Improving Biological Activity for Personal Gain (and Inducing Disease Resistance)
Lets start with this brilliant passage taken from Quality Agriculture:
‘An infection is not the result of the presence of a pathogen. It’s the result of the level of plant health and a result of microbial ecology in the rhizosphere.’
Looking back at this season with such variable weather and looking towards the future, it always makes us think on what our limitations are, how can we improve and how can we get to a better more resilient crop with greater reliability on weather patterns as unpredictable as they are.
Farmers and consultants (much to our disappointment) can do absolutely nothing about weather. We can however grow bigger root systems that give us greater drought tolerance. We can’t change our soil type but we can improve what we have by using thoughtful tillage, growing cover crops, building organic matter, adding manures or compost, and promoting soil life. These are all a start into the depths of improving soil biology for our greater gain within the farming system.
The Power of Soil Health and Microbial Activity
One of the big gains from improving soil health and microbial activity is the result of inducing plant resistance to disease. Within the soil foodwebs wide world of activity we can gain greater levels of disease control while also improving our other issues of retaining soil structure and porosity, low nutrient availability and improved water drainage and retention. So why wouldn’t we look at regenerating our soil health?
Consequences of Modern Agriculture on Soil Biology
It is necessary to be aware that from the results of modern agriculture and intensive production with pesticides, salt fertilisers and high levels of nitrogen that without adequate microbial activity within soils, crop production has and will go into a decline. Soils have the potential and been seen to become practically sterile from the results which we sadly witness on a regular basis on farms in need of help. The lack of biology to balance out the chemical and physical structure of soil leads to poor nutrient recycling, poor soil structure which tends to slump over the yield or cap from rain, lower yields, greater nutrient imbalances leading to pest and disease problems, and higher inputs to account for the higher rate of pests and disease.
Remediating Soil: A Process of Regeneration
The key being that if your soil is in decline from poor biology and structure, soils constantly slumping with little or no porosity, soil capping from rain – there is only more benefit to gain when utilising biological practices. Yes, it may take time and effort to bring the soil back to life for which there is no singular solution but a process. The potential to remediate is very much there to bring soils and crop production back up without having to resort to higher inputs that cause further damage and limitations to our farming systems.
The Foundational Role of Plant Nutrition
One of the first processes to address on route to recovering and improving soil biology and disease resistance is plant nutrition. Healthy plants not only will be able to exploit their own immune responses more effectively but will also produce greater levels of biomass, more root exudates as food for the microbes and larger roots to interact with a larger surface area of biology, minerals and water.
Pesticides and Micronutrient Chelation: A Critical Issue
One of the most common issues that we see from intensive farming related to nutrition stems initially from pesticide use and nutrient chelation.
Micronutrients are extremely important for our plant health and crop development and key to maintaining significant pathways within the plant. The issue in common agriculture is that many of the pesticides readily and easily chelate onto these important minerals which can lead to shutting down the important pathways needed for a healthy, functioning plant.
Herbicides (especially Glyphosate) work by chelating elements within the plants to inhibit enzyme function leading to plant death. Glyphosate chelates with a range of minerals within the soil with the key issue being Manganese. Manganese is a key element necessary for splitting water within the plant to provide hydrogen to react with CO2 and many other enzyme reactions. The two main examples of manganese being tied up that people are probably familiar with is that firstly, without manganese we cannot photosynthesize without splitting the water molecule and secondly, it will shut down the shikimate pathway. The Shikimate Pathway is very much like the plants immune system and once this is locked up and shut down, disease can move in more readily causing a wider host of issues.
Correcting Deficiencies to Boost Plant Immunity and Carbon Sequestration
Assessing and correcting nutrient deficiencies is necessary for the correct functioning of plant physiology and its immune system. The plant itself will feed the soil microbes 20-50% of its daily photosynthates (carbohydrates and sugars) to stimulate increased microbial activity within the rhizosphere to re-establish symbiotic relations with these microbes. If we had a manganese deficiency within the plant caused via this chelation effect, due to its important role in plant physiology, the plant would not be able to photosynthesize and as such, no or little exudates would be exuded into the rhizosphere and no sugars would be able to be utilised for plant growth leading to a build-up of issues resulting in pests and disease to take out the unhealthy plants.
Through the correction of plant nutrition to gain a healthy plant, therefore increasing plant biomass and the level of exuded sugars from higher rates of photosynthesis into the soil we start to increase the amount of carbon both captured from the atmosphere, but also being sequestered into the soil profile to feed our microbial workforce that will build upon our greater microbial ecology. This would be key to building up any pre-existing microbes within the soil and to start to initiate further breakdown of any chemical residues by increasing the available food source to provide energy for them to effectively digest it. We can of course start to use carbon feed sources alongside nutrition to aid in chelation, stimulation of plant growth and as a further food source for biology to help populate the pre-existing biology before taking a step further into biological agriculture. To get biology back on track we first want to encourage the break down of chemical residues within the soil by integrating food sources for microbes such as humics, fulvics, fermented molasses or seaweed alongside correcting crop nutrition.
Microbial Ecology: The Key to Disease Resistance
From a microbial start looking towards the personal gains from developing disease resistance, it is important to know that it terms of pathogenic population – the majority of pathogens within the soil tend to exist in the same quantity as for a healthy soil and an unhealthy soil. Whats the difference? The healthy soil with plants free from disease has a greater microbial ecology and greater balance between microbes. The unhealthy soil has the same amount of pathogens, but very little levels of other microbes in the profile to out-compete them, to keep these pathogens (and the other species) in check and police them. That is the only difference. We then gain extreme benefit from having present a greater ecology to digest, recycle and utilise the microbes in forms of nutrition and energy. The natural balance and competition of a healthy soil with a varied ecology will aid us in inducing disease resistance among many other benefits.
Pseudomonas and Chemical Impact
One of the species we see great gain in increasing populations of is Pseudomonas. Pseudomonas is a wonderful microbial species in the soil that regulate the balance of other species within the soil and act as the local police force. The catch is though that Pseudomonas unfortunately are extremely sensitive to herbicides like Glyphosate and as such, there is usually very little or none in the majority of our arable soils which would aid us in taking out and outcompeting pathogenic fungi within the soil. This shows the impact that certain chemicals can have on key beneficial microbial life and why we need to consider how to offset the damage we are doing when integrating these methods into our system.
Strategic Inoculation for Soil Rehabilitation
Furthering on the topic of the rehabilitation of soil life, we can then consider when there is biology beginning to build, soil structure is adequately able to offer air and moisture, and food resources have been built, we can start to look into using inoculation to further increase microbial ecology for the gain of disease resistance. Inoculation must be targeted to soils at the right stage and with adequate food source, water management and oxygen. Inoculation too early will see any residual poisons or inadequate conditions kill off your inoculant without gaining any benefits. Inoculants can be extremely beneficial in a good system though, enabling the benefits of select species and to fast forward soil biology by a couple of years than without. Nature always abhors balance, and so from regularly applying inoculants you also gain the guarantee of treating the rhizosphere with species that will effectively offer key benefits into regenerative and biological agriculture.
Inoculants are best implemented as a placement with the seed to ensure close contact and an established food source of exudates when the crop has emerged. Once conditions, ecological balance and plant nutrition is re-established, greater disease resistance, greater biomass, increased drought resistance, reduced inputs and healthier environment will all be a building factor into the farming system. The key for this process and for the coming season and all seasons, is to be observant. Take note of what your applications are doing to the soil and the plants. What’s worked, what hasn’t, why has it given the results we’ve seen? How can we continue to reap and improve the rewards of nature going forwards.
The Plant-Human Health Connection
Remember that plant health is no different to human health. If you as a person do not get the right nutrition you need, your health would start to decline and you would have less energy and become more susceptible to illness, health issues and disease. This is the same for plants. If you can correct the nutritional requirements for yourself or your plants, the immune system will start to naturally function again. It is key to understand that within this process, human health is almost whole heartedly reliant on your gut microbiota. You work off of a whole armory of microbes within us, which if we suffer damage to this, health issues can very much plague us for the rest of our life if not returned to our pre-existing balance or gut health. Plants work in the same way utilising the soil microbiota as their gut to feed them and look after their health in complex relationships. If we can get the soils healthy and working for them, the plants will stay healthy.
Nature’s Balance and Regenerative Decisions
Disease and insects are present to clean up the rubbish in nature as the weak plants. Healthy functioning plants will not be targeted by either as they are not a viable food source. There are of course different stages to physiological development to plant as you begin down these routes to soil health but it is achievable to easily utilise soil biology for not only personal gains in profitability but also to aid in returning the environment to a better state than it is.
‘Some tillage isn’t as bad as herbicides, not as bad as anhydrous ammonia and not as bad as high-salt fertilisers. When all of these are used together though, it can be very overwhelming and detrimental to soil-life and balance.’
// Michael Mcneill
All applications and operations have an impact on our farming systems. They can build upon each other to detriment, offset each other, or continue to improve the soils and plants we have. Base decisions on regeneration, not degeneration. Biology can offer huge returns, but unless we pay attention to the effects we have – how will we develop our farms for the better.
