Laura Decker from microBIOMETER on Soil Testing and Soil Health

GN: Good afternoon. This is Steve Melito and I’m speaking to you on behalf of Go Natural Education and today we are speaking to Laura Decker, who is the president of microBIOMETER. Laura, how are you?

LD: Good. How are you? Thanks for having me.

GN: It’s a pleasure. You are our first guest ever.

LD: That’s amazing!

GN: So as we have been speaking, Go Natural Education has been working on a soil series and the grand finale is going to be about soil testing, so I figured there’s no better person to talk to than Laura from microBIOMETER.

LD: Thank you. Yeah, soil testing is what we talk about and it’s an interesting and complex and a really good way for people to learn about food supply, climate change, and all that.

GN: Absolutely. So what are some of the basics about soil health? I think people tend to think of pH but not about microbes.

LD: Yes. A lot of the change over the years in understanding soil health has moved from a chemical understanding of soil health to a biological one. Soil has both chemistry and biology – just like you and I do – and for years Western agriculture has focused on NPK and pH. By putting chemical substances in the soil to increase production, we now know that that was incredibly effective in terms of increasing the amount of food that could be built on the planet and making a real dent in hunger across the world. So, I’m not mitigating the positive impacts but we’ve come to a point where chemical use is obvious and the population of the planet is exploding. The chemical use of the soil has sort of turned around so now a lot of is, if you use chemical farming, which is sort of what I call it, you know you can survive but it’s not very healthy

When we now talk about soil health, we talk about a range of things: soil structure, water holding capacity, soil chemistry, the sort of minerals that are in it, and also soil biology. In soil and in everything on the planet is pretty much covered in microbes – bacteria and fungi – and what we know is that plants and soil have a symbiotic relationship with each other.

There are microbes in the soil and there are plants that grow in that soil and the plant and the microbes barter and trade substances that they need to survive. It’s a very complex relationship that’s been built over billions of years. Microbes are obviously one of the first organisms on the planet and they have been working with plants for millions and millions of years to basically harvest nutrients from the soil to feed the plant and then the plant takes a lot of what it gathers: air, carbon from photosynthesis, and puts it into the soil.

When a plant is very efficient it will barter with microbes if it has to – just like you and I – but if you chemically feed through nitrogen and fertilizers, a plant will stop bartering with the microbes because it doesn’t have to. It’s very efficient. So that link has been disconnected.

We know that microbes do a lot of things for soil health. They build soil structure. When we talk about soil structure, I want you to picture like when you were a kid. The fields that you played on at school were like cement. They were hard, right?  There was no air. There was no water. There’s nothing growing. Roots could go in about that far. Soil structure is actually created by microbes and groups.

So you take soil. The mineral component of soil is sand. You put roots and microbes in. Those are carbon-based things. The microbes secrete this really cool substance that makes these little aggregates little homes for themselves. They’re so cute when I think about them. These little aggregates make little pockets that can hold air and can hold water. Also, roots can more easily penetrate an area.

If you’ve ever seen a wonderful garden, the soil is clumpy. It’s not dry. It doesn’t run through your fingers. That is soil structure. It smells good. It’s dark. Microbes work with plants to build soil structure. Soil structure aerates the soil naturally so that you don’t have to till all the time and one of the important things of soil structure is fungal content.

Fungi make more space in the soil. Then when the fungi die that space remains and the bodies of dead microbes form carbon. So when people talk about sequestering carbon and soil and reducing excess carbon in the atmosphere, putting it in the ground is a great idea because then it becomes part of a plant’s life. It’s a neat cycle. We could go on and on but when we talk about soil structure, it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s not one test that you do. It’s a real understanding of the history of the soil where you are. I mean, the things you can accomplish in the rainforest in Brazil are not the same things you can accomplish in the farmlands of Australia. Those are very different soils. They need very different treatments and the capacity for life, both planted and microbial, is different.

Then what do you want to do with the soil? A lot of agriculture is becoming more holistic. We want to mow and graze cattle. We want to plant crops and do cover crops.  We want to do all these things to improve the soil structure. The point of improving soil structure is manifold: sequestering carbon so we all don’t burn to death on this planet, improve the finances of farming because chemical fertilizers are very, very expensive. If you don’t have to use them, that’s great environmentally. Those chemicals, if used in excess, can be very dangerous and there’s also a lot of evidence that food grown naturally with the microbial community is just naturally healthier. There’s more micronutrients because all those microbes make micronutrients that feeds the plant, and we do know that plant immunity is mostly microbial, and those antioxidants that you love in kale and spinach are the result of immune activity between the plants and the microbes.

So if you don’t have a plant, ironically, that is just like a kindergartner when you don’t expose them to germs, they get sicker right until they build up an immunity and then they’re nice and healthy. That’s kind of the kale you want, so understanding soil structure and building soil structure and healthy food is really the building blocks for the people in regen world.  We get really excited. We think we could save all the world’s problems. It’s probably not true but that’s the part we’re working on, which is to improve the stability of the food supply system, the health of the food, and obviously to mitigate climate change.

That’s a little bit about soil health soil testing. There’s lots of ways to do it, and there’s lots of things to consider. I wish I could tell you it was super easy, but it’s not. There’s chemical tests. We run a test for microbial biomass that’s a cheap and sort of easy way to benchmark and look at changes in soil. There’s more complex ones. There’s DNA tests that are coming out. I will sort of warn people it’s early in the DNA world of microbes. There are millions and billions of microbes. Microbes only have a small amount of DNA, so the variation in them is quite large and we don’t quite know what they’ll do and we know that they’re there. There are some purely pathogenic ones but there’s a lot of ones that are are troublesome only in poor soil, so the DNA testing isn’t quite where it needs to be but really diversity and size of microbial population is sort of the best indicator right now of soil.

GN: Sure. Let’s talk about your tests. I suppose first off we can compare it to what existed before.  My understanding is you had to take the soil to a laboratory and it was expensive and inconvenient. What is your test like?

LD: I have it here. I keep it around. Soil microbes are living creatures.  The existing tests that are for microbial life, probably the best one is microscopy. We know that you take soil – living healthy soil – you prepare it, which is difficult. Microbes are glommed onto those soil particles so you want to extract them without killing them and then you want to put them in a solution which is hard and then you want to look at them under a microscope. Microscopy is very, very difficult. People go to school for it. It’s very hard. You have to differentiate things, but it is a very good way to say what is the population.

Now the other test you take the soil and you send it to a lab. Some of the tests dry out the soil and reconstitute it, which has its problems because if you have a whole community of microbes and you kill them, which is drying them out, some will sporate and when they come back they come back in links because microbes only have a little bit of DNA. They can only make up a few substances that they need. So microbe will start and it’ll make the substance that B needs so B will start to reproduce and C and D, that takes a while if you kill them all and reconstitute it. You’re going to get something slightly different.

We realized early on that microscopy is not something that we can really scale up right for small little farmers and into Africa. You’re not going to give everyone a microscope and hours and hours of training. So what this test is – this is the microBIOMETER – it was designed by Dr. Judith Fitzpatrick, who’s a microbiologist. She wanted a simple and easy test that people around the world can use so nothing dangerous about it, no crazy chemicals in it, and nothing too expensive. Because that is one of the things to bring soil biology data to people, it has to be affordable. So she said, “Let’s use a cell phone”.

What you do is take living soil. You put it in a sodium solution and whisk it up to separate the microbes. You let some of the soil particles settle out and you put drops of it onto our test card and use the cell phone to use our algorithm to read it. You can do it. It’s about seven dollars a test when you run it. We’re working on getting it lower so people can really test and people use it to say, “Okay. Where am I in my soil, and also where in my farm or garden are there different patches of soil that are doing well or not well?” And how does it vary with the seasonal cycles. In winter, obviously, they’re going to be lower than spring and then as I change practices like maybe I stop using so much chemical fertilizer maybe I move away from herbicides of pesticides, what does that do to my soil biology, with the hope that as you understand what impacts soil biology, you can work to build soil structure and plant naturally.

So you can improve plant nutrition and be more environmentally friendly and also more productive financially. There are millions of farmers around the world. One of the things that we need to do if we’re going to work sort of income equality around the world is to make farming more lucrative. Our real hope at microBIOMETER is that we can be a part of helping farmers so their income streams will be from corn and carbon credits. With soil carbon, it takes a long time to build soil carbon. It takes about 10 minutes to destroy it, which is sad to say. But we would like to be part of helping farmers get a new revenue stream and enable us to do like make things in manufacturing that does not produce carbon.

We do know that manufacturing does as an industry create excess an carbon environment, but can we offset that with helping farmers do better, grow better food, and live a better life themselves. So, the kit we manufacture here in New York State. We’re very proud to be in the Hudson Valley. We do all the procurement and manufacturing ourselves and we ship direct around the world. Well, most of our sales are international. A lot of other countries are sort of farther on ahead of doing real, we call them farmer researchers really, the farmers trying to understand what’s happening in the United States and there are lots of exceptions but in general agronomists take a soil sample, send it to the lab and tell you what chemicals to throw down and that cycle is really not very effective in sort of understanding things and then also taking a very, very individualized approach to each farm.

GN: Sure. Laura, to use your test kit, what type of skill does a farmer need? You mentioned that it’s very popular in the Third World and obviously a lot of our Third World Farmers are not going to the university. Do they need a lot of science?

LD: No. In fact, one of the funnest users of our kit are elementary school students. We have an app that has both video and written word instructions and pictures, so it’s it just – it’s  gonna feel like being in middle school – you open up this funny little kit. Here it is. You open this funny little kit and you open the app and it walks you through all the instructions and the timers. You can see that there’s nothing in here that’s unsafe or dangerous. No one can hurt themselves. We are working on getting the attachments onto our app that will allow Google and Apple to translate. We really, really would like this to be in more languages but we’ve done everything we can – like Ikea, right? – to have the instructions not be dependent upon knowing English.

We have a YouTube video where you can just watch someone do it and go from there. There’s really nothing you need except a little bit of time and some patience. When people order the kit, this is a starter kit with 10 tests in it, when you order a starter kit we give you five extra tests to sort of play with get used to it and then people order refills. The refills are the extraction powder, which is just a sodium solution and our test cards that we manufacture as well and then all the plastic that’s in here. Sadly, we can’t use glass because we think people on the farm will break it but all the plastic can be reused so we’re trying to do that and the kit is very hardy because people keep it in their trucks.

The app will walk you through it and it’ll hold all that data for you so you can GPS locate where you tested, what time of year, add little notes. So you could say , “Wow. If my microbes went down, I wonder why. Let me look at that data over time and you can, for those of us who aren’t too old to look at teeny screens, you can also access it on the cloud on a big screen and look at your data and you can also make a project and have other people send it.

Apps really have so much capacity that people don’t use but increasingly teams of farmers are using the microBIOMETER and sharing the data across and hopefully combining it with other means like other chemical tests and practice analysis.

GN: That is fantastic. I sincerely hope that people that watch this video, many of whom will be in the U.S. and Canada, will une into the fact that this kit is available. How would they buy one? Do they go to your website?

LD:  Oh yeah. So we sell direct out of New York State. Its microbiometer.com and we ship around the world. There’s flat-rate shipping around the world. We sell in over 20 countries as it is right now, and then in certain places the U.K. and Australia, if you reach out to us, we have distributors. With some countries, it’s a little time-consuming to get stuff shipped. Sometimes it’s stuck in customs, sometimes they don’t know what to do with it in customs, and you’ve got a big bill.

So certain countries, we have distributors who have supply right there so you can get it a little faster but anyone could order direct from microbiometer.com and our company is very small, there’s four of us, so if there’s any questions or feedback, we are a small and innovative company, so a lot of our product development and product improvements come from people writing us. It can be ordered direct from our site. Our starter kit is $135 U.S. dollars um and then the refills go down to about seven dollars.

GN: That’s fantastic. Laura Decker from microBIOMEER, thank you for your time today

LD: Thank you so much.