Effects of Herbicides on Soil
Working with students to help them better understand the complexities of soil as well as fuel their passion for the life underground has always been one of the primary goals of our company. These young minds are vital to the future of our planet.
Recently, we had the pleasure of working with Emaan Ashfaq, a ninth grader at Ashfaq Homeschool. Emaan performed a science project titled Effects of Herbicides on the Soil. The project used microBIOMETER® to analyze the impact of glyphosate and natural weed killer on the soil’s fungal to bacterial ratio.
Emaan presented the project at the Pittsburgh Regional Science Fair and placed 3rd in the Earth and Environment category. Congratulations, Emaan!
If you would like to utilize microBIOMETER® in your science fair project please contact us!
An interview with the San Antonio Food Bank who is using microBIOMETER® in their Farm and Garden Program.
How are you using microBIOMETER®?
We are using microBIOMETER to track the soil health on our farms, gardens and compost. This test allows us to understand if we are providing an environment for our crops to thrive. Because we grow fruit trees, herbs and annual edible crops the fungal to bacterial ratio helps us identify the current soil health and help us understand what strategies we can look to implement to improve that environment over time.
How does microBIOMETER® help people understand the importance of soil biology as opposed to the historical focus on soil chemistry?
Traditional soil tests give you a window into what nutrients are or are not available within your soil. It can give you insight into how much organic matter might be present in your soil, but not how you might work to track progress on soil health, diversity or improving your soil food web on an affordable level. While knowing the nutrient breakdown is helpful information it does not help you understand if you are providing an ideal environment for those micro and macro organisms to thrive and ultimately aid your crops or plants in receiving those nutrients and so much more. The microBIOMETER® test kit has helped us better understand our complex food web and what strategies we can do to create a more balanced environment for our crops and our soil.
How did the microBIOMETER® information assist you with your project?
This test helps us to educate not only our staff on soil health strategies, but also our volunteers and anyone who attends are Teaching Garden classes. The data we collect helps us to showcase how the strategies we are employing to improve our soil health are making a difference from season to season as opposed to every two years from a traditional soil test. That enables us to make better recommendations to our community of growers about ways they can improve their soil, too.
About the San Antonio Food Bank
The San Antonio Food Bank takes pride in fighting hunger, feeding hope in our 29-county service area. We believe that no child should go to bed hungry, adults should not have to choose between a hot meal and utilities, nor a senior sacrifice medical care for the sake of a meal.
Founded in 1980, The San Antonio Food Bank has quickly grown to serve 90,000 individuals a week in one of the largest service areas in Texas. Our focus is for clients to have food for today but to also have the resources to be self-sufficient in the future.
Fighting hunger is our number one priority but we also serve to educate and provide assistance in many other ways. We achieve this through our variety of programs and resources available to families, individuals, seniors, children, and military members in need.
Our Farm and Garden Program consists of two locations and six growing spaces, including two farms and the garden at the New Braunfels Food Bank. Together these areas total more than 100 acres and provide 300,000 pounds of fresh local produce annually to our 29-county service area. We utilize 5,000 volunteers annually to assist with our operation and to provide local produce to the community.
Our Farm and Garden Program strives to provide quality, local produce to the community and to provide resources to teach those in our community how to grow food for today and in the future. In order to meet those goals, we start with our soil. By understanding our soil biology and health we get a window into what is happening at the root level and better understand the environment where our crops live and how to make improvements so we are growing healthy plants and nutritious crops. We believe everyone deserves access to nutritious fruits and vegetables.
Our Teaching Garden classes provide information about the importance of soil and composting as a foundation for building soil diversity and health. We utilize cover cropping on the farms and in our gardens to reduce erosion, build soil fertility, reduce weed pressure and increase organic matter. We create and utilize composting to increase the diversity of our soil, divert valuable resources from the landfill and introduce the community to the benefits of composting at home or in the community.
Janet Atandi, a nematology PhD student in Kenya, is currently working on an assessment of banana fiber paper on soil health as part of a Wrap and Plant technology study. In brief, she is testing the long-term effect of using modified banana fiber paper to manage plant-parasitic nematodes and its impact on the beneficial soil microbial communities.
The banana fiber paper is used as an organic carrier for either ultra-low dosages of nematicides (abamectin and fluopyram) or microbial antagonists (Trichoderma spp.) and is to be compared to unmodified paper.
This study is being conducted using potatoes and green peas as the test crops over five consecutive seasons. With the aid of a microBIOMETER® test kit, Janet will be able to assess the impact of the paper on the soil microbial biomass and thus will be able to determine whether the banana paper is effective or detrimental to soil health.
Wrap and Plant technology sources:
NC State explores promising pest-control strategy with high-impact potential for sub-Saharan Africa
Banana’s Waste, potatoes gain
Potato farmers conquer a devastating worm—with paper made from bananas]
microBIOMETER® can tell you if you are increasing the nutrient value and disease resistance of your crop.
A Rodale study showed greatly increased levels of the vitamins and minerals in sustainably farmed soils as opposed to mineral fertilized crops. And at Rodale, the sustainable practice yields are the same as the paired fields farmed with mineral fertilizers – and in bad weather, and disease years significantly better. Rodale is only one of many studies showing the increased nutrient value of organically and sustainably grown food.
Now Dr. Montgomery of the University of Washington’s team in a similar study has shown that if you are increasing your microbial biomass you are increasing the nutrient level of your crop: “soil health is a more pertinent metric for assessing the impact of farming practices on the nutrient composition of crops”.
Biklé, A. and Montgomery, D.R., 2021. Soil health and nutrient density: beyond organic vs. conventional farming. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
Hepperly, P.R., Omondi, E. and Seidel, R., 2018. Soil regeneration increases crop nutrients, antioxidants and adaptive responses. MOJ Food Process Technol, 6(2), pp.196-203.
Different methods measure different fungal and bacterial populations. The chart below, adapted from Wang et al review of 192 different F:B ratios, illustrates how three different methods came up with three different F:B ratios for Forest, Farmland and Grassland. Note that microBIOMETER® correlates well with the gold standard, microscopy. By plate culture, forest F:B is about 1/3 that of farmland, whereas PLFA forest F:B is slightly higher, and microscopy and microBIOMETER® forest F:B are 10 times higher than farmland.
Nature article reports that microbial biomass estimates by microBIOMETER® correlates with soil health and yield stability.
The microBIOMETER® soil test was used to report microbial biomass in a recent Nature publication*. Scientists Dr. Judith Fitzpatrick and Dr. Brady Trexler of microBIOMETER® collaborated with a University of Tennessee team headed by Dr. Amin Nouri. The team evaluated the effects on soil health and yield stability of 39 different methods of raising cotton over 29 years. The conditions tested included till, no-till, various cover crops and different levels of nitrogen fertilization.
The study found that the major impacts on yield were very dry or wet conditions, and low or high temperatures. The deleterious effects of these weather extremes on yield were mitigated by regenerative agricultural practices which resulted in adequate soil, C, N, soil structure and microbial biomass.
*Nouri, A., Yoder, D.C., Raji, M., Ceylan, S., Jagadamma, S., Lee, J., Walker, F.R., Yin, X., Fitzpatrick, J., Trexler, B. and Arelli, P., 2021. Conservation agriculture increases the soil resilience and cotton yield stability in climate extremes of the southeast US. Communications Earth & Environment, 2(1), pp.1-12.
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.
