give the users the kits we have much cheaper pricing. If you buy in bulk and our bulk prices start at 20 kits, so it's not thousands of them. And but a lot of amendment companies have sort of armed their people with it as an educational tool.

45:21 Yeah yeah. I've seen those around a little.

45:23 Bit with some especially our elevated AG team, yeah, utilizing them. Yeah, and then where in Africa, so we've sent them to Kenya primarily. Earthfort, who's one of our really awesome partners and has sort of stepped in as a company that helps us do a lot of our lab work because they have access to other soils. They are doing a lot of work in Africa and they include the microbiometer and sort of their soil kits. Matt Slaughter who runs Earthfort is going to Africa about twice a year, Kenya and Uganda, and we're hoping to go with them next year, which will be really fun.

46:09 Chuck here is kind of just making a comment, maybe wanting your thoughts on it—over, you know, testing different soils or different material, different parent materials. Parent color materials, well, that skew the results, maybe, you know, progressive soils or, you know, maybe not so progressive soils. How does that maybe—you can't understand what he's asking? No, because I don't know what progressive soils are, sorry. Maybe, you know, maybe more biologically correct soils, probably. Yeah, so yeah, because it is a colorimetric test. Our tests can get interfered with significant amounts of pigment in the soil. For the most part, those are chemically sort of added, right? If someone's doing a weird amendment, the big example is biochar, right? So sometimes people put biochar in compost, right, or huge quantities of biochar into a soil, right, and that will skew the results two ways. One, biochar has got a lot of color in it, and two, if you have soil that's 20% biochar, right, when we do our test of a half a milliliter of soil, it won't really be half a milliliter of soil because 20% of it is taken up by biochar, right? So you will have a sort of lower number, right? Because you put so much, and biochar is a terrific product. I'm not saying anything against biochar, but when people are doing very sort of strange things or they have a very weird soil—and again, you know, we are learning so much about soil around the world. For example, very high iron soil can be a problem. So we now include a magnet. If you have a lot of iron, you just put a magnet underneath it and it sort of precipitates out the iron, right? Because the iron will mess up the color. If you do have some soil that is like, you don't know about it, you know, send us an email about it.

48:20 The other thing is, we're a small company. We really believe in what we do, but our users are sort of our science team. And so if someone has a strange soil that's giving a weird reading, we often pay for them to send it to Earthfort for them to do some testing, because, you know, and we'll cover it to say like, huh, you know, that's interesting. We love the idea that the kit being used everywhere, but we do know that's sort of unrealistic, right? Agriculture needs to sort of stop the one-size-fits-all, which we, you know, so that we're trying to gather places where the test can be interfered with—other very strange organic matter or different practices. Another example would be really, really, really heavy sand soil. Sand is very heavy. We have a precipitation process in the tube, and if your soil is predominantly sand, the sand will precipitate out so quickly that you'll get a very low reading. So we're working on testing very sandy soils so that you read the test not after 20 minutes but maybe after five, right? You'll get a more accurate result.

49:35 I mean, I don't have to tell you guys that soil is incredibly complex, and one of the hardest things for us is in order to get soils from international places, you have to be a USDA certified lab to get those soil samples, which we're not. And Earthfort is, so they can test soils from around the world. So, you know, we can say, oh, you know, we didn't know this about the soils in Israel, for example. You know, maybe we'll have to change our test or put a note or something like that.

50:12 And then Ken here asks, how does the test differentiate between bacterial and fungal content and their ratios? Yeah, so it is a broad estimate. So it's not quite the same as microscopy would be. What we did is we discovered that as our algorithm read it, fungi are one much bigger.

50:36 Right, and one often picks up a slightly different pigment. I will say that there are some fungi that have zero color okay, and those we don't pick up. So the test is a very good quick and dirty measure, but it is not perfect. No problem acknowledging that. So there are certain types of fungi that never—they're always clear—we won't pick those up, but the algorithm picks them up because of the slightly different color and the much bigger size.

51:09 I will say something: our test has this funny little thing that whisks up the soil for 30 seconds, and it's one of the more important steps. When people do the test, if you whisk your soil for too long you will destroy everything in there. The first thing you kill is nematodes. Our test does not pick up nematodes because we obliterate them, sadly. But when you follow the test, you do want to make sure you do all the timing correctly because you can—if you whisk it too much, you'll break up all the fungal filaments and they won't be read properly. And you will lyse a lot of the microbes so they will also not be read.

51:57 Yeah, I think that probably leads well into our next question here from Matt, just asking what are some of the common mistakes that users need to avoid when performing this test. Yeah, so the common—kind of like Masters and PhDs think they can use their own test tubes. You can't, you have to use our weird test tubes because they fit this whisker perfectly.

52:28 The most important thing is that you use fresh soil, okay. So if you have soil from last year sitting on the shelf and you test it and compare it to this year, it's going to be information, but it's not the same information. So fresh soil, and that you follow the instructions as much as possible, okay. There's videos, there's timers, there's all that stuff. You want to make sure that you whisk for 30 seconds—there's a timer in there—and then you read the test after 20 minutes of settling, okay. And that you read the test card within two minutes of putting it down. So it's mostly a timing issue.

53:10 The other issue is the more you can do everything the same the better, okay. So when you do a lab test, every little step can have a micro change, right, and they can add up. So if you can take—do the test and read the test card in the same place, even every day, that's better, okay. You don't want to do it in direct sunlight—that kind of messes with the camera—and if you use the same phone it will be more consistent, okay. So same lighting, same phone, even same person would be very good, right, to keep it consistent.

53:48 I will say I give a big thing about fresh soil. You can—and most people do—go on the field, throw some soil in a Ziploc bag. If you keep it in a cool, dark place for a couple days, you can still test it. It's fine. It's just when you throw it in the freezer for six months or keep it on the dash of your car for a week, there'll probably be changes. So you don't have to test it like within seconds, but normally 48 hours—as long as you don't let it dry out—is pretty good.

54:16 And if you're very interested in fungal content, you want to test as close to a root as you can. Like some people pull up a little plant and they'll scrape the roots, okay, because that's where a lot of the mycorrhizal fungi will be, okay.

54:34 I guess kind of going back to your experience in other countries—are they making their own compost and biological amendments, and can you describe any of that process at all? Oh, in Australia, which is fairly comparable agriculture to the United States, they sort of have the same compost and inputs as we do. So there are places making it in Africa like Earthfort is going there to help them make their own compost, particularly in Kenya and Africa. I don't think there's a lot of places that are making compost now or even compost teas, and so that's one of the things that a lot of companies and NGOs are working to do.

55:32 We know in India the government sort of subsidizes fertilizers and pesticides, so they have a lot of control over it, and they are mandating soil testing for farmers. But it is sort of a wild west out there in terms of what soil testing is doing, you know, what it means for the

55:52 Farmers, but again they're in a lot of places the government is sort of encouraging fewer chemical fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides, but there's nothing else for people to be doing right? So there's sort of a disconnect between the two. And I think that's giving a lot of business opportunities for American and Australian companies to go into those places to bring their technology, particularly if it's easy and it uses local materials to sort of fill in that gap between what do you do when you can't use fertilizer and pesticides and you have nothing else right?

56:36 I think we got maybe we'll go one more question here and kind of wrap things up and maybe get some closing comments from you, Laura. This one I'll kind of let you turn them into, but I guess I'll start off with this one from Mark. Which crops are fungal, which are bacteria dominated, or is there an effect on the quality, nutrient density of a crop, and do some crops favor one over the other? You know, when it comes to mycorrhizal fungi, things like oats, flax, sort of sedans and spring peas are all very highly mycorrhizal type crops. I think Mark, if you want, you could call us and maybe we could get some more specific details on what crops you're wanting to pair, but Laura do you have anything to add or comment to that that you maybe have seen?

57:27 Again we leave that work to you guys because it's hard, it's complex, it's a whole other business model, so I want to hear what you guys think. Yeah, those are definitely the species that are my go-to when you're wanting to build that mycorrhizal fungi, and the important thing is too, after you've done that with those crops, is trying to keep something growing in there that's going to keep that biology living and growing. So yeah, Mark you could definitely contact us and we could certainly look into some other more specific species maybe that you're referring to, but I think with that, Laura do you have any closing comments?

58:10 No, I'm just putting my contact information into the chat. I will say that if you send an email to info@microbometer you'll get all of us, and my staff is much more on top of things than me, sadly. No, I mean I just want to say thank you for having me on here. I think it's really cool. I think that adding sort of education and information and testing to the cover crop and amendment world is really key, and it's really neat to be working with companies like yours. And Keith, I'm going to send you my soil because where we are is a 200 acre farm and we need pastures to be cover cropped, so we're pretty excited about getting a little regenerative ourselves on our farm.

59:05 Yep, we'd be happy to help. Thanks, yeah, yeah. I think, but no, thanks for having me. Please, you want to reach out again? We find that you have a kit. I will say that we, you know, you can order our kits yourself, and if you email us you can ask for a discount code and we'll give them out like candy, so that's for that ask for that discount, you'll get it.

59:31 Oh, very good, Laura. I appreciate you taking time to educate and inverse this moral and this testing kit. I think it could be a great tool for any grower or any maybe company that's wanting to quantify, maybe it's a cover crop they're planning or biological they're putting down, to see how their soil is performing in a more easier way, maybe a quicker test than sending it off to a lab. I think sending off to a lab certainly can be of some good info as well. Yeah, we don't encourage people to do sort of all kinds of testing. This is just a little more immediate, so thank you. Yeah, so definitely appreciate it and appreciate everybody else hopping on for this today, and this will be recorded and put onto our YouTube page. And then next week we have Armin Miller with Elevate Ag and Nausea LaFontaine, I believe is how you say your last name, and there's going to be kind of talking microbe and plant relationships about at the same time as today's webinar, so we will hopefully see you all next week. And Laura, thank you again. Everybody have a great day.