Today we are joined by Miles Sorel from Terraforma and Miles, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a bit what you're about what Terraforma is all about?

 Sure, I'm Miles Sorel. I've worked in the ag business for about 10 years. I co-founded Terraforma with Cooper Scarborough. We are a focused biological company. We work particularly in soil health, but we do a bit of consultative services around building soil health on farms, typically on conventional settings, helping to reduce synthetic inputs and chemical usage and we've also developed some equipment to produce onsite localized biologicals for implementation.

And that's how we connected with Hiwassee as well. We use our TerraPod bioreactor to create solutions and then we've partnered as a distributor with Hiwassee to create the extracts to apply into the fields.

Excellent, so do you want to give some background on yourself? What first got you interested in soil biology, your journey into the whole soil field?

I have what I would consider a non-traditional entry into agriculture in general, but also into that biological space. I had gone to school to study neuroscience and came out with a neuroscience degree and on the tail end of doing all of that work, realized that I didn't want to spend my entire life in a lab. A lot of neuroscience is done on animal testing and you spend a lot of time indoors depending on the direction you take it and I was looking to get a little bit more involved in some outdoor activity. It's how I always grew up and that led me into agriculture.

I started working in the regulatory space, working with the agriculture office in Santa Cruz, doing more pest abatement. It's more regulatory stuff, what you can apply and when you can apply it. That was my first exposure into agriculture as a whole and it was obviously much more bureaucratic, a little bit slower, but I did work a decent amount with pesticides and when you can be using those different sprays, a lot of close contact. It makes you start to think about alternatives to be able to potentially not use all of these chemicals, which can be fairly toxic.

Having handled them directly, you catch a couple of whiffs and understand quickly that you don't want to be around it too long. I ended up joining a startup alongside my current co-founder. That got us our initial exposure into soil microbiology and that side of agriculture that's been generally overlooked. I came in with an understanding of agriculture from that chemical perspective, but no formal training allowed me to look at things from a different perspective.

Luckily, I was able to leverage a lot of that neuroscience background and biology background to pick up soil science and soil microbiology quickly. I did a a lot of reading white papers, doing experiments on our own and just trying to pick that up quickly and then through association with other research departments that we're working with, just having a lot of touch points with different crops, you start to pick up very quickly on traditional nutrient accounting and how traditional agronomic systems function.

We got that initial start with the Soil Foodweb. That was our baseboard and it's a great educational tool that we were able to then apply and learn and build on top of. We've taken that baseline education, learned a whole lot in trying to implement it, and have taken that our own direction. We ended up having a bit of a falling out with the company we were with.

And then we started Terraforma as a way to meet farmers in the middle and take the time to build up a more productive understanding of soil microbiology, what it's capable of and how it can work with growers. We're focused on farmer autonomy and building biodiversity in a way that can beneficially impact farmers' bottom lines. We don't want to be doing things just for the sake of doing them. We want to try to make processes that are both ecologically friendly and also are going to help farmers generate more profitability.

What got you from that, starting in the consultant space, to designing the TerraPod, and what principles is it designed around? How does it function?

We started everything consultatively. Our company is completely bootstrapped so we don't have outside funding coming in. We started with implementing concepts, usually compost-driven biologicals on site on the farm, working with compost extracts and we found out quickly that you hit a threshold at a certain point of production. If you're producing very large quantities of high-quality material, it becomes very difficult to source all those materials into it in a cost-effective way.

We needed a smaller solution that could produce a high-quality, microbially diverse product and apply it over a much larger area from a smaller system. Otherwise, the scalability becomes very difficult.

There's also quite a lot of work that goes into making huge compost piles with high precision and the need for quality control is immense when we're talking about balancing the airflow, the moisture content, the feedstocks that go in, getting the innoculums into place. Balancing all those factors and across multiple projects can become difficult. There's a significant skill and experience component towards composting, and there's only so many people that are capable of it coming in and doing that right the first time.

That's what the TerraPod came out of, this need for something compact that can produce high-quality results on a consistent basis, regardless of somebody's expertise or experience.

We took the experience we had with the soil food web style composting, which is very thermophilic. You're going through windrow styles or smaller contained composting piles, focusing on the recipe of those piles to drive the microbiome one way or another and through years of building different recipes and experimenting with materials from around the world, we got a good sense of which materials encourage more fungal growth or bacterial growth, how can we stimulate more nematode growth within a material. We can say that we have a good idea target a specific issue on a farm.

We can then take that recipe, inoculate it with local microorganisms to maintain everything in a localized condition, and then apply them into that system. The main targets that we had were scalability for one, getting over that experience hump for two, localization, which for us is a big one, which is to say we want native microorganisms within that system, so that there can be higher efficacy in the fields, and we want active microorganisms. We don't want something that's had to go dormant within a bottle. Realistically, anything that we put into a bottle, it has to go dormant, otherwise the bottle's going to explode. There's going to be respiration, and by definition, it has to run out of oxygen.

We wanted to make sure that everything we do gives the optimal result within the field, and we wanted biodiversity as a main hallmark of that system. There's a lot to say about the difference between an isolated microbe versus a microbe that we're creating with a broad diverse system, but we don't have the full grasp on every single microbe within the soil. We know 1% of all the microbes that we have, soto say that we understand that a singular microbe is going to perform any function, it overlooks the broader complexity of an ecosystem.

We also jumped off of the Johnson-Su studies that have been done, and looked at the implications of having a material mature over time and adding that diversity component in. We combined both of those things, and we improved on them and created a system that for us was more manageable for growers. It was convenient, able to easily draw from the material to create a solution onsite and then implement that without having a whole lot of hyper-specific knowledge.

Joining those two things together has allowed us to create a product that we can cycle through very quickly through doing a pre-composting phase and targeted recipes, and then hitting optimal diversity readings quickly as well within a two month period. And that's where that's been borne out, is trying to create those optimal conditions for growth.

Someone using the TerraPod, are they pre-composting material or is material just going into the system?

We have two different systems. A big focus for us is helping growers become as autonomous as they can. We work with growers to create their own feedstock as we would call it, which is that compost. A lot of growers, especially in the US, don't want to deal with that. It is an intensive process, especially if you're doing things on a smaller scale where you're not buying all this equipment, but it is time intensive. Most of the time those growers will tell you, “I just want to buy this material, get it shipped to me, and then we can inoculate it and stock it into the system.” A lot of the time we are making that recipe for the grower and then shipping it out to them and then we're inoculating that onsite and getting it just stocked in. They'll just fill that into the system themselves, plug in the sensors and then close it up and let it sit for about two months to gestate and mature and then we can extract that through the extraction system and get that applied as a liquid into the field.

The inoculum, is that something that you provide for them or do you just give them guidelines on how to source it?

We are happy to come out the first, especially the first time we'll get out there and we'll do that inoculum. We will also teach them how to find that and implement that into their terra-pod to get that inoculum going. Part of the features of the system that we built allow for transfer of microbes between each of the sections that we have built out. We're able to pass that inoculum through the mixture. We can retain that initial inoculum over time but we do recommend continuously bringing more in. We will come back out and make sure that we get a high quality inoculum source into that mixture repeatedly, but if the farmer feels confident that they understand what needs to get done, that they can find a solid source and they're comfortable doing that on their own and they don't want to have us come out there, we're also completely comfortable guiding them through that.

And can the finished compost material, right, that comes in, can that be used then to inoculate the next patch, per se?

Exactly. You can have a couple of ways of carrying that forward. One is an interlocking mesh system where you can harvest one, restock it and then they'll re-inoculate from the existing system. Two would be to save some of that material and then you can re-inoculate that moving forward. There's a couple ways to re-imbibe that ecosystem into your next cycle, which is always a good idea, but we also want to make sure we're constantly pulling in newer forms of inoculum as well to continue that diversification, which is an important component.

We have a hexagonal system that is five of the different sections have the actual composted material that feedstock in them where we grow out that microbial mixture and then the sixth door and chamber here is where we store electronics, water pumps, all of that stuff. We are connected either through wifi or cellular to be able to run programs on it so we're constantly getting feedback on the moisture content within the system. We can get the temperature off the system. We can control airflow within that system as well.

We do have a central column in each of these chambers is connected through meshing effectively. There's interchange between each of the sections as well as good airflow through all of those sections. So we're trying to encourage an aerobic solution constantly getting grown throughout the media.

And then as you're ready to harvest each of these, you can remove one section at a time. Each of these sections is going to be able to go through the extractor. We're going to be able to produce approximately 500 gallons of product through one section and that's going to be enough for approximately, I believe it's around 80 acres somewhere around there where our target for the entire system per cycle is going to be around 500 acres for corn, soybeans, crops, row crops, grains.

We can pull those out and then extract what we need to do in application either the night before or the morning of in order to get fresh product into the system and that allows us to maintain the composition and the viability of all of those microbes that we've grown out through that gestation and maturation phase.

So within a rough percentage, you're specific microorganisms that you've listed down. So you're able to analyze in real time to make sure that you're getting all of those, or do you run tests afterwards and that's what we're consistently seeing?

Every project is going to have a different profile of microbes. we have projects that are out in Ecuador, the Philippines, if it's South-Central America, the US, Asia, you're going to have different microbes in those regions and different feedstock options and so that's going to affect the product at the end of the day, but even within the US. My clients in Illinois and Iowa are going to have different products. Even within Iowa, you might have different outputs because every single system is producing its own microbiome and it's using its own inoculum. The idea is to try to create something extremely targeted. Now we do see a lot of overlap in that functionality. So you might not have the exact same species all the time, but you will have repetitions of the same function within groups of those microbes. Phosphorus solubilization or nutrient solubilization in general, nitrogen fixing, biocontrols, you find trichoderma in all of these systems and so we're able to do a genetic test on the finished product in solid to be able to understand what that composition is made out of. Then we can track, and this is how we understand when are we getting peak biodiversity. We were able to run tests on polling samples every month and seeing where we get that optimal biodiversity mark and then that allows us to establish, okay, we want to try to harvest this between two to six months is a good window to hit that optimal biodiversity peak within that system.

And then there's a lot of microbes. The ones that we list are the ones that we have known functionalities for. They're more common microbes. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them that just don't have much of a record. We know what the genus and species is, but we don't have a descriptive functional capacity of those microbes. Again, it's just a lack of scientific literature at this point to fully describe them.

From that perspective, there's a lot of work to be done, but also that's where we look at all this entire complement of these different microbes and how they work together and say, who are we to say that every single farm needs Bacillus subtilis and that's all they need. It's a much more complex system than that.

If you're explaining this to someone who's completely new to the whole concept of biology, how would you explain the roles of the different microbes in soil health, plant health, what results they can expect to see by adding these microbes into the soil?

There's a broad spectrum of function and it's hard to prescribe one function to any one microbe or group at the end of the day. Most of these microbes are going to have multiple functions. They might solubilize, they might also be a pathogen at the same time. They might fix nitrogen as well as break down organic matter. There's a lot of overlapping function and as these communities interact with each other, that function shifts and changes. They're going to influence and impact the output of an individual microorganism based on the community structure within that microcosm of the soil.

However, generally speaking, bacteria tend to help break down more readily accessible food sources, such as sugars. They're able to get plant exudates that are mostly sugar-based and they help perform functions regarding solubilization of nutrients off of plant soil colloids. They're going to help with fixing nitrogen from other free living or rhizobia. They're going to help produce smaller glues that help hold together soil particles. They help to build structure within that system and fundamentally, just as a chunk of biomass within that soil, the act of those bacteria getting eaten by upper level predators amoeba and flagellates and nematodes releases a lot of that nutrition back into the soil. So, just having that group of bacteria within that system isn't necessarily enough to supply what the plant needs. You also have to build out the higher levels of that ecosystem to make that available to the plant in a meaningful way and then fungi serve quite a few different functions. They can produce compounds that can compete with bacteria or other fungi. Penicillium is a great example. Penicillium produces penicillin, which is a natural antibacterial. So that can out-compete bacteria within a system. They also tend to add more structure. They tie together all the small micro-aggregates of the bacteria form. They loop those together with long strands of hyphae and they help to interconnect plants and soil. They can move resources from one part of a soil to another. They can help communicate between plants. There's a whole bunch of wild functionality.

But when you put all of that together, when you build out that healthy ecosystem of microorganisms, what you end up with is a highly competitive network within the soil. That makes it harder a pathogen, that wants to leverage readily available resources and attack a plant, to find resources and thrive within that system. So we want to try to increase the total competition within that root zone, within the rhizosphere, to increase plant health and solubilization and competition within that ecosystem. Normally, if you're able to reinstall that process, you start to see larger root systems. You start to see higher productivity and healthier plants. You will see some reduced pest and disease pressure. It depends on what pests and disease. It's easier to deal with soil-bound pests and disease than it is with foliar pests and diseases, but you will see that resilience of the plant being able to better defend itself because it has a better balance of nutrients and nutrition and hormone secretion from that soil profile.

Talking about pathogens, in the video of the cool case study down in Peru, they mentioned issues with root-feeding nematodes. It's something I hear quite a bit. For instance, in the potato industry, they fumigate the soil to get rid of the plant-feeding nematodes because their crop is grown in the soil.

Will increasing overall biology increase the competition level to where all of the different kinds of beneficial nematodes will tend to outcompete the other ones, even if their food supply is a little bit different, they're not feeding other roots?

There's a couple of factors happening there and this is true in bananas as well as the grapes and a lot of crops that we grow in the US. Root-feeding nematodes are a big problem everywhere, but there's physical occlusion. So if you have bacteria and fungi and beneficial nematodes that eat bacteria and the fungi within that system, they're going to physically block root-feeding nematodes from being able to access that root.

That physical barrier of occlusion is important and then also, if you're growing a larger root mass, if you're able to secrete those hormones that encourage that root mass growth, when a nematode does find it, a root-feeding nematode-- and perhaps it does kill some roots-- you have an excess of roots available to be able to survive and continue to thrive within that system. So it's not necessarily the full destruction of these root-feeding nematodes. It's the plants able to adapt effectively to that damage, but then you also have predatory nematodes in that system as well and those nematodes do consume root-feeding nematodes as well as bacterial and fungal feeding, but that level of predation, building out even higher levels of that trophic ecosystem, allow for control and consumption of those root-feeding nematodes as well. There are also fungi that will trap and consume root-feeding nematodes and they're relatively targeted because they tend to grow in the rhizosphere near where those nematodes want to be and you will see those fungi start to repopulate the soil, especially in areas with high root-feeding nematode populations if you're able to build out a healthy ecosystem and we have seen those fungi in our extracts and compost materials because we do get pretty high nematode numbers as well. So we'll see those dynamics at play also.

So it's about building out the ecosystem and letting the biology perform the functions rather than trying to control it and manipulate it with a lot of targeted microdoses of specific organisms.

In my experience, when you're talking about getting these isolates, a lot of the time, they're very hit and miss. I've worked with a lot of these products. I've moved them around from one country to the next when they're exported or imported and realistically, what's the expectation that a microbe from the Pacific Northwest is going to work in Guatemala? It's a very different environment. It's not fine-tuned to it. All of these products are dormant. They're coming into a system they're not acclimated to, so you don't see a huge success rate with those products. When we do consider those types of isolates, usually we're trying to find local species with a specific function that we think is going to be valuable and then propagating that specific species in an isolated system to be used within the same region that it's getting isolated from and I think that's the future of that isolate style propagation and then reactivating it, finding ways to make it metabolically active again before applying it so that it comes in with a better chance of survival and making that product work.

But generally, taking another step back from that, is it the right approach to be pumping these isolates into that system? There's not a ton of science backing this right now, this is just where my brain is at with this and my philosophy around this is, but what is the benefit of pumping all of these isolated microbes into the system?

There is a fixed amount of space in the soil, a fixed amount of resources to be leveraged. So if we're trying to massively increase one single microbe into the system, there's a necessity to push something else out potentially, unless your soil is so dead that it can just accept everything. You are going to have to push something out in lower biodiversity to make space for this isolated microbe that serves a singular function typically and is that the right way for us to think about that soil system? Is that resilient into the future? A lot of these products get applied and then die. So it's not my preferred way of doing this. I want to allow biodiversity to take hold, try to occupy as many of those ecological niches as we possibly can with effective native microbes to serve beneficial functions and then there's some biocontrol stuff where it has to be a singular microbe and it can be sprayed above ground to help control some insect pests and that can work a little bit better, but generally, biodiversity is the way to go.

Do you think that being cultivated in a compost material, which is fairly similar to the soil – a solid, aerobic, somewhat moist environment – does that make those microbes more adaptable to the soil in a soil application than something that was grown in a lab maybe under perfect control conditions?

Yes and no, a little bit. I mean, obviously, what you're saying is true. We're trying to replicate a soil-based condition as best we can within the region that it is to replicate some degree of temperature, some degree of substrate, some degree of the natural inoculum coming in and we want to replicate that as closely as we can to the soil system we're going to apply into because we want to fundamentally grow out soil microbes to go into that soil system. Obviously, compost is just a huge percentage of organic, pure organic matter to an extent. There's some minerals and stuff, but it's all organic matter. It's all food.

We're able to control and grow out this massive proliferation of these microbes on that substrate, which allows us to have a higher concentration density of these microbes to go back into the soil. It's an optimal growth condition for that reason. There are some drawbacks in the sense of we don’t have a root system within that system so a microbe that needs root association is not going to grow out in a system like ours. We can't grow mycorrhizal fungi within our terra pod. That has to be a separate system.

And that can be a good way to advocate for sometimes using these isolates to be able to help propagate something that is root specific, but generally, most bacteria, fungi that are going to associate with a plant root are also going to be able to live freely within organic matter and so it is a great way to be able to produce that. When we're talking more about the problem with these lab isolates, it's not that they're necessarily less able to associate with a root or live in the soil. It’s like a human, we have an immune system. We have an operating range that is optimal. These microbes are grown in the tropics and the heat, and high humidity. Maybe they're not very high elevation. Maybe they're ocean level elevation and so they're not going to do very well in a mountainous region where it's colder. They have a certain range that they're going to be most effective.

So we have to be conscious of that when we're building out these programs with these isolate microbes. We need soil this and we need temperatures this, and that's going to get you a much better result, so I hope to see moving forward with a lot of the isolate production is that you'll be able to get a profile of where it's effective and I think it will help the efficacy of those products a lot. It's just a different way of doing it and I think fundamentally, it misses the point of soil ecosystems at the end of the day.

There could be a place for it if you're able to very target what you can do with some genetic tests. We need phosphorous solubilizers specifically in this area, but that doesn't necessarily mean the one you pick off the shelf is going to be the perfect fit or anything along those sides. You want a variety of phosphorous solubilizers, not just one of them.

So then you've created the compost product. You've got all those microbes in there.How then do you get it out of the soil? What's your methodology for applying those microbes into the soil?

We used the Hiwassee extractor. We had experimented with our own extraction systems. We were looking for high flow rate, and we had built two or three iterations of an extractor and we were struggling a little bit with the user interface side of it, especially coming into the United States. A lot of our overseas projects have a lot more manpower available, so we were able to use a system that was a little bit more manpower-driven, but coming to the States, people don't have time for that. Farmers tend to be siblings, father-son types of duos. There isn't typically huge amounts of labor, and especially in the Corn Belt in the Midwest. We needed something to plug and play, so we got into the Hiwassee system because it's a very nice fit for our system. We designed the TerraPod to be able to have an extractable section that can easily drop into an extractor and the Hiwassee has a nice hopper that we can just lift our section out of and open the base and drop all of that material directly into the extraction system and then you just hit a button, and you get the extract running through. We're able to use that auger-based system to dose out exactly how much material we need at a given time. If a grower only needs to do 20 acres that day, they can produce enough for 20 acres. We do about five gallons an acre in corn and so typically, so if you're doing 20 acres, you're going to be doing about 100 gallons. You can just hit the button, let it run, figure that out, and have it go. Or if you need to do a whole quadrant, you can let it run for about 40 minutes to get the entire or the whole section.

Once in liquid form, all of this is filtered down to about 400 microns, which is around 40 mesh, which will allow us to not plug most sprayers if we pull filters. Ideally, we're trying to inject this at planting as often as we can. Not every grower has that capacity, so we have a couple of backups, for ease of access.

Ideally, when you plant, you're injecting this liquid. If you can't, then we're trying to do Y-drops so that we can get a more targeted dose right over the root zone. We want all this biology to get right into that root zone as best we can so it can associate with that root system and start doing it to work immediately.

If we can't do Y-drops, then our last backup is to inject it directly into a pivot irrigation system. Obviously, it's not very targeted. You get more of a spread, but it does allow us to have a very low cost and easy implementation structure, so we do have quite a few people that just go with that injection strategy, at least as a final backup and if that is available, you also have the ability to, we're on a two-month minimum cultivation cycle, so you can do an application to planting, and then you can do follow-up applications injected through irrigation pretty easily as well.

What about permanent crops in vineyards, orchards, that thing?

It depends on the cropping system and the available equipment. For grapes, if you have small tractors driving between the rows, we can usually do a drawn tote with a gravity fed system, where we can just gravity feed the extract directly onto the planting beds, . Ideally, we're not passing this through a ton of pumps. We want to keep that PSI lower. We want to allow those microbes to thrive and survive as much as possible, so that is a great way for us to be able to inject it there. We've also done injection into the irrigation system, but if you're talking about, standard irrigation tape and drip tape, it has a much finer nozzle size, so we have to filter that product down significantly more, so instead of being at 400 microns, we've got to filter down closer to 100 or 80 microns and you are going to start filtering out some of the beneficial nematodes and some of those higher level organisms and you are losing more of that great particulate that you have when you go down to 400 microns, that's able to bring in, be an anchor for a lot of that biology when you go into the soil. It's not our favorite method of doing that, but you do get a lot of beneficial bacteria and fulvic and humic acids and some fungal spores and smaller fungal hyphae through that system. It's a way to continue those applications over time, but generally, we prefer to try to get a drench into a permanent-based system as best we can.

So , I'll share what I can in terms of work we've done and how this has impacted things. I've got some cool pictures and stuff. All these clients are private. We do have some more public trials going on right now, but they're not completed yet, so I can't share everything to the point of the scatter plots that we've done, but we have done a lot of these trials are controlled treatment trials over large hectorages and we've been actively evaluating them with white papers produced internally for these teams.

So to start, we can look at a grape study we did. This is when we did it over three years. This is the video you've referenced where we made a little bit of a mini documentary. We can get a lot more of this information directly from the farmer's mouth and some of the workers there as well.

 the highlights of this, this is a grape plantation in Peru. They grow table grapes not wine grapes. They have about 95% sandy soil. They don't get a lot of rain, 200 millimeter millimeters a year, but they do have good access to water. It's just very calcareous so they have high pH.

You can imagine as a conventional farm is they were putting a lot of salts in the soil. There's not a lot of area for it to go. They had acquired this farm and within a couple of years, productivity fell off. They had done new plantings. They had some good yields at first and then steeply fell off, especially a heavy El Nino year, which we think might have brought a lot of that salt back up into the soil profile and wreaked a lot of havoc on their system. We came in and started working with them on creating biological solutions to implement, helping them with composting, as well as a variety of other soil health practices. The owner had the goal to become organic over time and so we didn't push for that, that organic shift.

Within the first year or two, we were able to see significant increases in bacterial activity and average biodiversity and fungal activity within the soil. We were able to start bringing that back along. We were able to reduce a lot of that nematode pressure. I don't have the exact percentage change there, but we went from having lots where vines were dying to not having any problems with that nematode pressure at all. We got to a primarily biocontrol based methodology. Instead of using insecticides, we were using some biological isolates that we were up-regulating. We were metabolically activating them, we were replicating them and then we're getting a high dose out there. We had some IPM strategies where we had a small insectuary where we were growing lacewings to be able to help control mealybugs and we had initially gone towards pesticide only when required type of applications and then just got rid of it entirely.

Initially we were able to produce fertilizer, quite a lot, and then just got rid of it, went to full organic based systems and that fertilizer cost structure reduced about 33%. Some of the management practices increased labor costs slightly, but the overall net was a beneficial production and production cost moving into organic for this grower, largely because we were producing a lot of our own products to put in the farm, making fish hydrolysates, making compost, doing biological extracts, all that made on the farm, which obviously is going to massively reduce the cost of purchasing all of these things.

From the year when we came in, when production was very bad to the next year, we saw about 146% yield increase and then the year after that, we saw another 100% yield increase. If we look over the historical production levels to back when they were at their peak for them, we ended up getting about a 20 to 25% yield increase over their historical performance. They were not doing well, but we were able to recover that productivity very quickly, and achieved higher total yields than what they were producing when they were conventional. The total ROI on this was around 3000% to say the cost of implementing a lot of these biologicals was very low and then the value that they were able to create was quite high.

So we'll just dive into some of the pictures here. This is that first year when I showed up, you can see some of the grapes underneath the canopy here, you'll see the gaps in the canopy, you'll see it's fairly lowly, not very populated and then these are those same lots the next year, where we had much higher density, closed canopy, things were looking quite a lot better at about the same point in the year.

We started with a lot of weed pressure. This is one of the big issues you can see just how sandy it is out here and dry. This is a different gabling system. They use a couple different styles for the grapes, but I want to focus more on the underside and look at that weed pressure. This is what they had to go through and spray with herbicide repeatedly.

Obviously, we're not trying to use a bunch of herbicide, we want to find other control methodologies and we want to use things that are going to support biological life as much as possible. So as good as it is to take an extract or a biological product and get it into the soil, that is one piece of a larger puzzle that we're trying to solve in terms of improving soil health over time. We have projects where we just put that in the ground and we get a nice response, but if you can start to make those steps to experiment with, okay, is there a better way for me to reduce herbicide, weed pressure without herbicide, that can go a long way to also increasing the health of that soil, the microbial activity in that soil. This is what these lots looked initially.

We started experimenting with putting mulches on the surface and that was working to reduce the weed pressure and we didn't have to go and put a bunch of herbicide down, but it was costly and difficult to get that out there. We were using sugarcane waste. So we were able to get this nice response out of it, reduce the herbicide, we could cover the inoculums we were putting down with that, provide some carbon to increase the fungal biomass.

But it was expensive, we had to do it repeatedly and it would degrade quickly so we ended up looking at alternative strategies with integrated cover planting. We started putting crops underneath the grapevines. These help fix nitrogen into the soil, they helped compete with the weeds, they provided more exudates to microbiology, they increased total diversity. we got some flowering species in there that allowed us to be able to attract more natural predators into that system, which helped us reduce the amount of insecticide that would be needed to be used, and overall helped us build up organic matter in that system and support a larger microbial community as well as a larger diversity of those microbes.

Eventually we got to a point where we were even planting the center row. We have sweet potato, we have sun hemp, we have even marigold in there, which is part of that nematode control strategy. We've also planted this central area here to help reduce dust to kick up to help increase biodiversity within that system and overall, we have a good effect of rebuilding the ecosystem this way. We're supporting a lot more life, we're holding more moisture within the system, we're increasing natural predators within that system and then we've got a much more biologically active soil and a higher carbon ecosystem.

This is a picture of one of the beds that we had. You can see how the root structures interact here. You'll see the sweet potato was planted here and you'll see the actual rise of the sweet potato in there and so we'll get the sweet potato that'll grow and form and then it'll start to break down into grade, so there's this initial take from the soil where to establish that cover plant, you're taking some nutrition out of that system, but then once you're getting it cyclically installed, you're having breakdown as well as nutrient storage at the same time. You're getting release of nutrients as well as absorption of nutrients and you get to a place where it's stable and then increasing the total capacity, production capacity of that system and you'll also see that it's just integrated in with the grape roots. There's this larger grape root structure and the sweet potatoes integrated into that, so the total competition for resources isn't all that steep.

We did eventually get animals into that system. This didn't have a huge cost benefit for them, it was neutral. Whether it was labor or having a bunch of sheep, but there was meat from the sheep. The owner enjoyed having them more than anything else but it was another way to diversify revenue streams. They could come in, eat some of the cover plants and keep them controlled. We're doing strategies to release the nitrogen from our nitrogen fixers at certain time periods. Releasing sheep into that system and having them graze that down to close to the root would release a lot of nitrogen back into the system as well, and they couldn't quite reach the grapes or the leaves.

So they were able to integrate pretty well into a system that and you can also make out here, you can see these irrigation systems, how they're set up. They're a little high, but it was drip irrigation and that is the type of irrigation we're also able to inject a lot of product into to deliver solutions.

So your primary method, application method was injection into irrigation?

We did three or four different application methods here. One was injection into irrigation. One was that tow behind system that was gravity fed. We tow a 250-gallon tote behind a small tractor and then we'd gravity feed off tubes onto the row right near the root zone. We also did a lot of foliar biological sprays where they have an atomizer, not quite an atomizer, but a spray that coats the leaves. And then we were injecting fish hydrolysate. We made different nutrient mixes that we made that were organic, but we'd inject all of that through the irrigation system as well. It's very convenient to do it that way obviously. Very low cost.

We have a couple different banana projects ongoing, but this is one that we've been running with for about eight or nine years now. It's about 200 hectares. We were able to see again, big root mass increases. This is typical to see when you're working with microbiology, if you have a good product, you tend to see a much larger root proliferation because of the association with those microbes.

I assume a banana tree is as much a permanent crop as anything else.

They do renovate typically on a seven-to-10-year cycle depending on the farm and how well managed they are, but you do have a permanent crop that's constantly growing, and when it's setting fruit, it's growing new vegetative growth through the sucker and it's an extremely consistent cycle of usage within that system.

It constantly roots in the ground again, very tropical plant. So there's a slower season when it gets cold, but it's very active all year round. You do have renovation cycles occasionally. You'll see something similar with the sugarcane trials. You get on about a seven to 10 year renovation cycle just to clean up the lots and there's quite a lot of disturbance when you go through that and work through that. That said, you are in a system where this is more drenched or we're injecting it through an overground irrigation system. So again, trying to find that fit for what is the most economical for this system and this grower specifically and then how do we best provide that material with the best dosage out there?

In this system, the TerraPod is going to do a smaller area. It’s about 50, 100 hectares per TerraPod because we're doing applications constantly throughout the whole year, whereas in corn or a soy, it's going to be more reduced. We're getting a lot higher dosages out there, but you also see this big root feeding nematode population drop. This we were able to track.

Bananas are extremely susceptible to three or four species of nematodes so getting biology out into that system and improving the soil caused a huge reduction in root feeding nematode pressure. We also saw leaf nutrient content spike across the board. Depending on which nutrient, it was between a one to 13% increase in leaf concentration. This is an organic farm, but we did manage to reduce their fertilizer input by about 25% with a similar, if not higher output. We also decrease their costs significantly, but again, that comes off the back of producing a lot of compost and inputs for them on site, so the cost structure is lower.

We did see some about a two and a half percent yield increase over about a one to two year study. And the ROI on that was around 360%. Again, it's more intensive. We're putting a lot more product in but you're still seeing these large increases.

We're still working with this farm and they've done a good job of continuing to implement these practices and support them and they're at the most productive they've ever been at this point at the lowest input costs ever. This is just a good example of a younger banana plant that we did some trials with where we treated one with biology and one without. Otherwise, they received standard treatments. So this wasn’t that one got nothing and this got biology. It was biology and standard and biology and SOP. And we hardly pulled these out of the soil the exact same way.

You can see the difference. Auxiliary roots are about twice as dense. The fine feeder roots are massively improved and we did do genetic testing on both of these plants and the soil around the root system and what we can find was a much higher secretion of hormones into the soil around the amended with biology treatment. You're seeing more oxygen, gibberellins, cytokines that are responsible for root differentiation and growth. You're getting this huge support to that plant and as more roots, more absorption area. This is an organic farm, but in a conventional farm, getting more roots also means that you're going to absorb more fertilizer you put down, have less waste, so that all ties together quite well.

This is a large composting facility where we're making a lot of those inputs into the banana farm. You can see in the background here and so this is part of how we're able to help reduce some of that cost. If you're importing organic inputs versus making your own organic inputs, you're obviously going to have a much lower cost structure if you're making your own inputs.

So we're getting a higher quality input at the end of the day, and then supplying a lot of that nutrition to them through something that we can create on site and then we're optimizing that release of nutrition and the cycling of what's available in their soil already through that microbial component.

Sugarcane, I have a ton of data here. I can't share it all but they're doing good work here. This is a larger conventional farm, 40,000 hectares. It's very large and we've been working with them for around five years. We have seen, especially in areas that are inflicted with fusarium, massive increases in root biomass and health. We've helped them reduce their fertilizer usage around 12% and seen yield increases between 3 to 8% depending on the implementation. If it's a newly renovated lot where they're planting again so we can get right into the root zone with product and that gives us a better response where we're getting more 8% yield increases. If we're injecting through overhead irrigation systems where it's less targeted, it’s closer to 3% yield increase. We've been working with them to improve the implementation and the dosage to be able to get to a better response, but still, getting a solid 3% yield increase is a very good response.

And in bad years where there's drought or other issues, we see a much better performance from the lots that have been treated to the level of I think 45% less reduction of yields. In a drought, you might have a 70% reduction in yield and an untreated lot and a 35% or 35% reduction in a treated lot. So in those tough times, you can see a huge benefit.

We're still hitting a 6000% return on investment a 3 to 8% yield increase and the reason for that is that with sugar cane, we can apply a lot. We have an eight-month application window where we can get out there and apply, so we can maximize the output of the TerraPod. We can do close to 1000 to 1500 hectares per TerraPod and distribute the equipment cost over a much broader area, so any increase is going to be substantially more beneficial.

The return on investment that we can achieve for the grower is usually between 200% to 5000%. We want to make sure a lot of that goes back into the grower’s pocket and that they're reaping the benefits of making these changes. I should note this ROI is independent of fertilizer reductions and stuff like that too. You'll see some nice response with fertilizer reductions and other strategies if you're building up organic matter over time. All of these things are interrelated but it's it is largely a biological implementation.

These are some pictures I wanted to show we have about seven TerraPods out there. This is our 1^st generation TerraPod. This company is innovative. They are one of the first clients we put the TerraPods on the site with and they've been a nice collaborator with us. This is how that system looks there. Version 2 has a similar footprint to this version, but we've made changes to improve the functionality, the ease of use and the overall product quality.

When we're bringing in an inoculum, this is what we're talking about. We're going out into untouched forest untouched land, finding high quality inoculum sources, different fungal species, different bacterial species that we can bring and then inoculate into that system. Within the TerraPod itself, we're holding those conditions steady and we're seeing a lot of this aerobic growth of these beneficial microbes within that system.

We help many clients set up labs where they can do product verification and validation, make sure we're seeing beneficial nematodes and this broad diversity of microorganisms, as well as being able to do genetic testing on those products to be able to say, hey, look, , we are getting these beneficial, upticks in these ins biodiversity we want to put in the field.

This is an example of that root mass differentiation.If you want to guess which got treatment and which didn't, you can see the differential. Obviously on the left, we've got about twice as much root mass. They cut out a section of soil and counted all of the roots in the soil and there was a 117% increase in root mass with the treatment. This area was an area that was suffering disease pressure so the difference there is going to be stronger. But still that impact of being able to use biology to recover a root system is powerful, especially over consecutive years where there's just that much more organic matter coming back into the soil.

And then this is an example. They started with this lab, they've since upgraded this lab numerous times. They have a huge capacity. This is a company where they're isolating their own microbes, making their own isolates to put back into the soil, working with a lab in Guatemala. They've trained a lot of people on the microscope. They put a lot of time and energy and research into this. This is obviously a larger corporation. It's great to see them putting those investments into this type of process.

This is, when we're looking for beneficial microorganisms, I just wanted to put up some slides to show. You can verify fungal growth, you'll see in some of these different pictures, beneficial protozoa within some of these products. You can see predatory nematodes even within a lot of these products as well. So you can get this visual identification in terms of quality and then you have to go to the genetic level to look at differentiation and species diversity of these different microbes, but you'll be able to see all this activity and growth and different forms of life within these types of solutions and you can verify the quality of those different extracts and products as they're going into the soil, which is great to see and then generally, you can smell it too, follow your nose. It's always a good ad. Did you want to touch on anything from the sugar cane?

Well, two things. First of all, what is that on the bottom right?

These are just larger fungal spores. So I believe they may be germinating mycorrhizal spores, but they're very large spores that are germinating.

With the sugar cane, have you gone through a cycle of, if I understand it right, after a certain length of time, they'll, they'll dig up the canes from the ground and then lay new canes down and get started from there, correct? Have you gone through one of those cycles yet with this client?

 We've been working with them for five years. So we haven't gone from start all the way through a normal cycle and renovated them again. They're doing a lot of other things than just biologicals too. They're doing a lot of cultural practices and stuff that, but they're testing out. There's a ton of different lines of investigation happening there. We started in some lots, ran those for a couple of years and then did those renovations. The renovations are obviously a good point to get biology deeper into the soil right here in the root zone, very targeted. That’s where we get a better jump in results usually. We're seeing more of an 8% percent response as opposed to 3%. It's good to be able to target those areas if you are a grower in that system if you had to make a choice. The way we started with this farm was to target renovation lots, and then expand the program from there. Normally you're going to get the most bang for your buck, getting treatment on seed or on roots.

Sugar cane is a super extractive crop, isn't it? Where you're taking a lot out of the soil over, over a period of time.

 It can be fairly extractive. Obviously it's very high biomass and you're pulling a lot of that off. Some of the changes we've worked with them on is keeping more mulch in the field and you have some of that carbon cycling through, but it can be high volumes so some of that does have to get pulled off occasionally. Again, there's a lot that goes into putting resources back into that soil. We do a lot of composting to put back out there. They're still a conventional farm doing nutrients to go back into that system. This is not by any means organic.

It's a very managed crop. It's a fairly high input crop and it grows very quickly, produces a lot of biomass. So it can be fairly extractive. A lot of growers will burn the crop to make it harvest easier as well, which is obviously going to burn off a huge portion of the carbon that you put back into the soil. It's going to sterilize a lot of that soil as well, which makes it that much more important to re inoculate microbes into that system.

But again, we've, they've done a lot of work with us to help reduce the burning as much as possible, trying to machine harvest green so that we can get a lot of that biomass back in the soil and maintain that life.

And for then for sugar, the application is what?

Mostly liquid biological application. There's a number of options. We had to experiment a lot because the equipment to do what we wanted to do didn't exist. We had to make a lot of modifications, but they can plant in a number of different ways. There's a mechanical planting, and there's more of a hand done planting system. We're either leaving the planting row open, which allows us to go through and apply with a sprayer where we have more of a direct nozzle and we can apply directly over the planter, where we've made the planting beds and then plant and close. So that's one option. Another one is when you have the automated one, we can spray the seed as it's getting deposited. So from the seed getting belted into the distribution of the planting system, we can spray it going in, which is another option there.

And then we can also just inject it directly in overhead irrigation. They have to water, and they usually use an overhead irrigation sprinkler, but there's a number of different systems that can inject directly into that. So you're going to their irrigation station and you're creating an injection pump to get all of that product in. We're usually trying to do more of a suction based system so that we're not having to push super hard into an active stream of thousands of gallons of water a minute.

This is going to be a quick one here. We've obviously worked with soybean and corn a lot. A lot of our corn clients have just adopted their whole fields so we don't have a ton of good comparison data, but we have worked with soybeans in the United States as well as in Brazil. Just one year of just extract, just compost extract in the soil got a one year return of 5%. We've seen returns up to as high as 30% compared to averages in the area and again, very low cost to do this on a per hectare scale or per acre scale, 750% ROI. If you can get a 5% yield increase on an already highly productive farm, that's a significant amount of bushels and the cost of that, if you're paying five bucks for that acre, for instance, and you get a 5% yield increase, that could be a substantial boost in profitability as well. That's something that we always look for. We've got a nice little picture of some of those microbes coming back into the system here, which is always good to see.

So that's what I prepped in terms of case studies for today to take a look into. I mean, we're doing some work right now with CSU on the corn trial. We're trying to get some trials started in onions and different crops in Colorado specifically.

This type of system where if you can make a regional or farm-specific community transplant, these upper level microbes and nematodes, protozoa, the flagellates, the bacteria, the fungi, you get all of it in there. You keep it alive, you keep it active, you get it into the soil early to associate with the root system and that seed. It's highly universal and it's a piece of the puzzle that we don't often focus on. We're so focused on physical and chemical structures, and those are important, but also the biological component is what drives all of that. So it's important to consider how that's how that's looking at performance.

Most growers are all or nothing, and your equipment is large ours is. Most row crops grains, we're going to have a minimum 500-acre treatment area to make it as cost effective as we can, which is a substantial area, so if a grower’s bought into the idea, they're more likely to do it in all their acreage, as opposed to setting up these tight controls and treatments. So we get a lot of our good data from larger corporations, a lot from outside the US, because they want to put the effort into evaluating exactly that cost benefit of every single practice. The sugarcane trials we were running were over 5000 hectares of treatment and control, which is huge, right across different regions and Guatemala. Just, doing that stuff is expensive and time consuming.

And in agriculture so much goes wrong. We’re trying to start an onion trial and they got hailed recently and might not survive and we could lose our data that way. It can be brutal. It's very unforgiving.

Let me just look at a quick question. So you mentioned just because you're talking about vegetable growers in Colorado, I was speaking with one recently and he said, we can't do extracts because of food safety regulations. I assume that's based on the idea that compost can carry salmonella, e.coli, all those things. When you talk about compost, that's that's the field we're working in, and is there any work around by relabeling stuff that's biological, this or whatever?

The only reason you wouldn't be able to is for e.coli or salmonella. There's regulations around putting manure down, I think it's six months before harvest because of potential contact and transfer of e.coli. Rain can splash microbes up, working in the fields can transfer that, and so you don't want to have e.coli risks, because not everybody has the same cleaning procedures. But as long as you have a fully recorded thermal cycle through your material, you should sterilize all of the fecal coliforms in that material, and it should be completely fine to use and I think the regulations permit that usage.

Either way, getting it in early, you don't have to worry about that, especially if you're focusing on soil amendments, as opposed to foliar amendments. I think that comes down more to confidence in the product you're using more than anything else.

I would think also if you're planting out, let's say peppers or tomatoes, when you're getting them from the greenhouse down into the soil, if you're doing your extracts at that point, that's months before you're going to be producing that.

You don't have to worry at that point either and if you're using starts, if you're going from a greenhouse, you can even inoculate at the greenhouse stage, inoculate those roots as early as you can and it's going to make your life easier too, because then you don't have to inoculate all of your soil outside of that, you can bring the plant have that carry that in. Starting from that earlier time period is going to offset most of those types of regulations, but again, it should be fine to apply anytime if you made the product correctly.

The next question I had is a big picture question. You've been in this long enough to see the large scale growers, buy into it. What's the best way of just getting this to gain more traction in agriculture generally? It seems there's a huge education gap even around the fact that biology exists in soil. It’s changing, but what's the best way of making people more aware of the results and the implications of managing biology more?

It is a slow process. It's been a long time, starting 10 years ago in this field. Even where we are today, it's a very different space. There's a lot more awareness. Pretty much any farmer you talk to has heard of biologicals. They're aware of them to some degree, which 10 years ago, it wasn't even close to that. So it's come a long way already.

Now the problem, one of the big problems is that it's come a long way in the mainstream in the form of a lot of white labeled bottle products that don't always work. You might try one product and it doesn't work you thought it would, or it didn't give you the immediate result you're looking for and you say, okay, biology doesn't work. It's all snake oil or whatever.

So educating between the differences of products, having products that offer a lot of upside and less downside, it's going to be a big piece of that. It's going to mostly be the growers who are innovative and willing to try things and then see that result sand stick with it that eventually will pass it along, but everything has to be financially viable. We can't be selling on the premise that carbon's good for the environment. A lot of people just don't care, and at the end of the day, it's a business. I've worked with big and small growers, , large multinational corporations and smaller ones, and the first thing that gets cut when things get tight is sustainability initiatives, so it needs to be a moneymaker.

We spent a lot of time is thinking how do we make this into something that can go mainstream because it's a financial must: if you don't do this, you're leaving money on the table. We feel we're there, we have that. We've demonstrated it repeatedly and now it's just getting people to believe you.

That next step down the line, but again, we do a lot of outreach. We do a lot of speaking at a lot of different events. We try to get in touch with growers and share as much as we can, an open kimono with our technology, with our process, with things that work or struggles. We want to be as open and educational with growers as we can and even hopefully connect growers that are curious about this type of thing together so they can share their experiences with each other. It's just a matter of being persistent, constantly going through trusted channels, working with universities who can third party test everything, working within communities of growers who share information and when they see something that works, they're willing to do that.

We started programs with our clients that have TerraPods to give some of their product to to other growers in the area. We have a grower in Burlington, Colorado, we can take some product from his TerraPods and we can apply it to 20 or 40 acres in somebody else's farm. So it lowers their commitment to that system. They don't have to spend on all the equipment and do all this stuff to do 500 acres all at once. That way they don't have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to buy equipment and do all this stuff and they can just get the result and see for themselves.

We want to try to crack into your everyday conventional farmer and we want to help them take that one step a little closer towards being a little bit more soil health conscious. if we can get the broad majority of growers in the US towards to care about soil biology even a little, then we can also start to reduce some of that fertilizer over-application and waste. We can start to reduce some of that chemical usage and so that's a small mid step moving forward.

I think a lot of growers are daunted by an entire regenerative program where you have all of these different things happening. It's very overwhelming. Things go from a fully conventional system using all the chemicals to a full regenerative system. It's a huge learning curve. Taking small steps from full conventional ag towards the other side of more sustainable ag, taking small chunks out of that mainstream is going to be important to get us there over time.