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.
Often, we are asked about variance – different results when you test the same sample. Our answer is that nature produces most of this variance. To explain, when you measure out 0.5 cc of soil, you have on average about 0.6 grams of soil. If your microBIOMETER® results read 300ugMBC/gram of soil, that means you have 600ug of microbial biomass – we divide the number we get by ½ because the literature tells us that 50% of the dried MB is carbon. As dried bacteria is estimated to weigh 1pg, if this were all bacteria, it constitutes 600,000,000pg or 600 million bacteria.
Now imagine that I have 600 apartment buildings in NYC that each contain 1 million people, and I decide to check 10 apartments in 10 buildings at 4 p.m. to estimate the number of people actually in the building. Obviously, it would vary because people are not always in their apartment and different apartments have different numbers of inhabitants – the same is true for soil.
Soil contains microscopic aggregates of different sizes and the number and type of inhabitants in each varies on the physical and chemical composition of the space as well as the nutrient, pH and hydration level. Each sample you take is like looking at a number of different apartments in a number of apartment buildings.
For this reason, when conducting research, soil and medical researchers run duplicates or triplicates. Because of cost, soil labs generally do not run duplicates and they see 10- 25% variation. We are recommending running duplicates when using microBIOMETER® unless you are doing academic research. Generally, we see <10% variation for a given sample, and for a field that looks homogeneous. Pastures can have much higher variation because the nutrients level across the area varies tremendously.
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:
microBIOMETER® reports the microbial biomass as ug of microbial carbon/gram of soil. The chart pictured here shows how much carbon can be stored in an acre just by increasing microbial biomass alone. (Chemically fertilized farmland averages about 100 ug/microbial C/g of soil.)
Microbial biomass is the best single estimate of soil quality. It is the bodies of dead microbes that build humus/soil organic carbon, returning carbon to the soil and building soil structure which prevents erosion and pollutant run off. (Chemical nitrogen fertilizers have been shown to inhibit microbial biomass.)
The literature reports that lab measurements of soil organic carbon are not sufficiently accurate in monitoring an increase in carbon sequestration in less than 3 years but that a yearly increase in microbial biomass can indicate that the process of carbon accumulation is occurring.
microBIOMETER® has been used to demonstrate increases in soil carbon due to increases in microbial biomass on the Apple campus in Texas and for 3 years by the NYC Arts and Science Carbon Sponge Project.
Katharhy G. is an agroecosystem and ethnoscience researcher who traveled to Ecuador to investigate the relationship between microbial biomass and crop health, as well as to study the local indigenous agriculture practices.
He visited 28 different farms growing 15 different crops. 14 of these farms are practicing conventional farming, while the other 14 farms are practicing indigenous regenerative farming. Most sites are not receiving irrigation. He tested the soil with microBIOMETER® and ranked the crop health as poor (1), average (2), good (3), excellent (4).
As the graph shows, microbial biomass correlated with crop health under all these different conditions. Samples with microbial biomass lower than 225 were all poor (1) and samples above 400 were all excellent.
The take home lesson is that to improve your plant health and yield, increase your microbial biomass by feeding your microbes with organic amendments.
If you have microBIOMETER® research data you’d like to share with us, please contact us. We would love to share it with our readers!
Contact:. ka*******@***il.com
Many first-time cannabis growers don’t think too hard about the soil their plants will be growing in. If the soil looks healthy enough, it should be good to go, right? Well, it might be, but that isn’t enough information to tell for sure. If you really want to know whether your cannabis will thrive, you’ll have to see whether or not your soil contains a solid amount of microbes.
Microbes have a mutually beneficial relationship with the plants in their soil, and supporting microbes is one of the best ways you can support your cannabis. As we go along, we’ll be discussing the details of microbial presence in soil, the relationship between microbes and plants, and the specific organisms that make optimal growth possible.
Why Microbes Play a Vital Role in your Cannabis Plant Health
Microbes are key if you want your cannabis plants to grow as well as they can. If the idea of beneficial bacteria is strange to you, remember that we, ideally, have loads of bacteria in our bodies that keep us healthy. We’re not made of soil, of course, so things don’t work exactly the same, but the microbes in soil and those in our guts share key functions in common. Namely, as we’re about to explore, microbes provide vital nutrients to the plants in their soil, along with protecting them from harmful forces.
How Microbes and Cannabis Plants Work Together
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how the relationship between microbes and the cannabis plants you are growing play out in the soil. Plants need sufficient amounts of phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen to survive and microbes have a direct hand in how much of those nutrients your plants receive.
While the nutrients may be in the soil already, they aren’t as accessible as they could be. Potassium, for example, is often shrouded in inorganic material. As microbes happen upon it, they’ll consume it, metabolize it, and excrete it in a form much more readily consumed by the plants. While the others aren’t as hard for the plant to get to, the microbes break them down nonetheless, and the plants benefit greatly from the enhanced access. This effort is further assisted by their ability to aerate the soil, ensuring there’s an even flow of water and nutrients.
The microbes aren’t only doing all this from the goodness of their heart, though. As the plants are fed, their roots excrete a collection of substances, called exudates, into the soil. These exudates, which include a variety of amino acids, organic acids, and sugars, happen to be a great source of nutrition for the microbes. With their microbe bellies full, the nutritional cycle is fully formed, and the plants are ready to thrive.
The Importance of Fungi for Growing Cannabis
While we think of fungi as separate from microbes, they’re part of the club too, and serve the same cause. To be clear, though, this is because they also partake in the exudates to stay fed.
Mycorrhiza fungi, in particular, can be found acting as the extension of plant roots, collecting nutrition from further down the soil than plants would be able to otherwise.
One type, ectomycorrhizae, acts as a sort of sheath for the root, extending out for nutrition. Endomycorrhizae, however, actually live inside the plant, helping to bring the nutrients straight into the root. To preserve them, ensure that you’re not being heavy-handed with fertilizers. Of course, you should also avoid fungicides entirely.
Microbial Dangers, and How Other Microbes Stop Them
As the fungi provide nutrients to the roots, they serve as a protective layer for them as well. But what, exactly, do they need protecting from? Well, among the beneficial microbes, there are thousands of microscopic worms, called parasitic nematodes, that feed on the roots of plants.
Looking from the outside, you’d notice roots facing attacks from ectoparasitic nematodes, which live in the soil right outside said roots (the rhizosphere). At the same time, endoparasitic nematodes are able to enter the roots themselves, breaking them down from the inside.
In anticipation of this threat, fungi will utilize their hyphae, which are the tiny strands that make up their mycelium. Using these strands, the fungi are able to locate and trap both types of nematodes, preventing them from further chewing at the root.
The fungi also receive help from, interestingly enough, other nematodes. They aren’t quite the same, though; while the others are parasitic, these are known as predatory nematodes. They, too, dwell in the rhizosphere, but only to eliminate plant-eating threats in the area.
How Earthworms Play a Part
Not every part of this underground battle is microscopic, though. In fact, the humble earthworm will be one of the main lines of defense for your cannabis plant. Parasitic nematodes happen to be a favorite prey of theirs, so they’ll munch up whatever your fungi and other microbes can’t catch. In turn, the waste they excrete contains nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (the three vital nutrients we mentioned earlier), along with calcium and magnesium. They also aerate the soil as they move around, ensuring the plant has easy access to the natural fertilizer.
How Benefits Show Themselves in Cannabis Plants
If you’re able to ensure optimal conditions for your soil microbes, you’ll notice it pretty quickly as your cannabis plants mature. Their leaves will be greener and fuller, they’ll end up on the taller side, and your buds will be notably larger and more resinous than average.
Your plant may be able to survive without a healthy amount of microbes, but it’ll look amateur in comparison. That’s not to mention the cost of those seeds adding up, leading you to lose money you could spend on expanding your growing operation. Armed with this new information, you won’t even have to worry yourself with the thought. Just keep those microbes and worms alive, and you’ll be on your way to hefty yields of potent buds!
microBIOMETER®, a rapid, on-site soil test, will help you determine the microbial levels in your cannabis soil as well as the fungal to bacterial ratio to ensure the healthiest environment for optimal growth of your plants.
Soil microbes are tightly bound to and often covered in soil making them very hard to evaluate by microscopy. The special magic of microBIOMETER® is the extraction powder and whisking process that separates most of the microbes from the soil. And during the 20 minute settling time allows the soil particles to precipitate leaving the extraction fluid >95% microbial.
This allows microBIOMETER® to examine 100 – 1000 times more microbes than any other method. When you apply extraction fluid to the membrane in the test card the colored microbes are captured on the surface of the membrane. A cell phone picture of the card is analyzed by the app and the intensity of the color of the microbes indicates their quantity – this is the basis for all laboratory colorimetric tests. We discovered that the fungi in soils are a slightly different color than bacteria, and so the app is able to distinguish between bacteria and fungi.
Click here to see a full video tutorial of microBIOMETER® soil testing.
Understanding Soil Organic Matter and its impact on soil health and microbial biomass.
We are often asked what is a good level of microbial biomass (MB). There is no one answer. The level of MB you can reach is dependent on soil organic matter (SOM.) Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a large part of soil organic matter but SOM is a mixture of Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Sulfur (S) and all the other minerals that microbes and plants need.
There are 2 types of SOM: Stable SOM, often referred to as humic matter; and Fresh SOM. Fresh SOM is composed of SOM material recently released from Stable SOM and any fertilizers, amendments or litter. You can compensate for low stable SOM by providing lots of fresh SOM. The key to the efficacy of fresh SOM is that it needs to be nutrient balanced*, i.e. it needs the correct balance of C,N,P, and S. That is where understanding soil chemistry and using the right additives comes in.
Think of SOM as your credit reserve. In spring, the plant starts to grow and puts out exudates that stimulate the microbes to multiply. But these multiplying microbes need more than the sugars that the plant supplies, they need the N, P, S and micro nutrients that are in SOM.
Agronomists often cultivate soil for intensive organic agriculture and those soils contain lots of fresh organic matter. The microbial biomass of these mixtures can read as high as 2000 ug MBC/gram of dry soil. As the microbes and plants in this rich soil die, they become fresh SOM. The amount of stable SOM that soil can store depends to a large degree on the type of soil because storage requires mineral surfaces for attachment and aggregates for protection. If your soil is inherently poor at storing SOM, you will need to rely on fresh SOM to feed your microbes and plants.
We highly recommend that you read the review referenced below to better understand SOM.
Coonan, E.C., Kirkby, C.A., Kirkegaard, J.A. et al. Microorganisms and nutrient stoichiometry as mediators of soil organic matter dynamics. Nutr Cycl Agroecosyst 117, 273–298 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10705-020-10076-8
Leeston Pastoral is a 5th generation, family owned farm in New South Wales, Australia. Historically, they have had a fine wool Merino & Hereford cattle breeding operation. Over the last 20 years they have moved to focus on cattle.
The 2019 drought forced them to reevaluate what operation they wanted to continue in. They decided to adopt a more regenerative approach and move from a cattle breeding operation to a cattle trading operation. They now have one large mob grazing holistically using short grazes and long pasture rest periods.
microBIOMETER® has allowed them to quickly, easily and inexpensively record existing benchmark measurements of their soil microbiology and now reassess the effects of stock movements and plant/soil amendments. They are excited to see the new F:B ratio measurement, as they want to make sure the soils stay fungally dominated so they can more effectively create stored soil organic matter.
They were happy to see their microBIOMETER® results showed an almost 30% increase in microbial biomass and fungal to bacterial ratio one month after holistic grazing. Studies have shown that a 1.5x increase in your soil’s F:B ratio can lead to a 3x increase in carbon sequestration. Thank you Adam for sharing your experience with us!
