Green Country Worms is a small worm farm located in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Their main focus is producing high quality worm castings. They started vermicomposting in 2008 when they received their first pound of compost worms. 12 years later they still love composting with worms and are fascinated with the worm castings they produce.
About a year ago they discovered their customers wanted proof of the quality of their product. While they could make claims about their worm castings, their customers wanted to see actual data. They periodically sent their castings to a certified lab to be tested, however, this is costly to do on a regular basis.
They love the microBIOMETER® soil test because it is affordable and it gives them a quick census of the microorganisms in their castings. They learned early on that a simple NPK soil test did not give them the data they were looking for. Being research minded they were also happy to find out that microBIOMETER® is involved in various university studies to demonstrate it’s validity and reliability as a soil testing instrument.
Green Country is currently using microBIOMETER® to compare worm castings that are produced with high quality malted barley. They feed malted barley in some of their worm bins and not in others.
Stay tuned! We will post the results of their experiment once it is complete.
Source: Food Web and Soil Health
The graph pictured here from the USDA website depicts the ratio of fungi to bacteria as a characteristic of the type of system it is in. An excerpt from the article:
“Grasslands and agricultural soils usually have bacterial-dominated food webs – that is, most biomass is in the form of bacteria. Highly productive agricultural soils tend to have ratios of fungal to bacterial biomass near 1:1 or somewhat less. Forests tend to have fungal-dominated food webs. The ratio of fungal to bacterial biomass may be 5:1 to 10:1 in a deciduous forest and 100:1 to 1000:1 in a coniferous forest.”
If you are measuring soil attached to the roots colonized by mycorrhizal fungi, your ratios should be much higher than is shown for agricultural soil. Also the saprophytic fungi population increases when there is a lot of litter for digestion, so you would expect to see different ratios at different times of the year and under different conditions.
The graph pictured below based on USDA website information shows the expected fungal to bacterial ratio for various plants.
Please visit our Using the Fungal to Bacterial Ratio with microBIOMETER® on YouTube for more information on fungal to bacterial analysis.
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