Why Change Your Food Production? Linking Soil Health to Human Health

0:00 I guess the first thing that I wanted to look at is why would we change the way we're producing food that we're all consuming and millions of Americans are consuming and I wanted to just like link soil health and human health. Some of you will have heard all this information before. I'm just going through this first bit really quickly but I think it's important that we establish why it is that we definitely need to change the way we produce food in this country.

0:38 So the USA spends twice as much on health care as any other country in the world but ranked 17th in terms of your health and your life expectancy in this country. So there's a disconnect between the amount of money spent on health in this country and what the outcomes are. The causes, I was looking at a recent article on the causes of death in London in 1705 and they just had a list of all the things that people had died from and I couldn't see anything on that list that is now currently on our list of the things that people died from. So back in those days people died from infectious diseases like the plague and that sort of thing but there were other things as well like tuberculosis and others that now don't feature very much in our society today.

1:30 When we look at the leading causes of death today here in the United States, cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer's top that list and those three autoimmune disorders are actually nutritionally related. And 54 percent of children here in the United States now suffer some kind of chronic illness. If you talk, if any of you have children or grandchildren or you're linked with people like schoolteachers, they'll tell you about just the incredible range of illnesses that kids are turning up with in schools now or in homes, like especially things like skin rashes, food allergies, headaches and all kinds of unexplained things. Until recently, well in say ten years, leukemia has been the number one killer of children and then just recently brain cancer has taken over leukemia. Brain cancer is now the number one killer of children under the age of 15.

2:29 So we have to wonder why is it that we've got all these things with our body, it's actually just not functioning effectively. It's breaking down. It's where we're not getting the sorts of things that we used to. Disease was once something that you caught from someone else, was an infectious organism and it was transferable. Now we have things like you know you can't catch a stroke or cardiovascular disease or diabetes or something from someone else. These are not infectious diseases. This is the body actually breaking down, it's failing to function as it should.

3:06 These autoimmune disorders, there are now 80 known ones and there's a whole lot of mysterious ones as well. So that's incredible that there are so many, they keep getting added to the list. You'll be talking to someone, they say well my doctor said I've got some kind of autoimmune disorder but I can't even put a name on it. My body's just not functioning effectively. But the ones that we can put names on include things like diabetes, that's probably the one that's really taken off the most, and then cancer. It's predicted that one in two people, not long from now one in two people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

3:40 Autism and the numbers for autism are going through the roof. I think someone was telling me the other day in California that it's predicted that by 1950 or something one in two children will be born autistic. Alzheimer's, of course, all very well aware of that in this country. It's probably more significant if there are some developing countries that you go to where most of these diseases are unheard of, particularly Alzheimer's, dementia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis and so on. So they collectively cost trillions of dollars a year which is why the USA health bill is just escalating. But they also of course cause a lot of unhappiness and pain in our families. You know we don't really want to have these kinds of things happen to us and truly they are all related to what you eat and how what you eat is produced.

4:40 Autoimmune disorders currently affect one in six Americans and those numbers are growing daily. And more Americans are actually dying from a poor diet than any other factor. So part of the problem is poor food choices. I mean when you see what people, if you're in the supermarket buying food and you look at what people, I see people with the cart just totally loaded up with stuff that none of it I would call food. There wouldn't be one single item in there that I would call food. But even people who are trying to make good food choices have a difficulty actually getting the minerals and trace elements that they need the way that the food is being produced.

5:18 So one of the things I was going to just touch on briefly this morning before we get into biology is the nitrogen story which has been a very big story here in the United States. I think something like 49 states in the US now have contaminated groundwater and that groundwater is contaminated with nitrate. There are also lots of other issues. Nitrate is a very potent carcinogen. It's carcinogenic at two parts per million and I think your allowable level in the states here is something like ten parts per million. So the fact that it's still regarded as being safe to drink at ten parts per million is only because above that it causes blue baby syndrome where babies actually die from drinking it. But at less than ten parts per million it's still a very potent carcinogen. So lots of times when the groundwater is regarded as being safe it's not actually safe.

6:09 So the nitrogen story is a very interesting story. You'd actually wonder how it came to be that we've got into this situation. For a start, when you apply nitrogen, only 10 to 40 percent of it is taken up by plants in the year of application. So that means we lose 60 to 90 percent of what we apply. Some of that is going to go up into the atmosphere. Someone's going to leach through the groundwater or be carried in surface runoff. So when nitrogen is applied, it's a highly mobile element and plants simply can't take up what is applied in one go, like the way that it's applied. It's not possible for a plant to take up all the nitrogen you apply and then store it for later. It's only going to take up what it can use immediately and that's only 10 to 40% of it. The rest of it you lose.

7:04 So what that means is that there's a hundred billion dollars worth of nitrogen fertilizers applied globally and 60 to 90 billion dollars of that either goes up into the atmosphere or pollutes the water. So you might as well just get $100 bills and chuck them out really. And there's over 500 oceanic dead zones now around the world. You have some famous ones here in the United States down in the Gulf and at Chesapeake Bay and those kinds of places. And then you've got some inland ones like a URI I guess. But then around the world, this is not just a US problem. There are 500 of these dead zones. We've got some famous ones around Australia too and New Zealand has them and it's everywhere. So there's not just the United States problem.

7:52 But just to give you one example of another issue with nitrogen fertilizers is that they acidify soils. In Washington state I was talking to Steve Appel born the other day. Some of you may know Steve. He was saying the pH of their calcareous soils has fallen from 8. So 8 is a high pH, like it's an alkaline soil, down to 4 which is a very acidic soil. That's a massive drop in pH and he says we're just seeing this routinely now with soil acidity being an issue whereas before the soil was alkaline.

8:23 So inorganic nitrogen also forms non-protein nitrogen. We could talk about that at length but I won't. If you had livestock that is a real issue because they cannot digest non-protein nitrogen. It's actually a poison to their systems. And it stimulates weeds which, if we're talking just our row cropping and we're putting in nitrogen and plants are using only 10 to 40% of it and the rest of it's a pollutant, but it's also stimulating weeds and then we end up having to use herbicides. And then there's a whole lot of reasons how that affects other things that affect the metabolic processes within that plant. We end up using things like insecticides and fungicides simply because we started with the nitrogen fertilizer that has made the plant unable to deal with other things in its environment. So they're expensive, they're inefficient and they're polluting. So why do we use them? Well it is true that applying nitrogen does make plants grow.

9:27 House look and you had some pots with just soil with no nitrogen and then you had some others with soil and you add nitrogen. These plants will grow more, but the problem with all of those experiments is that those pots are not biologically active. That soil that's used in those experiments has been collected months before or years before and piled up in a great big bunker somewhere and hasn't had living plant roots in it. And then it's all going to be homogenized and possibly sterilized before it's put into all those pots. So what you're seeing is that seeds are going to be put into soil, but it's not a biologically active soil. There's no mechanism there for plants to be able to get nitrogen in any other way other than the fertilizer that was placed on those. And so you add fertilizer and the plants grow more.

10:15 It's not a deliberate act, I don't think. It's just that that's what we see when we do an experiment in that way. And in the same way, if we have a field where the soil's not biologically active, if it's been plowed and plowed and plowed or sprayed and sprayed and sprayed and left bare for long periods of time between crops, and we haven't actually actively been doing things to keep that soil as a living thing, apply nitrogen and plants grow more because they have no other way to get it. Whereas in a natural system, plants can get all of the nitrogen that they need, and it doesn't matter what kind of plants they are. If they're green, they have some kind of relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

10:51 So we have this fixation on legumes because of their association with Rhizobium. And why do we always think about legumes? That's because Rhizobium is a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that we can cultivate in the laboratory, and we can make an inoculant. We can inoculate seeds with both sodium, and we can get good legume growth. But in fact, there are thousands of different kinds of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and 999 of those cannot be cultured in the laboratory. So we cannot make an inoculum from those other ones. But they are all there in a natural environment. And if you think about it, if you go somewhere in the world where there is a diverse, rich kind of natural environment like the Amazon rainforest, I guess, or something like that, there aren't any legumes there really. There may be one or two, but it's not really a situation where you've got lots of leguminous plants. And you've got massive amounts of dry matter production. The biomass production is huge.

11:54 In fact, we see that the most productive environments on earth actually have very few if any legumes in them. And the science is now showing that in diverse mixes like if you were looking at your forage mixes or your cover crop mixes, the science is showing that the ones that don't have legumes in them actually build soil faster and fix a lot more nitrogen. So what we want is diversity rather than a single focus that we have on nitrogen fertilizer.

12:23 The problem with adding nitrogen to a plant is that they become empty vessels. Yes, we do get more biomass, but it doesn't have anything else very much in it because what we've done is formed a disconnect. When the plant has to get its own nitrogen, it has to produce root exudates to support nitrogen-fixing bacteria. And in the same process as supporting nitrogen-fixing bacteria, it's supporting a whole lot of other bacteria and fungi that are able to bring calcium and magnesium and sulfur and phosphorus and zinc and boron and everything that that plant needs. So if we short-circuit that process, apply nitrogen, the plant will grow, but it doesn't have all those trace elements in it that it needs for its own immune system to function effectively. So it's going to be susceptible to insect attack. It's going to be susceptible to fungal issues, etc., etc. And then we're put in this situation of having to apply those things as well as nitrogen. So it becomes very expensive to produce a crop under that system where we are starting off with an inorganic fertilizer, which leads us down the path of having to apply a whole lot of other things.

13:36 So if we just look at some data on that from Australian grass-fed dairy—all our dairy is grass-fed—but if we look at nitrogen applied to pasture and relate that to milk production, what we see is that we have this is the amount of nitrogen being applied. So over time, farmers are applying more and more nitrogen, as they have here in the United States, trying to get things to grow more. But when we look at milk production over that same period, there hasn't been really any relationship between those two curves. And this was put together by the University. Two professors at the University who put this data together said that this increase in milk production over time was due to improved animal genetics. And it's a selection process that was taking place in having dairy cows that were actually able to produce more milk for a given amount of feed. It wasn't because they were being better fed. So there is no relationship in a pasture situation between how much nitrogen you apply. You might get more bulk of feed, but it actually hasn't got anything in it that animals need.

14:40 And then the same thing happens with grains and with vegetables. We put nitrogen on and things grow more, but the nutrients aren't there. So you can eat more of it, but it's not actually satisfying your need for nourishment. So we've got all these empty calories now, which are part of the issue that we have with things like diabetes. And it goes largely unrecognized. And then this reduced plant uptake of the minerals and trace elements obviously has a flow-on effect for animal and human health.

15:11 Now, no civilization has outlived the health of its citizens, right? If we all fail, what is happening with our society now is that not only do we have this extraordinary expansion in autoimmune disorders and kids being born with all kinds of issues—I don't know what the right word for it is, but they're not really diseases, but all kinds of issues with their metabolism that we weren't seeing in kids fifty years ago. But we as a species are actually failing to reproduce as well. Infertility in young couples is somewhere between 25 and 30 percent, people needing to have in vitro fertilization or something like that, assisted fertility. So fertility clinics are just booming around the world in developed countries. I think I heard a report the other day, unverified, but that infertility rates in young couples in Japan was 70%. We certainly know that in our dairy cows like they're out on pastures that are getting all this nitrogen and then all the other stuff that goes with it, we have an infertility problem with our dairy cows as well. That's up around 20 percent. So it's not just in humans. It's like between animal populations. And if we stop, if we fail to reproduce well, it's the end of the story, right? So no civilization has outlived the health of its citizens. And we've known for many, many centuries, where we've seen civilizations fail, that no civilization has outlived the usefulness of its soil. The classic examples of that from history.

16:47 So if we look at the effect of this mineral depletion that we're seeing in conventionally fertilized crops, what has the effect of that actually been on the plants? What we're seeing is this increased susceptibility to pests and diseases, which I'm sure you're all aware of. Every other day, there's some new thing that's emerged—you know, soybeans got something wrong with it, all the citrus trees are producing green oranges that won't turn orange, and all these kind of weird things that we're starting to see turn up now in agriculture and horticulture that no one's got a name for or no one can figure out what's going on. Then we have to apply expensive insecticides and fungicides, and this reduces your profits. And then we're adding all these unnecessary chemicals to the food chain. Really, we can produce food in a way where we do not need insecticides, we do not need fungicides. And one of the problems with those chemicals is that now when we look at the consumers of the food, we're consuming, all of us, food that's very, very low in essential trace elements and minerals. Look at the supplements market. There's a whole aisle in the supermarket now that'll just be loaded with supplements. Why are we needing to take supplements? Because we're not getting the things that we need in our food. So we've got food of low nutritional value and then it's loaded with toxins. So it's a real double whammy for our bodies to try and deal with all of that.

18:22 What does that do to our bottom line? This has become quite a famous graph. Darren Corman, who recently wrote an interesting book on all of this, and it's Canadian net farm income, but applies equally well to the United States.

18:36 Australia to Europe and here we have from 18-year period from 1926 through 2016 this blue area here is the gross value of agricultural production in other words you know what is the total value of everything that was being produced in Canada in the agricultural context and of course it varies with seasons it varies with commodity prices and that's not unexpected that this amount goes up and down over time but the trend is up.

19:06 This here is net farm income over the same time so what we found in the early period here is that net farm income was following gross farm production as you'd expect and as you'd hope in a good year we have a good season we produced more farmers make more when commodity prices are good we receive more for our production and farmers make more but then there was a disconnect the gross value of production continues to go up and the net value of production is going down and here was when corn the cost of producing corn was more than the value of that corn and you've probably all been in that situation yourself so you know what that feels like and we had the same thing happen in Australia in New Zealand with dairy cost more to produce milk than what you could receive for that milk.

19:58 Farmers that continued to produce milk were actually losing money around on average around $200,000 a year just for continuing to have dairy cows and produce milk so what's going on here like this is still going up this one's going down and what Darrin worked out was that in the last 32 years that he was looking at from 1995 to 2016 the input suppliers the providers of the fertilizers and the insecticides and the fungicides and also the tractors and also the banks that were lending money and all of those everything that's associated with agriculture receive one point three two trillion of the one point three five trillion of agricultural production in other words 98%.

20:44 That's sort of become my mantra now when I see people putting stuff on their crops or giving supplements to animals or saying that there's a 98% so farmers are actually getting 2% from all the hard work and effort that goes into farming are getting a very very low return in agriculture there's other people out there that are making plenty of money from the agricultural sector but it's not farmers so just bear that in mind about the 98% so the majority of Canadian farmers are supported by off-farm income taxpayer funded support schemes asset sales and borrowed money that probably sounds familiar.

21:19 Farm debt is at a record high and farm debt in the USA is also at a record high and we're repeatedly told that we need to produce more to get out of this mess but it's not actually about maximizing yield when you look at it in terms if you sit down and start looking at your farm production figures than your costs in your incomes and everything it's actually about optimizing profit we need to start thinking about it's not the person that has the highest yield at the end of the day that necessarily is the one that makes the most from it and we have to regenerate the resource base because we got to spend a whole day here talking about soil degradation and issues with erosion.

21:56 You know soil has been the United States biggest export for at least the last 100 years there's more soil goes off most areas of land than there is any other product so if we look at this worldwide we find that excessive use of nitrogen and also phosphorus I didn't talk about phosphorus but we could make pretty much the same arguments for phosphorus it's caused soil degradation that's caused environmental pollution reduced all biodiversity and then we have trace element deficiencies in plants animals and people so I think it would be fairly safe to say that the current approach to farming and food production has been a big fail for all of those reasons health reasons environmental reasons and the reason that it's not hugely profitable for farmers these days to actually be in farming.

22:45 So how about we take a different approach which is what today is going to be about and talk about supporting microbes rather than using high analysis fertilizer and how might we support those microbes and why would we want to I mean what can microbes do that we can't do so let's have a little look at the soil microbiome and just see how this world actually does work and why it is that if we why would we want to take a different approach anyway.

23:18 So a recent census of life on earth this was last year this was a scientific study of all the life on Earth and it was measured in gigatonnes of carbon because all living things are made of carbon we're made of carbon and the trees and the grasses and the insects on their cows and like every living thing is made of carbon and microbes are made of carbon as well so that's how would you find something that's living if it's got carbon in its body then it's a living thing and they looked they discovered they calculated that there was 550 gigatonnes of carbon based life forms on Earth and a Giga ton is a billion tons so that's a lot and unsurprisingly 450 of the 550 Giga tons of carbon-based life forms were actually plants because in most places when you look around you the living thing that you see is plants.

24:08 Here you're looking at lots of acres of crops in other parts of the world you'd be looking at acres of trees or trees and shrubs but as a general rule as long as you go into a desert somewhere what you're seeing around you is mostly plants so it's not surprising that the majority of life on Earth is actually in terms of weight is actually in plants but then the other living things that make up the remaining 100 Giga tons so we've got most of our carbon-based life forms there's plants and then what makes up the other hundred Giga tons of life and that's where it got really interesting because it was the things that we can't see things that we can't see make up 93 percent of that other 100 Giga tons of life on earth and there's microscopic things we call them the protists the archaea the bacteria constitute the majority of life on Earth in weight terms apart from plants.

25:07 And this if we look at this diagram at ecological we see we've got the protists up here in the orange up here in the purple fungi in the green and bacteria a whacking 70 percent of that other 100 megatons and this is not my number humans don't even feature on that graphic there because we're by weight we are so small compared to all the microbes.

25:32 Remember that things we can't see things we can see like insects the mollusks that things like slugs and snails but also in the ocean we have oysters and clams and scallops and pippys and all those things we like to eat all in that mollusk group and then of course there's the fish I think how big the oceans are they cover something like 70% of the planet think of all the life that's in there you know not only the fish and shellfish but you know you've got the sharks and the whales and all kinds of everything that lives in the ocean all the things that live in soil like annelids and nematodes any of you who are involved in ecology of soils there's lots of living things that we can see and source in a healthy soil if you go to a healthy prairie and there's their animals like cows sheep and our cattle and also our domestic pets and then humans hey yeah we actually get a look in there.

26:29 Collectively all these things that we see that we think of as being life on Earth make up 7% of life on Earth and humans well we're point oh one percent in terms of biomass of life on Earth and I'm talking weight yeah well we have really punched above our weight haven't we point oh one percent of the biomass of life on Earth we've managed to destroy about 99 percent of the rest of it and that's why we really do have to change because we actually depend on all that other life the things that we depend on the things we can't see for our health.

27:04 And again we could talk we could spend all day just talking about human gut microbiome and how that functions and how the microbes in our gut are the primary drivers of our health which is now being recognized and there's a lot of work going into doing something about that the microbes that are in your animals gut are the primary drivers of your livestock health and the microbes that are in your soil are the primary drivers of your soil health and therefore of your farm income because if your soil's not healthy your plants can't be healthy and then you're having to pour on all these other chemicals to try and get a yield to sell so we're talking by weight they're not my number and if we look numbers they're even more staggering because we know that 1 teaspoon of healthy soil contains more microbes and all the humans there are on earth.

27:51 Soil is not as microbially rich as some other environments like the rumen of a cow. If you take one drop, just one drop that falls off of rumen fluid, it contains ten thousand times more microbes than there are humans on the entire planet. We think we're so big and so clever, and really when we start looking at finer and finer scales, we see that everything is being organized by microbes that are responsible for how things function at a biochemical level, like how the chemistry is being influenced all of the time by microbes.

28:38 And then we can go to an even finer scale. In a census of life on earth, viruses are actually the most abundant entity on earth by orders of magnitude. If you are particularly interested in viruses, I can send you some mind-blowing articles about them. For example, if you were just to put something out like this outside and leave it for thirty minutes, the surface of it will be totally covered in viruses that have just floated down out of the atmosphere, and there would be hundreds and thousands of different kinds, most of them that we have no idea what they actually do.

29:16 They're not living things according to science. The science is that a living thing is something that's able to replicate itself, and viruses cannot replicate themselves other than by invading the cell of another living thing. They use the cellular energy of the host to replicate. So when you get the flu, those viruses, just fragments of DNA and RNA, will enter your cells, use your cellular energy to reproduce, which is why you feel so tired when you have the flu.

29:53 But we think of viruses as being detrimental because we're familiar with ones like the flu. And at one time, that was why we thought bacteria were detrimental—because we linked them to some diseases that can be lethal. And then we thought fungi were detrimental because we link them to fungal pathogens. But in actual fact, when we look at bacteria, we find that 99.9 percent of them are not only beneficial but essential. 99.9 percent of fungi are not only beneficial but essential. And 99.9 percent of viruses are not only beneficial but essential.

30:29 In fact, every single bacterial, fungal, and human cell has viruses in it and would not be able to function without those viruses. So that's where we start looking at worlds within worlds, and we realize that viruses are essential to the function of every living thing on the planet, but they are also essential to the functioning of our terrestrial—in other words, our land-based—and our marine ecosystems.

30:55 An entire marine ecosystem has been driven by viral activity, and our terrestrial systems are being driven by beneficial viral activity. They're essential to the function of our gut microbiome—the bacteria that we've all become so familiar with these days in your gut. They can't function without viruses in them, and our immune system can't function without viruses. If anyone wants to read more about this, I can send you some articles on it. And they use quorum sensing to regulate their populations.

31:33 This is some actual photos taken under a microscope of viruses. This is a bacterial cell that's been in the process of breaking down, and these viruses in this case are not beneficial viruses. They look like parasitic ticks or something, and they look like they're living, but they're not. Here's a Bacillus subtilis—this is what a rod-shaped bacteria looks like under a microscope, and these little guys that are all attacking are viruses. They look like something from outer space.

32:11 This is like a cucumber mosaic virus—that's what that looks like under the microscope. And again, this is another quite common shape. They really do look like living things, but according to the definition, they're not.

32:31 So if we just take one example of where viruses are hugely influential in an ecosystem, if we look at the marine system—the oceans—we know that plankton in the oceans supply half of the planet's oxygen, but they need to get nitrogen from somewhere. There are lots and lots of bacteria in seawater, and what happens is that viruses actually prey on those bacteria, and once they're decomposing, they liberate the nitrogen that was in their bodies. That nitrogen is what the plankton need to grow.

33:06 If we take a sample of seawater and eliminate the viruses, the plankton that's in that seawater dies because it can't get its nitrogen, and then there's no oxygen produced. So the oxygen that we breathe—half of it comes from marine plankton—and if there weren't viruses in the ocean breaking down bacteria every day, we wouldn't have that oxygen. It's really extraordinary when you see the power of these tiny little things that most of us don't even think about.

33:38 One study estimated that viruses in the ocean are actually destroying 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the ocean every day and keeping the system in balance. Remember when I was talking about the magnitude of just even the weight of microbes on the planet, and then remember that viruses are orders of magnitude above the microbes that we are more familiar with.

34:00 In the human gut, we have about 10 trillion bacteria, and then there are viruses within those 10 trillion bacteria, probably at a 10 to 1 ratio. So if we have 10 trillion bacteria, we have a hundred trillion viruses, and they're within those bacteria. They're regulating their populations and their behavior. What they're actually doing is preying on bacteria that the viruses consider are not good for us and actually protecting bacteria that the virus has decided are good for us.

34:29 So these decisions, if you like, being made by viruses in our gut are having a huge impact on our human health. And it's now the work that's going on in human health research—the frontier, I guess—is that it is actually viruses that are the drivers of human health, whereas all this time we thought that viruses were bad for us. We can't function without them, and because they can modify the bacteria that then modify the human host, so we're just microbe taxis, really.

35:00 We have to start thinking about how we live and the things that we consume. We have to think about what the effect of those is on our microbial populations. So that's why there's been a big move away from antibiotics and things like that, because you take an antibiotic and you're just depleting all the beneficial microbes from your gut as well as the one that you were targeting.

35:23 It's interesting that the Americans went down that road of antibiotics. The Russians never did go that way. They've gone down the way of understanding how the most specific microbes communicate with each other through quorum sensing, which I'm going to talk about in a minute, and then how to actually scramble those messages so that microbes weren't able to reproduce simply by interfering with the way they communicate with each other. That's called quorum quenching—how you scramble those messages. So instead of having a broad-spectrum antibiotic that just knocks out everything, you just target the specific organism that's causing the issue, and the other ones can get on with doing what they should be doing.

36:12 The human biome influences the human genome because when we start talking about quorum sensing, we talk about how those microbes actually affect genetic expression in their host. So the microbes in your gut can turn some of your genes on and some of your genes off, and the microbes in the rhizosphere of a plant—what lives around the roots of a plant—can switch genes on and off in those plants.

36:36 And that's where we're starting to see the real reason, I guess, why we need to be really, really focused on what is happening in the rhizosphere, because if the plant has important genes for things like frost tolerance, drought tolerance, resistance to insects and pests, and diseases, and all of those genes are switched off, then we have a plant that's very, very fragile in quite a hostile environment.

37:06 A very variable environment these days as far as the weather goes so we need to have a plant that's more resilient, that's more flexible, that's more able to deal with what the climate, the weather, all that is throwing at us. And it needs a wide range of the ability to be able to switch genes on that will help it, and it cannot switch those genes on unless it's getting signals from the rhizosphere. And we're going to talk about that. Signals is what I'm leading up to.

37:35 So in the human case, our human genome, our genes can be switched on and off by the microbes in our gut. And we now know that it's the viruses that are controlling the bacteria that are doing that. So one other little thing about microbes before I get onto quorum sensing—is a relatively new term, it's only been around for ten years. And that's right off year. And the other word for it is microbe every. So that would be evil. We know like there's a herbivore, which is something that eats herbs, like a grasshopper is a herbivore or a cow is a herbivore, or there's a carnivore, which is something that eats meat, like a cat. Well, there's an omnivore like most humans. We eat meat and we eat herbage, so we're so that would we have carnivore, omnivore, herbivore. So a microbe or is something that eats microbes. And ruminants do that, ruminant animals, so you cattle eat they grass and other curvatures. They're unable to digest cellulose. There is no mammals are able to digest cellulose, so they have all these bacteria in their room that produced cellulose enzyme that breaks down cellulose. And in that process, the cows, the cattle are actually digesting the volatile fatty acids or short chain fatty acids that come out of that fermentation process. And they're also digesting the microbes. It's a whole lot of the microbes that are involved in breaking down cellulose in the room and actually utilized by the by the animal as microbial protein. So your cow is consuming breakdown products of cellulose and the microbes themselves. And there's lots of instances in our own bodies of where we are engulfing microbes and consuming microbes. So it's not really an unusual thing, but no one realized that plants. So in the animal kingdom we're aware that this goes on all the time, that things are digesting microbes. It's never actually been thought of as plants being that active or that in that place where they were actually eating microbes, but now we know that they do because we have the techniques to be able to observe this.

39:54 So this is a newly emerged tip, a plant root tip, and what looks like swarms of flies around here are actually microbes that are all gathered around that newly emerged plant root tip. And I think one of the take-home messages from today I'd like you to think about when you're thinking about plants is that it's young, actively growing plants and new roots that are the really important things in soils. Once a plant gets to the stage where it switches over from vegetative to reproductive, starts throwing up the seed head, everything around the root zone changes. So if you want plants to be modifying soil, you need to look in the early growth stages and young plants.

40:30 What if what are they doing? So why do you think all of those microbes are gathered around that newly emerged plant food tip? What are they doing there? Why are they there rather than just being spread out through the soil? Why would they all be gathered around that newly emerged plant root tip?

40:53 Feeding, yep. And what would they be feeding on? Exudates, okay. So what kinds of things are coming out of the plant group that the exudates? What have they got in them?

41:05 He sorts of things, sugars and stuff like that. Okay. So these, mostly bacteria, but there is also there are fungi and other things in that mix as well, are feeding on very energy rich exudates that are coming out of that plant root tip. So why are there all those? Why is the plant root producing all those energy rich exudates to attract microbes? Why is the plant doing that? It's using it's been photosynthesizing and converting light energy to biochemical energy. That's no mean feat. It's used carbon dioxide and water in that process. And in that miracle of photosynthesis, we have elements that have just come from the air, like the air that we're all sitting in today, things that have just come from the air, actually turned into the leaves of that plant through photosynthesis. It's made simple sugars and then joined those carbon atoms together to make cellulose, which is what the leaves are made from. It's grown roots. Later on, it's going to produce some seeds or some flowers or something. I mean, that's just absolutely extraordinary how a plant builds itself from the air by converting light energy to biochemical energy. So some of that energy that it's gone to all that trouble to transform, it's now just got energy basically just excluding out of its roots. So why would it be giving all that away? Giving all those shoots? Wait, could use that energy to to grow more roots or grow more leaves or grow seeds or flowers or something. So why, why are all those exudates coming out of the plant roots? That's what the microbes that will gathered around their fall. But what, but why is the plant doing that?

42:46 Yeah, so it's going to trade the stuff it needs. And up until recently we figured we thought that that trade was going on through things like mycorrhizal fungi and other connectors within that system. That micro sol fungi were like taking carbon from plants and trading up with colonies of bacteria. And that definitely does go on, but now we've seen these and we've got this really fine detail techniques for actually observing what happens in very very my new detail. What we're seeing is that when these bacteria and other microbes get really close to the edge of this plant, they're actually engulfed by the plant roots. So the plant is eating the microbes that are surrounding it. This is what's cool rides off the G or micro batteries. So the microbes that are consumed get taken into the central part of the plant. They have their cell walls stripped off. All their nutrients are divulged or do whatever the right word for that is. The plant actually consumes those nutrients. And then this is where it gets really interesting is the DNA is still intact. The DNA of those microbes travels through the plant. These are plant root hairs here. Usually you need to look at look at a plant under the microscope to see though sometimes you can see plant root hairs with the naked eye. So the DNA, after its had all the nutrients stripped from it, is actually moved around here and out through a plant root here and spat back out or divulged or whatever the word is out into the soil system again. So you just have naked DNA going back out into the source system. And that DNA reforms a cell wall and reforms as it was before, whatever it was before. If it's the bacteria, it reforms as a bacteria. It gathers up nutrients again or fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere or whatever kind of bacteria it happens to be. And then it's attracted by the nutrients coming out, other exudates coming out of the plant root, and it gets engulfed again and eaten and has all of its nutrients divested. So we have this cycle of this cycle, which is called microbe every. So the way that it's described in the scientific literature is that plants nurture microbes in the root zone, which then enter this root tip. They're actually eaten by the plant, but we put it nice and they don't volunteer aliy enter the plant root tip. If you look at it under like really high magnification, you see that as they get like close to the edge, there actually engulfed like that. They lose their cell walls. Well, they have them stripped off and they divulge the nutrients again. That's not voluntarily. They have them taken away from them. And then the microbes then leave the plant. Well, the plant actually spits them out by the route here. And then they start the cycle again. So it's really quite an extraordinary thing. And there's not only rose offered you, but there's lots and lots of other like worlds within worlds going on in the soil. It's an extraordinary ecosystem that we really haven't thought very much about.

45:52 So I guess to summarize all of that is that all plants and animals, including humans, are embedded, totally embedded in a microbial world. We have microbes all over us as well as in us. And when we go to a new place for the first time, like say you go away on vacation and you're going to a little cottage somewhere or whatever, you your microbiome will establish itself in that space. And they say that after you've been there, if you come and go from that new space that you haven't been before, by about the third day when you come into that room, your microbiome will actually recognize the microbiome that's in that room as yours. And it feels more familiar because we're seeing it for the third time, but it also feels more familiar because our.

46:40 The microbiome recognizes it and if you go into an environment where the microbiome is continually being removed like in a hospital for example where everything's being sterilized all the time, do you notice that it just doesn't feel comfortable? For me it doesn't anyway. It doesn't really feel like a place where I want to be. There's many reasons for that obviously, but that very sterile atmosphere—for some people more sensitive than others—you can feel that there isn't really a strong microbiome presence there.

47:10 We're all embedded in a microbial world and we have a microbial world embedded within us. So what we need to think about is that this is actually a very good thing once we understand how we could utilize these, the power of these microbes for our own benefit. We don't need to look at it as a negative because microbes are actually capable of performing all kinds of things that we as humans are not capable of doing. And in fact in the agricultural sense, they can do nearly everything that we need to have, other than actually plant our crop for us and harvest our crop, which we need mechanical things to do. But in terms of everything that happens in the soil, the microbes can do for us what we have tried to do with fertilizers and all the chemicals that we use.

47:59 So we need to figure out how to harness that power and put it to good use. So how do microbes actually perform all these amazing things, these extraordinary things? I'm going to show you a few examples of the sorts of things that microbes can do. They can't see each other, they can't speak to each other, they can't hear anything, and yet we know that they are very, very good at coordinating their behavior and working together, probably much better organized than where humans are actually when it comes to working together and achieving tasks.

48:30 So do they utilize this process called quorum sensing? Well, the evidence is coming up pretty strongly, yes they do. And we now know that in fact all microbes actually use this process. So what does that word quorum mean? Well, in human society we use that term to mean the minimum number of members of an organization or a group that need to be present in order for some kind of business to be transacted or for a decision to be made.

49:02 So if the fairgrounds here had a committee—I'm sure there's probably a fairgrounds committee or something, is there Keith?—and there may be, I don't know how many people would be on that committee, but let's just say there was ten people on that committee and there's probably a president and a vice president and a secretary and a treasurer etc. And we were going to spend ten thousand dollars upgrading something here on the fairgrounds, then we had a meeting about it and the quorum for that committee was let's say seven. Seven members of that committee had to be present in order for us to sign that check for the ten thousand dollars to be spent.

49:40 So we have a meeting and only three people turn up. We go, well we've only got three people, we haven't got a quorum, so we can't actually make a decision. So even though we had three people come to a meeting and the meeting was going to be about spending ten thousand dollars, we cannot make that decision to spend the ten thousand dollars. So we reconvene the meeting and this time we get eight people come. We go, okay, so we can make that decision.

50:00 So it's exactly the same in the microbial world. There are microbes in your gut, for example in your large intestine, which is a fermentation vessel, pretty much like the rumen in a cow or other sorts of things that we're going to be talking about today about fermentation. That's what happens in your large intestine. In that process you make a lot of vitamins or you potentially could make a lot of vitamins, especially B vitamins, but if you don't have a quorum of the microbes that make those vitamins, they'll all still be there. You could analyze that your large intestine, you can find yes, we have all these microbes that are able to make B group vitamins, but if there are not enough of them, they will not form a quorum and they will not switch on their genes for making B group vitamins. So you have to go and buy off the shelf.

50:53 So you see what I mean? You could have—and we know in the rhizosphere there's going to be lots and lots of—there's got to be millions and trillions probably of microbes in the rhizosphere. But if there are not enough to form a quorum for something like fixing nitrogen or for producing vitamins for the plants—plants need vitamins as well—so if those microbes in the rhizosphere haven't reached a quorum, even though there's some there, this is always going to be some there, then it's not going to happen.

51:19 So we need to understand a little bit about quorum sensing, about tipping points, about how do we actually ramp that up so we have enough of them there to make a decision. Well, if we put something like nitrogen anywhere near a seed or obviously if it's a seed that's coated with or treated with insecticide or fungicide or any of those kinds of things, there is no way you're ever going to reach a quorum on anything because the side-cide—it means poison—and you got your poisoning things in the rhizosphere. And nitrogen is pretty effective poison as well.

51:56 So in human society a quorum is the number, the number we're talking numbers now, it must be present. So in the microbial world that term quorum sensing again, it's density dependent, it's the numbers, and it's coordinated behavior. Once you get a certain number, then the microbes are able to actually communicate with each other, coordinate their behavior, and that regulates gene expression. This is where it gets really, really powerful: that bacteria are able to switch their own genes on and off.

52:27 If we take a bacteria that's in the rhizosphere, in other words the area right next to a plant root, and it's able to utilize the exudates and that kind of thing, when we move it even just two inches away, it will switch off all the genes that it had switched on while it was in the rhizosphere, which on a whole lot of other ones, because it's in a different environment and needs to get its energy in a different way.

52:47 So bacteria are very, very adept at switching genes on and off. They're also adept at horizontal gene transfer, transferring genes into other organisms. And now that we know more about viruses, we know that they're doing that all the time. So this is—it's because, not just because there's lots of microbes, it's because when they reach a certain number that they can actually alter genetic expression. That's where the power comes from.

53:11 So it's density-dependent, coordinated behavior. It occurs in all species of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses. Every single species that's been analyzed, and that's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of species, all use quorum sensing. And in fact it now appears to be used in all other groups as well, like protozoa, and higher-order animals use quorum sensing as well. And we probably—well, we do, don't we?—we if we have a meeting about something, that has to be a quorum or we don't make a decision.

53:43 So every species produces its own unique signal, and these signals are called autoinducers. And we're going to be talking about autoinducers today because what we're doing when we use a biostimulant is actually we are producing autoinducers and it's your own juices that we're going to apply to our seeds or use in our foliar sprays. And when the concentration of autoinducers in the environment reaches a critical level, that's when it regulates gene expression. So in your plants that might be their productivity or their tolerance to stresses in the environment.

54:16 Microbes are also multilingual. They don't only just produce a signal that tells them how many of their own kind there are, but they have a molecule that says 'me,' so I can find out how many, if I was the Lactobacillus, how many other kinds of my species have Lactobacillus there are. And then there's a second language, its generic, which is interspecies communication. So bacteria will know how many other kinds of bacteria there are, not just their own species, and how many kinds of fungi and other things are out there. It's incredibly complex signaling system, and these tiny little single-celled organisms are extraordinarily clever at sensing where they are in the world and how many of their own there are in that space and how many others there are in that space.

55:11 Because when you think of the things that they can collectively do and how small they are, it's quite extraordinary how they actually do that. So that now: how many of them, how many of them, and then they actually use that information to decide what tasks to carry out.

55:27 Know whether Becky's got you all on us on it like on an email list or something, but if there's some really good videos on this, in fact if you want to write it down, there's a lady called Bonnie Bassler, B-O double-N-I-E and then capital B-A double-S-L-A-R. Bonnie Bassler has spent basically her entire research career investigating quorum sensing in the human body, but she talks not only about how it works in our bodies but some general. It's got some lovely little graphics there of how these molecules are actually transferred and how they the receptor sites, about how they're produced, how they received, how microbes—it's called how bacteria talk. I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. So Bonnie Bassler, 'How Bacteria Talk,' and it's a YouTube video, it's 18 minutes, but I promise you the 18 minutes goes really, really fast because it's a very, very engaging YouTube, and that will explain a lot of the background too. If you think about it, okay, she's talking about human body, but we can think about how this works in soils.

56:31 The information is used to decide what tasks to carry out, and I think she might actually in that YouTube video, she may relate that to the human body as well. So if you think about it, you're an amalgamation of all these different organs—your lungs and your heart, your liver and your spleen, your adrenals and whatever—and then you have your pituitary and your hypothalamus and your adrenals, I sort of, sending up messages all of the time. You've got that HPA axis they call it, where there's all this. Even at the moment while you're sitting there figuring out how this works for soils, your body is undertaking a whole lot of tasks that you're not even thinking about, and it's doing that in a coordinated way. How can it become, you know, why, how do the kidneys know they have to function as kidneys and your liver functions as a liver and your spleen is doing something else and your heart's beating away and your lungs are breathing and hopefully your brain's working, and all of this is because you're coordinated as a single living thing by the biochemical signaling that's going on in your body all of the time. And if you didn't have that biochemical signaling, if you didn't know when you're hungry, if you didn't know when you're tired, if you didn't know that you need to produce some of this enzyme or some of that enzyme or some of this hormone or some of that hormone, if all of those things weren't working, then you wouldn't function as a unified living organism.

58:00 What we need to think about of this in terms of the soil is of it being a living thing that has a whole lot of functions. There's a whole lot of tasks that need to be completed, and there are different functional groups of microbes that are important to those tasks, which is why plant diversity is incredibly important because every plant will have its own microbiome. Even within a species, like even with something in within something like wheat or corn, all the different varieties of corn and all the different varieties of wheat will have distinct microbiomes. So even if you were just even having one—you're just going to grow wheat—sometimes there's an advantage of putting four or five different varieties of wheat in together just to give you a little bit of diversity. So we have to start thinking about these different functional groups and how they all work together, but not only that, but how numbers, what are the numbers in those functional groups? So it could sound complicated, in actual fact if we just understand what the game rules are, what the rules, like, you know, we need diversity and we need numbers, then we just need to start actually pulling on that string, as Gerry says, don't we? We've always been pushing on it. We keep pushing things onto plants and saying, here, we'll give you some nitrogen. We give you this. What happens when you push on a stream? You don't get very far, right? So we just need to pull on that. Well, what are the main things that we need to, what are the essential things here? Plant diversity and doing something to get to enable microbes to do what microbes do best—basically, get out of the way and let them get on with it. But we can help a lot with stimulating this process of communities of organisms that are interdependent, that all need each other.

59:41 So diversity is very important, and there's no such thing as an independent organism. We cannot exist on this planet without, for example, the plants and the marine plankton that provides the oxygen for us to breathe. We can't exist on this planet unless there are things to eat, and we depend on all of these other life-forms to bring those things to us. So we all need other species in order to survive, and all plant, animal, and human genes, all the genes that make us up, our DNA, can be influenced by quorum sensing in that embedded and surrounding microbial population. So how we're going to utilize this for our benefit, we just want these microbes to be able to do the things that we want them to do even better. So if we look at how this applies to agriculture, we have to actually look at how soil works.

1:01:07 Actually, thanks for mentioning that, Case, because if you do look at it now, sorry, I have to try not to breathe when I'm looking down, but you on page 29 you'll see there's two photographs at the bottom of this of that page, and one of the one on the left is plant roots don't have a quorum, so they're not connected to the soil in any way. And they're that's what we're doing when we add nitrogen to the soil. We're actually creating those. If you can see the roots and there's no quorum there, and then the one on the right-hand side is plant roots that have great microbial structures around them, a biofilm, well, aggregated soil fungal hyphae, all kinds of things, and you can't see the roots because they're in behind those particles. And then if you turn over to pages 30 and 31, there's an article there called 'Nitrogen: The Double-Edged Sword.' Thanks for reminding me about that, Keith. I'd forgotten this was in in there. So there's the impacts of inorganic nitrogen, a little bit about the liquid carbon pathway, which is just what I'm going to be talking about now, and in fact there's a photograph that I'm going to put up very soon that's like that honeycomb, the one that looks like honeycomb on the bottom of page 30. So yes, you can definitely go back and have a look over those, and in fact over the page there's an article on 'Our Bacterial Killer: Mycorrhizal Fungi' by Wendy to Hurry, and you'll see some what the plant root looks like when it's been colonized by mycorrhizal fungi, and then over the page, you'll see some on page 33, you'll see some photographs of mycorrhizal spores, which is very similar to that photograph that I put up at the beginning of this session. So yes, so there's there's a whole lot of really good stuff. When he's ready, Neese's article. Now this, I mean, there's just the photographs which I think really do help to understand what is going on in the soil and how you can recognize on your own farm if you've got a spade.

1:03:11 So the two things that you really need, two essential pieces of equipment on a farm, is a spade and it needs to be in the back of the pickup because it's no good if it's in the shed in the shop, and you need to use it every time you go out looking at your crop. Please dig up some plants and have a look at the roots. And a refractometer. How many of you have a refractometer, little thing about this big? Okay, we need to see a hundred percent of hands come up. A refractometer is a way of determining how much sugar and minerals and trace elements are in the sap of your plants, and if it's not a very big number, then the roots aren't communicating with microbes in the soil. So you can tell by using a spade to dig a hole and have a look and see whether the roots are just actually getting to this now. How can we tell whether we've actually got a quorum forming around plant roots? And then you can use your refractometer to measure the sap of your plants to see whether those minerals and trace elements are actually getting up into the plant.

1:04:18 So what you're going to do, whether to use a refractometer, is you're going to use a garlic press. You're going to grab some leaves and you're going to use a garlic press or something, gonna roll them up, stick them into a garlic press, squeeze, get a please, get a stainless steel one because there are many months—how do you say that in this country—but anyway, it's not aluminium. I can't never get that right. Aluminium once break really easily, so you need a stainless steel garlic press. You squeeze a drop of the sap onto a little plate on your refractometer. You going to put another one over the top of that, and you're going to hold it up to the light, and what you're looking at is the refractive index of that liquid. In other words, how much dissolved solids in that liquid. If you put a drop of distilled water on that plate and held it up to the light.

1:13:29 In there, so this is a macro aggregate. The blue bit is shown as being blue because the moisture content inside a macro aggregate is higher than it is on the outside. This is our fine feeder root, and remember it's the new roots, the young roots, and the feeder roots and the ones that are actually activating the soil biology. Older roots don't do this. We've got root hairs coming off here. What mycorrhizal hyphy micro sol go right into that plant root and then stretch out, so the mycorrhizae are pulling the whole thing together into a macro aggregate. And then there's little orange shapes here, which are your soil micro aggregates, and these are being formed by bacteria. Again, the bacteria that are forming these micro aggregates are using energy that's coming out of this plant roots. So that plant root is like exuding all kinds of not just carbon, not just energy rich compounds, but all kinds of signaling molecules.

1:14:24 Cool, so these ellipses here, bacteria of all different kinds, thousands of different kinds of bacteria, and they're all capable of doing different things. And depending what the plant needs, it will produce different exudates that will stimulate different ones of these to provide it with what it needs. So we don't have to even think what the plant needs because the plant knows what it needs, and the plant will signal to the bacteria and they will respond to that need and bring those things to the plant in exchange for the energy. And one of the other things that happens here, in addition to the nutrition for the plant, is that all these microbes work together to form a product, a carbon compound called humus, which is about 60% carbon, 6 to 8 percent nitrogen, always in those ratios, and a little bit of phosphorus and sulfur, and they're always in those same ratios. Doesn't matter where in the world, what kind of soil it was, humus always has the same analysis. And if you add those things, they come to about 70%, and the other 30% of minerals that are in the soil, like iron for example, which form part of that complex.

1:15:29 So if we have a look at that, just diagrammatically, just the organic, well, the bits that came from the atmosphere, the carbon, the hydrogen, and the nitrogen, the oxygen and see how they're all joined together in this humic molecule. So the carbon atoms are in rings, what we call rings, which are six carbon atoms forming a hexagon. This is a carbon ring, carbon ring, carbon ring, and then we've got the other elements, some of them in rings as well, joined in and chains. If you were a chemist and you know we're interested in different kinds of how different elements combined together into chemical compounds and how they were bonded together, but the extraordinary thing about this, when you actually look at that structure, is to think about the fact that somebody joined all those elements together, all those atoms. Like, how did the glucose that was formed in photosynthesis, which was six carbon atoms in a chain, and that's gone through the plant and come out as a sugar rich exudate? There's been other exudates as well. There's oxygen and nitrogen that are in the atmosphere that bacteria are actually involved in utilizing those and teasing those. But somehow or another, that microbial community living around a plant root has taken all those different elements and joined them together in a very stable polymer. So once you have a humic polymer, it's very, very difficult for to break that down. You make polymers can actually stay in the soil for thousands of years.

1:17:02 So why did the microbes go to all that trouble to convert the carbon compounds that were coming out of plant roots into humic polymers when they could have just used the carbon for energy and be done with it? You could have just eaten it and lived and died, and that's what life's about if you're a microbe, right? You use energy, you divide, you produce more of yourself. Why would the microbes go to so much trouble to join all those different atoms together to make humic polymers? There's a lot of work goes into that. We don't know how to do it in the laboratory. Humans can't make humus even though it sounds a bit like human. So why did the microbes bother to do that when they could have used all those energy rich compounds coming out of the plant roots just for their own?

1:17:53 Yeah, a place to live, for who? For the microbes, yeah. They could have done that for a place to live, and then, yeah, so that's, I guess, the saints like creating habitat, right? A place to live, and then if you're going to live there in that place, what else do you need? So you've got somewhere to live, so you've actually improves the soil, so it's better for you to live in. What else do you need to put as well as somewhere to live? You need food. Where is that going to come from? It's got to come from the plant. So would having all this around the plant root be of any benefit to the plant? Yes. How would having better soil structure around a plant be of benefit to the plant?

1:19:08 And exactly, so why do we want better soil? We want better soil structure for plants, right? So who has created better soil structure for the plants? The microbes. Why did the microbes create better soil structure for the plants?

1:19:25 Yeah, more roots, and more roots means more what? More who? So if you are a microbe living around a plant root, remember that diagram I showed you of all the microbes living in the rhizosphere? Who's looking after those microbes? Where are they getting everything they need from? Yeah, sunlight. And who's converting the sunlight into things that they need? Plants. So if there wasn't a plant there, the microbes aren't going to be there, right? Remember I said the biggest issue that you've had over the last 50 years here in the United States is bare ground because the prairies had plants, hundreds of different kinds of plants, 500 to 700 different kinds of plants even in an area, say four times the size of this room, hundreds of different kinds of plants, all growing together, capable of responding to rain at any time of the year. No matter when it rained, there was a plant there that could grow in response to that rain. And what did that plant do when it grew? Photosynthesized, it produced root exudates, it fed soil microbes. So the microbial community that was living under that prairie had energy coming into it all year round. Just imagine how diverse that plant community was. If we know that there were hundreds of different kinds of plants, imagine how many microbial communities there were. And what did they do? They built six feet of beautiful, deep, rich, black soil, right? Your mollisol, your grassland soils. Plants didn't do that. Microbes living in association with the plant roots did that. And why did the microbes bother to do that? Because if they don't keep the plants alive, they die.

1:21:06 You have a similar thing happens in your gut. If you're somebody that needs to have sugar, if you feel addicted to sugar, it's because you have bacteria in your gut that utilize sugar for energy. And when you have some sugar and saw something sweet and they proliferate and then, oh, they run out of sugar, so they're going to send a very powerful signal to your brain for you to eat sugar because if you don't eat something sweet, they die. It's a very, very powerful signal. For you, those of you who are addicted to sugar, you'll know that you crave sugar, and in fact it's very, very hard to get over a sugar craving. But if you haven't had sugar for years, I haven't had sugar for something like 20 years, and honestly, I could. We had a chocolate tasting in California. Do you remember that, Jerry? We were tasting all those different chocolates, and they were like 82, 88, 92 percent cacao, and then obviously varying amounts of that. So the one that was like 92% dark chocolate didn't have much sugar in it. Then we tasted one that was about 60 percent cacao, I thinking, and the sugar was just like, wow, way too high. Most of you probably would have been, maybe if you're addicted to chocolate, you would think the 60% one wasn't even sweet enough. So the reason that we're addicted to sugar is because the microbes in your gut are craving sugar, and if you don't keep on feeding them sugar, then they sold us disappear in you and that craving will go away. So microbes send very powerful signals. We don't realize how much they are controlling us as well for those various cravings. So I've lost my train of thought completely now. Why is that relevant? I've got no idea. But the microbes will, the plant will, the plant signals to the microbes for what it needs, and the microbes respond and to get it actually work as a unit, like the plants and the microbes are meant to work together. And one of the things they're doing, the microbes are actually producing humic substances around plant roots to help keep that plant alive.

1:23:06 Because if the plant dies, if you stop eating sugar, the microbes in your gut die. That was the relationship. If that plant dies, everything that lives around the roots is going to die. So it's to the microbes' advantage to actually support that plant, and that's what they're trying to do. And we keep interfering by putting things on seeds and around seeds and under seeds. Other than what we need to put on a seed is something that's actually going to stimulate these microbes in the soil. We're not going to put microbes on the seed. We're going to put something that stimulates the ones that are in the soil that can do this.

1:23:37 So the nitrogen in that molecule has to be fixed biologically. It has to be fixed by the microbes involved in making humic substances. If we apply it outside of that, if we just put nitrogen organic nitrogen onto the soil, the microbes that stimulates do stimulate a whole lot of bacteria, different kinds of bacteria, other than the ones we want. They will break down these humic polymers to get the carbon out because they need carbon and nitrogen in their bodies. So adding nitrogen to the soil breaks carbon down. Having natural biological nitrogen fixation take place in the soil builds carbon up. And nitrogen and carbon always move together. If your soil is losing carbon, it's using nitrogen. If it's building carbon, it's building nitrogen. They're in the same molecule, they're together in the same molecule. So it has to be fixed biologically. The carbon to be sequestered in a stable form. So there's a pathway. Photosynthesis to make the carbon compounds in the first place. They have to be translocated to the roots and we get aggregates forming around the roots and root sheets and humidification. And I think you'll find something about the liquid carbon pathway on page 30 anywhere in the book.

1:24:55 So we have to have actively growing green plants, and preferably a whole lot of different kinds of those. And we have to have a diversity of beneficial microbes, which is what we're going to be talking about today. So what we've done in the past is to try and replicate or to replace biological activity with chemical fertilizers. But the plants supported by the high analysis fertilizers actually can't get all the other minerals and trace elements that they need. So let's just look at one example of farming family that have supported microbes rather than using high analysis fertilizers. And that's one reason actually why we're having this workshop here today.

1:25:34 Ian and Diane Haggerty from Wild Ketchup in Western Australia were at Paciencia Ranch in February this year, I think. There was there, and there was lots of discussions about how they were farming. They're farming 40,000 acres now and they're not using any nitrogen fertilizer at all. They're out yielding all their neighbors. They've got higher quality grain, higher valued grain. And they're now getting markets in Malaysia for nitrate-free grain. So if their grain is nitrate-free, the Asians have figured out that if it's nitrate-free, they also don't have to test with fungicides or insecticides or glyphosate or any of those things because it won't be in there. Because they don't need to use those. They don't need to use anything because it's nitrogen that's actually created the conditions where we have all the weeds and we have the insects that we have, the pests that we have to deal with with all these other chemicals.

1:26:27 And Ian and Diane are going to be speaking at No-Till on the Plains in January next year. So that will be coming back to the United States. But there has been a lot of interest in how are they actually managing to farm without nitrogen. I realized that very different environment to here. I just wanted to very quickly mention what they were doing. So they've supported the soil microbiome by retaining a diversity of green plants all year as far as climate allows. They've replaced their nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. They use a farming liquid, which is a worm liquid, a worm leachate. And they use compost extract. They put on the seed. They have liquid inject and they have a post-sowing foliar spray on the leaves of their wheat. And they integrate livestock as well. I think it's important to say that they do do that. Brix levels in their wheat up to 28. Any of you who use the refractometer, you know it's pretty hard to get up to 28. And their neighbor next door will have Brix levels around 2 or 3. So their plants are photosynthesizing 10 times faster than their neighbors, which explains in part why they're getting higher yields, better quality grain, building soil.

1:27:36 The first time I came across the Hagertys was in relation to a survey that was done by the Wheat Belt NRM. So the area in Western Australia where people grow wheat, called the Wheat Belt. I guess like you have a corn belt. And the Wheat Belt NRM decided to test the soils on 50 wheat belt farms. And luckily the Hagertys were involved in that. It was just a random stick a pin on and that kind of a thing. And luckily they were under one of those pins. This is about 8 million hectares or I don't know what that is. That's a lot anyway. I think it's about 15 million acres of wheat country looks like in Western Australia. Over summer, it's just bare ground every year, year after year. And everybody is encouraged to keep it there. So they'll probably spray three times, two or three times every summer to keep that bare. We grow wheat over winter. So imagine Southern California. Moist, wet winter and hot, dry summer. The Hagertys over summer their country looks like that. There's actually wheat stubble all through that. So that photo was the neighbors just across the fence, and that's in there. So there's wheat stubble but just let everything else grow through it because they've got sheep. And the fact that they've had green stuff over summer means that they have built a lot more carbon than their neighbors.

1:28:56 So when the soil scientist came and sampled these paddocks compared to their native paddocks, using the protocols developed by the National Soil Carbon Research Program, says it's all very high-level science with lots and lots of replicates and three depths. What they ended up with was like hundreds of samples that went into this. What they found was that compared to their neighbors, the Hagertys had increased carbon by 41.5 percent, nitrogen by 30 percent, even though they don't use any, and the water holding capacity increased by 13 percent. And when we look at the depths, where that was the top four inches of the soil had increased about 37 percent carbon, then the next level down 41 percent, and then the next level down, not even down at 12 inches, that increased soil carbon by 54 percent. So remember what I said about it's the root tips where the exudates come out. So if you think of their wheat, it's around the bottoms of the wheat plant where most of the exudates are. So when that pathway is functioning effectively and you're measuring soil carbon at different depths, you'll find that the greatest increase in soil carbon is wherever the root tips were. So not necessarily it's going to be anywhere near surface, whereas when you've got crop residues breaking down, you get a little bit of carbon form near the soil surface. But once you get down to 12 inches depth, you've generally got no change in soil carbon down there.

1:30:15 Which is what we saw when we saw the change to no-till from tillage to no-till. We've got an increase in carbon right at the surface. And there was a lot of people talking about the fact that you're not increasing carbon down here. It's actually not making any change. And if you want water to actually infiltrate down there, we need to think more about which is one of the advantages of your cover crops and having something living between cash crops is that you've got living roots. This is why there's so much emphasis on living roots because it's down at the root tips where you've got carbon coming out. And therefore you're changing the whole soil profile. You're going to get better infiltration and you're going to get more moisture at depth. And if we look to see what their wheat roots are doing, we see like here's a wheat seed. It's got a coleoptile, which is like a little sheath that pushes up through the soil. The roots, the leaves will come out at the top of that. It hasn't even produced any leaves yet. And the roots that came out of that wheat seed when it first germinated are totally covered with root sheets. So it's a huge amount of biological activity taking place in the roots of those plants before it has even produced leaves. And when they send plant roots off to the lab to be tested for microbial colonization, even at that point.

1:31:27 At this stage there'll be about 75% of the roots will be colonized by mycorrhizae whereas conventional wheat there will probably be none at that early stage. And then later on, when the plant is at the stage of having three tillers, there's this soil that's all sticking around the plant roots like that. That's actually new topsoil that's being built by those plants, so they are actively building topsoil and improving soil structure.

1:31:57 That's a closer look. I'm not sure whether that photo is in your booklet or not, but that's what the soil looks like. That's actually from the Hagerty's. That's what it looks like when you try to take a photo of the roots. It actually looks like that under a microscope, and then the neighbor's wheat looks like that. It's the same magnification under a microscope, so you can see it's really sticking.

1:32:15 So the neighbor has to keep applying nitrogen to feed those plants. And this is an example, I think this one might be in the book too, of wheat seeds. Whether it's nitrogen put under the seed, that's clean roots under the seed, and then compost put on top of the soil. So all these roots have mycorrhizae in the presence of the compost, and these were severe because they're in the presence of nitrogen. So that's why you need the spade to actually dig your plants up and have a look at the roots and see what they look like.

1:32:43 We had a field day there in October last year, and this is in Howgood. There's a little four-minute video of Ian talking about how they actually get autoinducers on the seeds. So if I send you that link, you'll see Ian and Diane's standing behind him. This barley crop that's just behind them, they're in an eight-inch rainfall environment and they produced a really beautiful crop. Thousands and thousands of acres of beautiful barley, triticale, oats, wheat. There's no weeds in there, there's no disease issues. It was just a really magnificent crop. And that's a Salt Lake there in the background, so that's very saline, sodic, acidic—everything you can think of—soil. And yet they have no trouble producing crops.

1:33:37 The other thing that we see there and in many other situations as well, there's lots of big words here, but when living things behave symbiotically—in other words, where they work together like plants and microbes—they have emergent properties. In other words, things happen that we can't predict, that reductionist science can't predict. And one of the things that has happened on the Hagerty's is that where they've planted the wheat, there's all these grasses—native perennial grasses like your prairie grasses—that are coming up in the rows exactly where they planted the wheat.

1:34:14 These are really interesting. These ones here are just coming through like as if they've all been sown there. Those seeds, the native grasses coming up where they planted the wheat. The seeds are being, their first, who knows, hundred years or something—those grasses were considered to be extinct in that area. I talked to the Department of Agriculture. They'll even say they never even were native grasses there. And now they are all coming up in the wheat rows.

1:34:39 There's something going on here in terms of the biological stimulation. It's not only stimulating their plants to grow better, but also stimulating everything else that's in the soil, including seeds that theoretically weren't even there, haven't been seen there for a very long time. And another thing: these are native grasses, perennial grasses. They don't even have to plant those to get them. They've got shapes, so they're very happy to get native grasses back again. And all they did was plant a crop with autoinducers on the seed.

1:35:06 What we're going to be talking about today is biostimulants—what are they? And using the Hagerty's, I guess, was like that. They were the stimulant, the biostimulant for these workshops, and the fermentation process. So what's so special about fermentation?

1:35:27 Well, fermentation is what happens in our large intestine. Fermentation is what happens in the rumen of a cow. Fermentation happens in the gut of an earthworm. And we know that fermented liquid and fermented cast and those kinds of earthworm products are very beneficial for plants. We can make beer with fermentation. We can make wine with fermentation. We can have fermented foods that have become very popular these days. So what is so special about fermentation?

1:35:57 In that fermentation process, there are actually millions, billions, and trillions of microbes involved in fermentation. As I said, one drop of rumen fluid has ten thousand times more microbes in it than there are humans on the planet. So when we have an environment where fermentation is taking place, we know that it's a very microbially rich environment. The microbes that are in that environment are communicating with each other, and they're producing these autoinducers that I talked about to sense how many of them there are and who's doing what. So they're all basically talking to each other.

1:36:49 What we want to do in agriculture is basically capture the essence of that. We want to capture something about those conversations. We want to do something that will encourage a seed to behave differently. So when you think about a seed in the soil, a seed can sense if it was in the right conditions. Let's go back to the prairie for a moment. When you had cool season plants and warm season plants in the prairie, you had some plants that germinated naturally. Some plants germinated in springtime and some plants germinated in fall, and they were the two main germination times of the year.

1:37:28 Something that germinates in spring and grows over summer will not germinate in fall because it's going to die over winter. And how does it know whether it's fall or whether it's spring? It could rain in springtime and it could be exactly the same soil temperature as when it rains in fall. You could have two situations where you've got the same amount of rain and the same temperature, and one of them was springtime and one of them was fall. And there will be seeds that will come up in fall and seeds that will come up in spring, and they will not confuse that. The seed knows how far it is from the soil surface.

1:38:04 If you take a seed and plant it ten feet down and the soil is moist, it will not germinate because that would be suicidal. There's no way that it can make it back to the top of the soil. If you took that same seed that had been planted ten feet down and it had been there for five years or something, and then you dug it up and you planted it now half an inch from the soil surface and watered it, it will emerge. So how did it know it was half an inch from that soil surface?

1:38:37 Also, how does it sense how far it is from another plant? How does it sense whether it's under a tree or away from a tree or what other kinds of plants are around it? So a seed has all kinds of messages coming through the seed coat all of the time: the temperature, the moisture, what other plants are near it, how deep it is in the soil. All of these things—it is a very, very, very sensitive package of plant intelligence.

1:39:06 Unfortunately, we've bred a lot of those things out of seeds when we've used them for our commercial cash crops. They aren't quite as intelligent as wild seeds, but they still do have a lot of intelligence in them. And through their seed coat, they can sense what is in the surrounding environment. So if a seed was in a very microbially rich environment, as it was in the prairie when it rains and the soil is moist and the temperature is right, it is also going to be able to sense whether there are a lot of microbes around it or whether there are not.

1:39:45 How is it going to be able to tell through its seed coat, through the moisture that comes into its seed coat, whether there's a lot of microbes in the environment or not around it? How is it going to be able to tell that? What's it going to pick up on in that water that comes into the seed coat? What's it going to be sensing in the moisture that comes into that seed coat? What is it going to know?

1:40:22 Do you think that bacteria living outside the cedar going to end up inside the sea? Well, I think I need to get the sack as a speaker. What do you reckon, Steve? So if you're a seed and you're in the business of planting seeds, I presume for...

1:40:58 Either forage production or grain production or something, and you're going to put that seed at a certain depth in the soil because you know that if you put it too deep or you leave it on the surface it's probably not going to germinate as well. So in a way, the seed knows right where you put it. It's going to affect how well it goes. You know that it needs water. You know it needs a certain temperature, and the seed knows all that too. But we have to know that in order to do what the seed needs to grow. We have to put it in the right place and give it the right amount of water and plant it at the right time of the year. So we know that a seed knows those things, but there's other things that a seed needs as well that we're just figuring out. It needs to be in a microbially rich environment so that it can get all the nutrients that it needs.

1:41:45 But how does a seed know? How does the seed sense whether it is in a microbially rich environment or not? The biological signals from the microbes—and what are they called? What's the word for that? Autoinducers? Thank you. So microbes communicate with each other using chemical signals called autoinducers, and they're water soluble and they spread through the environment that the microbes are living in. A microbe uses those signals to know how many other ones are like it, how many of me are there, and how many others are there out there, and to coordinate their behavior. They're producing autoinducers all the time. So if the water that comes into the seed coat when the seed is like ready to germinate, if that water is loaded with chemical signatures of microbes—it's loaded with autoinducers, which are water-soluble—then the microbe is going to sense that it is in a microbially rich environment. That's how it would do it in the prairies, right? If there was one that was in a really lovely bit of deep fertile soil compared to one that ended up like out on the rock somewhere or in a really shallow area, maybe there was rocks under the soil surface and it's in a really just like a mineral soil that's not biologically diverse or anything.

1:43:21 So let's say that the seed senses that it's in a microbially rich environment and it's just taking in some water, it's just starting to germinate. There's a whole lot of enzymatic processes that take place in the seed when it starts to germinate. How is it going to respond? Is it going to respond differently if it's in a microbial enriched environment compared to not being in a microbially rich environment?

1:44:02 Well, in a microbe really rich environment, they would be out there, right? So the microbes are out there in the soil, and the seed detects that they're out there. And so it is going to respond like everyone's coming to dinner, alright? Well, there's people coming to supper, so I'm going to have to feed them. So the seed will produce lots and lots of exudates in response to the fact that it really was in a microbial diversity environment. In the original prairies, when it starts to germinate, that's when it's at its most vulnerable stage. That's when it really has to form a relationship with those microbes to get the nitrogen that it needs. Let's say it was a grass plant—and corn is a grass, some wheat is a grass, right? So something in the grass family. It's a grass plant. It doesn't have a relationship with Rhizobium bacteria, so it's going to have to feed nitrogen-fixing bacteria around its roots. So in that very early stage, when it first takes in moisture, it's going to start using lots and lots of exudates to feed nitrogen-fixing bacteria to get the nitrogen that it needs to grow. So it's going to respond to the presence of microbes in its environment by feeding them.

1:45:16 So those are all the exudates that you see. When you see the riser sheet set form around the root hairs, like they never ever see the roots on their wheat crops when those wheat seeds are germinating. They never see roots on those plants. All they see are those thick riser sheets, the dreadlocks we call them. And that's because the seed has created all that, produced all those exudates to feed those microbes. Seeing that in the haggerty's case, they have tricked the seed. They planted the seed virtually in the desert. Those white sands are very, very infertile. They've planted the seed in a very infertile, hostile environment and tricked it into believing that it's in a very microbially rich environment by putting autoinducers from a rich microbial environment onto the seed. And now the seed responds, and it's like 'build it and they will come,' right? Then, once the seed actually—once you've actually tricked it into believing it's in a rich microbial environment—it will behave as if it is in a rich microbial environment. It will start producing lots of exudates. Whatever microbes are in the soil will respond to those and do the things that the seed wants. And then plant and microbial interaction, plant intelligence, if you like, takes over from that and just continues to build on that.

1:46:32 If we took that same seed and put it into that inhospitable environment like their neighbors do, using nitrogen under the seed, the seed will use that nitrogen to grow. But it won't have a microbial community around it to protect the roots. So it's quite likely to be subject to fungal pathogens around the roots or insect attack. It won't have the secondary plant compounds that it needs to have in its leaves. It's going to have a very low Brix level. So it is going to be subject to lots of insect attack, aphids and red-legged earth mite and all kinds of things—grasshoppers, locusts, whatever it is. In different parts of the world, you'll find there'll be different insects that will attack. I think you've got corn borers or something that attack. You know, they won't attack plants that have a high Brix level. Those things will not attack plants if they had a high Brix level, and they have all the microbes around the roots and everything that are protecting it. So we've created the environment for the things that we regard as being pests to proliferate.

1:47:40 Are we clear on that? What we now want to do, if we want to replicate this in agriculture, we are going to create an environment. We're going to be talking about a fermentation process. So we're actually going to be using the compost as a way to create a fermented compost to create a microbially rich environment. Then we're going to take a cold water extract of the compost when it's finished, and that cold water extract will have the chemical signals that the microbes used while they were making the compost. It's not necessarily about the compost. It was just a way of creating a fermentation environment where there'll be lots of microbes producing lots of signals coming to communicate with each other. And we're going to take those communication signals, we're going to put them on a seed. We're not putting microbes on the seed. They just want to make that clear right at the beginning. That we are changing the soil environment. We are changing the rhizosphere environment by tricking the seed into actually sensing through its seed coat that there's a lot of microbes out there that aren't there. Have we got that right?

1:48:54 Well, it's time for a break, and then Jerry is going to be actually talking about how we capture microbes from the air to form an inoculant, which is like a Rhizobium inoculate, I suppose, that you put on a legume. So we're making an inoculant, and then we're using that inoculant to inoculate a compost pile. And then all the microbes that are involved in the fermentation in that compost are going to produce autoinducers. Then it's those autoinducers that we're going to collect at the end of the process, and we're going to put them on the seed or put them in furrow. We'll use them as a foliar spray. That's what the rest of today is going to be about—how, in practical terms, you're actually going to do that. But we need to know at the beginning why we're doing that. And if you've done an e-learning composting course or you've made aerobic compost in the past or your compost teas, you have to forget about it all. That because it is going to confuse you. If you think you're making microbes to put on the seed, you're going to get totally confused, okay? So if any of you have that experience, just brought that out and to start with a clean slate. We are talking about autoinducers today, okay? So we take a break now, and then we'll come back.