Soil biotics - The Joy Of High Brix - SweetSue Goes Perpetual

PeeJay;2590002 said:

Sue, I'm not disparaging anybody. I think that picture from Bob's journal is actually a Krystalica. Beautiful coloration. You openly encourage discussion and learning in your journal and by your own admission are questioning why you shouldn't spend significant amounts of time doing things like sprouting grains for SSTs, brewing up ACTs, supplementing with coconut water, etc. When speaking to the subject you directed the many readers here to go look at the "trichome explosion" in Bob's journal. So, i went and gave his journals a careful read through. One thing that is interesting to note is that Bob was very pleased with how well his plants in complete soil did when he was recently away for 17 days on vacation and they had nothing but water.

You are also asking interesting questions about things like how long a bacterium lives after it is added to the soil and obviously contemplating how nutrients are absorbed into the plant from the soil.

When a soil biologist is assessing the relationships between and relative numbers of microbiological residents in the soil community she has a great new tool to use now compared to the old days. In the old days counts were made by running serial dilutions of soil samples and then culturing plates of various growth media from the dilution. Culturing anaerobes was very difficult because the plates needed to be incubated in an oxygen free environment. Nowdays DNA assays provide a clearer snapshot of what is going on in soil at any one minute frozen in time. In order for a DNA assay to be useful the genome for each type of soil organism must be decoded first. Once the genome has been decoded then the quantity of the organism in the soil can be determined with reasonable accuracy. It's interesting stuff. In a tea brewing scenario the goal is to culture large quantities of bacteria and add them to the soil with the idea that they can be added like pets into the soil community where they will frolic and flourish in the happy environment we have created for them. In reality 99% of them will die within an hour of being added to the soil. Microorganisms that grow explosively in a bubbled tea environment are introduced into a very different environment than they flourished in while bubbling away. The environment in the bubbler is as drastically different from the environment in a container of dirt as the environment in the Gobi Desert is from that of the Brazilian rainforest. A healthy soil environment will host a healthy and balanced microbial community independent of the introduction of large numbers of a few types of successfully bubble-bucket cultured organisms.

An interesting way to think about the microbial community in soil is to consider the prebiotic/probiotic relationship in humans. If the gut contents (which is analogous to the soil in many ways) lacks probiotic organisms it leads to improper digestion and the body suffers the consequences. Remember that the gut is not "inside the body" in a true sense. The gut forms a barrier between the outside of the body and the inside in the same way as the skin and mucous membranes do. Certain disease states or courses of antibiotic medications can disrupt a healthy probiotic population in the gut. A great deal of research has and is being done to figure out how to reestablish a healthy probiotic environment once it is out of whack. It turns out to be quite complicated. Prebiotics are the other piece of the puzzle. Prebiotics are mostly poorly digested or undigestible carbohydrates that the body can not break down but that some types of bacteria can.

In soil we want a diversity of prebiotics, substances that provide the good juju for beneficial microbes to thrive. There is no amount of "good bacteria" that can be dumped into a soil that has a poor prebiotic environment and will make any difference. That is why it is important to build a solid healthy prebiotic soil environment. Once that prebiotic environment is in place the soil community becomes self regulating. A healthy symbiosis. There is no need to repeatedly attempt to breed and release large numbers of the scant diversity of organisms that thrive in a bubble-bucket environment into the soil. A healthy prebiotic soil supports what it will support independent of those types of additions. At best, such additions may foster a prebiotic environment in some ways because all the corpses provide resources for the already established complex probiotic environment. On the other hand you could just make sure that the raw materials added to the bucket are present in sufficient quantities in the soil and you'd get the same results with much less mess and fuss.

Nutrient transport is mostly under genetic control. Environment influences genetic expression. The plant manufactures protien transorters that move things from the soil (the outside) into the plant. These things do not simply "soak in." Even water absorption is controlled by specific proteins called aquaporins. Aquaporins are pretty cool. They let single water molecules into the plant and the molecules must be in the proper orientation to pass. Nothing, as far as I have read is co-transported with water. There seem to be no piggybackers at all. Other protein transporters can be symporters or antiporters. Many are ATPases that use energy from high-energy phosphate bonds to move substances up concentration gradients. These proteins are enzymes. Enzymes are large molecules. Even the smallest and simplest enzymes dwarf something like an ammonium ion on a scale that is hard to put into perspective.You can not add enzymes to the soil and have them taken up by the plant. There are no known enzymes that transport enzymes. The plant builds more enzymes from raw materials that have been transported into the plant from the outside by other enzymes using energy from high-energy phosphate bonds created in photosynthesis. Since this is the case sprouting grain to add enzymes to the soil is ineffective. The soil biota can not take up these added enzymes either. They must break them down first into raw materials. What are the raw materials for enzymes? Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and in a few incidences sulfur. Enzymes are proteins and are made up of specific amino acid sequences. Amino acids are made up of the above listed elements and those elements are already abundant in the organic materials we put into the soil in the first place. Many enzymes also require cofactors to operate. For example magnesium. Enzyme activity is governed by substrate availability to some extent, but more importantly by regulatory pathways that turn up their activity or turn it down and by the turning on and off of specific DNA codons leading to increased production of required enzymes. These regulatory pathways are pretty complex. Both animals and plants, for example, use CorA-MRS2-ALR-type membrane proteins to transport mono and divalent cations. These are interesting. One of the things is that overloading the outside with one type of ion inhibits the transport of other ions. This has to do with many things including the affinity of the competing ions for the enzyme's active site. Bone health is a good example. It was thought for some time that osteoporosis could be prevented by really increasing the availability of calcium on the "outside." It turns out that jacking up the calcium inhibited the transport of magnesium and phosphate which are also vital for bone health. The key seems to be adequate calcium on the "outside" but not excessive calcium. Excess of one cation on the outside leads to inhibited transport of other cations. What we are talking about is "lockout."

Because the biology is so complex the best course of action is sensible whole food nutrition. The supplement business for plants, humans, and other animals is hugely profitable. There is a tendency to grasp at any straw that is offered in order to boost one aspect of metabolism - often at the expense of other aspects. All too often there turn out to be unforeseen consequences to substrate level manipulations. The beauty of creating a great prebiotic environment is that it regulates itself so you don't have to try to manipulate it constantly with "wondrous miracle additives." If you want to be a healthy human the best course of action is to eat a healthy whole food based diet. The healthiest populations on earth do that without consuming huge quantities of kombucha and chia seeds or taking massive numbers of vitamin pills...

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