Austin testing soil testing at a hemp farm with microBIOMETER®
PLANT Group is a team of designers, engineers, and ecologists. The company is building systems to connect humans and nature. In the process, they are soil testing at a hemp farm in Iowa, Honeysuckle Hops & Hemp.
First, through their partnership with Blue Forest Farms, the team at PLANT Group is using microBIOMETER®. They are utilizing the tool to research soil health and carbon sequestration implications of growing hemp.
Furthermore, Austin has an interest in publishing research on their alternate organic hemp production methods. microBIOMETER® is assisting them in collecting some “pretty cool data on microbial biomass and fungal ratios in the soil in response to these strategies.”
Meanwhile, the company recently launched a new line of hemp food products, Hemp Hearts. They grow each plant regeneratively. This includes a focus on soil carbon, biodiversity, and ecosystem health.
Did you know one hectare of hemp can absorb 15 tons of CO2 per hectare? Hemp’s rapid growth makes it one of the fastest CO2-to-biomass conversion tools available. Therefore, let’s stop cutting down our forests. Plant some hemp instead!
Lastly, please visit the PLANT Group website to meet the rest of the team and learn more about their business. And follow them on Instagram to keep up to date on their progress!
Jeff Lowenfels
Jeff Lowenfels, a valued advisor and member of our Board, was recently featured in the New York Times Sunday Magazine article, He Wrote a gardening column: He ended up documenting climate change.
For 45 years Jeff has written a gardening column for the Anchorage Daily News and over this time has helped adapt Alaskan growers to their much longer growing season. And in doing so has become a documenter of climate change.
Jeff joined Prolific Earth Sciences because he knew the only way to wean agriculture off synthetic fertilizers was to trust the microbes to deliver nutrients to plants. Jeff is the well-known author of the all-time best selling gardening book, Teaming with Microbes, as well as Teaming with Fungi, Teaming with Nutrients and DIY Cannabis all very readable, informative and available on Amazon.
Chiappetta Agricultural Company
We were excited to hear from our long-time customer Marcelo Chiappetta of Chiappetta Agricultural Company on how his microBIOMETER® testing has been progressing. Below is what he shared with us.
“Here in southern Brazil the past 5 years we’ve been working with biological agriculture and changing the way we see and manage our farm; more and more like an agricultural organism. Taking care of microorganisms, plants, animals and humans and focusing on producing high quality grains.
Fungal and bacterial ratio is fundamental to know how our soil is related to what crop we grow. And now, after starting to brew compost tea and using compost extract, microBIOMETER® is helping us measure and understand the right recipe of carbon and nitrogen related to the amount of fungi that we want to build in our composts before adding to the soil. We see that good microbial biomass along with organic matter is excellent for our soils.
In practical terms, we see biological flowering in crop fields and this is the proof that we are doing a great job with nature. Our soil is our bioreactor, and we need to feed it with the right nutrients. The Brazilian biome is rich on biodiversity and as farmers and soil guardians we have a responsibility to bring life back to our farm again in a sustainable way of producing food.”
Click here to read more on Marcelo’s soil testing.
Soil testing
Modern agriculture practices have led to the systematic degradation of the world’s soil and release of carbon into the environment. The effects are increased need for expensive and environmentally dangerous inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides), the loss of fertile top soil, decrease in water holding capacity of soil and dangerously high levels of atmospheric carbon.
Farmers, industry, and environmentalists are looking for cost-effective and reliable ways to measure soil health, to assess impacts of progressive changes on soil and harvest management, and to measure carbon in soil. Before microBIOMETER®, growers have traditionally relied on expensive lab testing of soil. Many current methods are technique and individual lab dependent. Therefore, run-to-run and lab-to-lab variation can greatly affect consistency leading to increased variability. Current methods are performed in labs and the soil is aged and changed from the time of collection. Furthermore, lab tests are difficult to use in developing countries as they can cost upwards of $500 per sample. This makes the test prohibitive to some markets and limits the number of times a grower can test their soil.
Our mission at Prolific Earth Sciences is to enable soil stewards all over the world to use mobile technology and our low-cost soil test to assess regenerative soil practices, to improve soil health, and work towards increased soil carbon sequestration. microBIOMETER® equips growers with the data necessary to make decisions on which practices are the most cost-effective. Inputs such as fertilizers are expensive and changes to practice are risky. Monitoring soil microbial biomass inexpensively, in real time, can help a soil steward quickly assess if an input and practice is improving soil health and worth the investment. In other words, assess before you invest! We also envision microBIOMETER® one day being a powerful tool in the measurement and audit of carbon sequestration programs.
microBIOMETER® has been on the market for over 3 years with direct and distributor sales and currently has customers in over 20 countries.
Graham Mackie, Golf Course Manager at Edzell Golf Course in the U.K., has been using microBIOMETER® to monitor the health of the soil on the greens. Here is what he had to say about our soil test.
“I really like microBIOMETER®. It is simple to use and for the first time I can get baseline readings to see what is effective and what is not in influencing soil biology. As a golf course manager I believe that swinging the F: B ratio in favor of the fungi will allow the dominant grasses to be the desirable perennials.
I took microBIOMETER® readings of the main 18- hole course as well as the small 9-hole course and the readings correlated with what I expected. The 9-hole greens have more poa annua, therefore, were more bacterial dominant. I also took a reading of an area of untouched fescue rough which was very fungal dominant, as expected. It was great to have this theory confirmed. I am now looking forward to see if and how I can swing the balance to more fungal dominance on the greens.”
A BIG thank you to Graham for sharing his testing experience with us!
Sustainable Organic Q8 was launched in mid-2018, educating people on recycling their organic waste, being environmentally aware and teaching people how to grow whatever and wherever they can. As far as gardening/farming styles, Sustainable Organic focuses on the value of the living soil and the soil food web and teaching home gardeners and farmers to slowly shift the general culture from MONOCULTURE, “Babysitting plants” and providing all their needs from nutrients to medicine to DIVERSITY, Building and regenerating an ecosystem that will take care of itself or at least be a bit less exhaustive and much more sustainable.
Sustainable Organic has helped bring diversity above grounds back to the region in the past couple years. However, many people are still very new to the life underground and living soil. Their gardening/farming practices rely heavily on providing nutrients and immunity/medicine to plants. To them it is cheap, it works, and they’re so set in their ways that the idea of change is becomes a source of anxiety.
Although more and more gardeners are praising the life in the soil, they also practice routine solarization and refuse to refrain from it, reflecting their hazy understanding of soil biology and the soil food web and what it really takes to construct. Testing the soil to most growers means checking nutrient availability, water content and pH.
For the sake of adding some objectivity to soil biomass and increasing the value of soil biomass testing, Sustainable Organic sent microBIOMETER® test kits to popular gardeners in Kuwait, Saudi and Dubai to experiment with by testing their soils and compost. These gardeners have a large number of followers and they educate via social media, gardening courses, and workshops. By starting to broadcast microBIOMETER® as a means of testing the biomass in the soil and amending it based on the readings received, Sustainable Organic intends to create a trend in the region shifting the focus more on the life in the soil than the mineral content.
“microBIOMETER® is an innovation that has made it possible to quantify the life in the soil. This economic tool, I believe, not only helps us improve our soil at the gardening/farming level, but it can also help us deepen our understanding and comprehension of the soil food web and the LIFE underground. This will ultimately lead to a tremendous positive change at the psychological and behavioral level. It’s common to see people in our region praising the life in the soil (finally), but then professing solarization at the end of or the beginning of a grow season. This is an obvious clash in concepts that we hope are not deeply understood. We believe with popularizing the use of the microBIOMETER®, we can help clear the fog!
It’s beautiful to see people go out in the middle of the desert and start digging holes to “build” soil, plant trees and mulch around them; then announce seeing mushrooms and biologic diversity; start talking about soil biology, arbuscular fungi and carbon sequestration and tell farmers near them to try out the living soil method learned from Sustainable Organic. They say think globally and act locally. We intend to revive the desert in the Arabian Peninsula with Mother Earth and her fever at heart!”
About Dr. Jassem Bastaki. Originally from Kuwait, Jassem acquired his education in Head and Neck Endocrine Pathology in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2012, he left Pittsburgh to practice diagnostics and oncology in Kuwait and in doing so transitioned from fertile land to urban settings in some of the harshest climates in the world. The stress from his line of work led him back to gardening; indoors and hydroponic initially until he learned how to garden outdoors no matter the climate or conditions. Every second he spent with his plants taught him more and more about life and the reality we are unaware of. “We are guests on this earth with everything else that lives on it and in it.” The more he realized what was missing and where to find it, he wanted to help everyone find their way back to earth.
Jassem is a microBIOMETER® distributor in the Gulf Region as well as Iraq, Jordan and Egypt.
Source: Ben Taylor-Davies Twitter
Ben Taylor-Davies, also known as Regen Ben, is a farmer and bioagri-ecologist working from Herefordshire in the UK. His farm is based in Ross-on-Wye and has been focused on environmental improvements for the past 22 years. His work includes creating 12km of new hedges with 6m of pollen and nectar or ground bird nesting margins around every field as well as working on river meadow restoration.
Following a Nuffield scholarship in 2016 and the opportunity to travel the world (USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Peru, South Africa, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Mongolia, China, Singapore and Australia), Ben was intrigued by the regenerative agriculture movement which very much complimented the environmental work he was doing back on his own farm. When discussing these soil health focused farming methods with clients as an agronomist, it struck a chord with many of them too; the future of agriculture and real farm sustainability.
Ben came across microBIOMETER® in 2019 and found it an incredibly useful tool in benchmarking clients farms in order to start monitoring change in what they were doing. The real time results offered by microBIOMETER® provides Ben with full control over how, where and when he takes readings. Ben uses his microBIOMETER® readings in conjunction with the What3words app which allows him to accurately repeat measurements in subsequent years in order to build a picture of successes and failures.
In the spring and early summer of 2020, the Nutrient Management Spear Program at Cornell University conducted a soil survey of yield-stability based management zones on a New York dairy farm.
Ben Lehman, research assistant in the Nutrient Management Spear Program at Cornell University, completed a study on the Within- Field Variability of Soil Characteristics and Corn Yield Stability on a New York Dairy Farm.
Ben utilized microBIOMETER® in his research to determine the microbial biomass of the soil samples.
This study was presented at the 2020 American Society of Agronomy Annual Meeting.
Source: Cornell Center for Materials Research
Sometimes the wisdom we need to build a great future is buried in the past. Regenerative agriculture isn’t an entirely new concept, it’s actually more of a return to the wisdom of farmers from days gone by. What’s old is new again and its popularity is spreading around the globe like a prairie fire.
While regenerative agriculture gives a well-earned nod to the past, its relationship with science and technology allows it to effectively transform the way we currently grow food. microBIOMETER®, with their customers all around the world, are leading the way with technology that shows farmers when their soil health practices are working and when they are not.
“I believe biological agriculture is the way to regenerate and create more resilient soil that will supply nutrients and higher immunity to the plants. This is why microBIOMETER® has become an invaluable asset to my soil management efforts.” ~ Marcelo Chiappetta of Chiapeta Empresa Agricola in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Creating healthy soil may take the wisdom of generations of farmers, but microBIOMETER® supplies the knowledge farmers need to best manage potential outcomes.
In learning how to develop healthy soil for healthy plants and people, Frans Plugge of New Zealand discovered the importance of increasing the fungi population in his garden and this led him to microBIOMETER®.
“The microBIOMETER® soil test makes measuring the fungi to bacteria ratio so easy,” Frans said.
To promote the benefits of soil regeneration, Frans has started the community street garden using the principles of regenerative agriculture; minimizing artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Frans plans to take regular measurements of the fungi to bacteria ratio using microBIOMETER® to monitor his progress as well as create a great discussion point with members of the garden community, therefore, contributing to a healthy plant community.
Some of the microBIOMETER® results Frans shared with us for his home garden and compost:
The first photo pictured here is a bare clay strip that Frans forked loose but did not turn. He added a thin layer of garden compost along with a layer of soil sowing in ten different species of autumn crops; legumes, grasses, and cereals. Then he planted brassicas into the garden (second photo).
Over the years, Frans typically added compost and dug in green crop in the main vegetable garden, but had not had great success in yield. This autumn in the area the microBIOMETER® sample was taken from, he planted an autumn cover crop of 7-8 different species and a selection of brassicas amongst them. The idea is when the cover crop begins to go to seed, they cut at root level and drop as mulch (third photo). Frans is hoping they can stop digging in an effort to build up healthy soil organisms.
Frans’ conclusions related to New Zealand’s potential to reduce its carbon footprint:
About Frans:
