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Re: Beneficial Soil Microbes
Joel -
How many microarthropods, earthworms, ants, or termites in a conventional ag field? Zero, most of the time. Why? How about insecticide use?
Diversity is by no means the strong link. Why do you think adding compost or compost tea works as well as it does. Take a look at leaf surfaces in your ag fields sometime, and compare them to the leaf surfaces in a healthy forest system. It's night and day. The leaves in the ag fields are desert wastelands compared to the huge numbers of individuals and diversity present on healthy forest leaves.
Every time you use sulfur, every time you till, every time you use copper, you kill organisms. Who comes back faster? The beneficials or the diseases?
All you have to look at is simple direct counts. Healthy soils have 600 million bacteria per gram, 150 micrograms of fungal biomass, 50,000 protozoa, and 20 to 30 beneficial nematodes. How many species of bacteria? Fungi? Protozoa? We see on the order of 20,000 to 25,000 species (DNA sequencing) of bacteria, 5,000 to 8,000 species of fungi, 150 to 200 species of protozoa per gram. 12 to 20 species of beneficial nematodes.
What's in the standard ag field? 1 million bacteria, 5 micrograms of fungal, 15,000 protozoa and very few beneficial nematodes, herds of root-feeding pests. How many species? 5,000 species of bacteria, 100 species of fungi, two or three species of protozoa, 3 to 6 species of beneficial nematodes.
Birds carrying inocula on their feet? Sure. All the time. But do the few bacteria carried that way replenish what you need? How fast can the bacteria, or fungi or protozoa or nematodes spread from that one inoculation before some chemical is applied which will kill them?
Remember, we're killing the bacteria and fungi with each chemical application. With each fertilizer application. Killing fungi, and beneficial nematodes and microarthropods with each tillage event.
How far downwind can you detect a single pesticide spray? And one way to detect the pesticide impact is to look at non-target organism death. It can be as much as 15 miles, maybe further.
We keep killing the beneficials in our soils off, and we don't let them have the time to grow back. Ag fields are not like the vents in the ocean. No one is at the bottom of the ocean killing the vent dwellers with toxic chemicals.
Inocula are necessary.
Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com