Jesse: Krisi, thanks for joining us this afternoon. Could you introduce yourself, tell our audience who you are, and explain how you got into soil health and where it has taken you?

Krisi: My name is Krisi Oliveiro, and my husband and I co-own a soil business in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called Alter Eco Farms. We focus specifically on soil biology. That's our niche. We don't know plants. We don't know animals. We know soil biology. I first got into soil biology around 2021 or 2022. I'd been working in advertising, and I was having a hard time with how I felt at the end of the day. I enjoyed the creativity of the job, but I didn't feel like I made the world a better place. I decided to look into a second career, something that might feel more fulfilling.

That was when I started trying to figure out what I could do. I tried a lot of different things. I built houses out of tires with Earthship and learned a lot about permaculture. Eventually I found Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web School and thought, this might be something I can do with just me and a microscope, and I could make a big impact. That was part of what drew me in. I felt like, as a single person, I could have a big effect. I didn't need a crew of a hundred or 15 years to see an impact.

I didn't need all kinds of money I didn't have. That's still part of what I like about soil biology today: you can have a big influence on the world around you with very few resources.

Jesse: And that's because of the information you're able to get from taking a sample and putting it under the microscope?

Krisi: Truly. There's this whole world that I didn't know existed. To be totally frank, I was so ignorant of it. Biology had always interested me, but not necessarily soil biology. There's so much to learn and discover under a microscope, but there's also the accessibility of being able to make compost and start seeing a big difference. It's really not that hard to do. It takes a lot to learn, but once you learn it, you can see results quickly.

And of course, the microscopy element is super fun. One of the things I like to say is that before I started doing this, I thought the world ended at my feet. Looking at soil under a microscope, you learn that the ground does not end at our feet. The world doesn't end at our feet. There's so much going on, and it's given me a lot of respect for the ground I walk over every day.

Building Alter Eco Farms in Chattanooga

Jesse: That's great. So could you describe what you're doing now, what your business looks like?

Krisi: We've been in Chattanooga for about two years now. The first year was pure experimentation. We came from Colorado, which was a high desert, to Chattanooga, which is a temperate rainforest. The whole environment is different here. We spent a good year experimenting: How do we make sure our compost always has every organism significantly above our minimum standards? How do we make compost in winter? How do we do it in summer? How do we make sure we're able to do this consistently? How do we experiment on a garden level to restore soil, and how do we experiment on a pasture level?

We're doing all sorts of things. I'd say we're still in a phase where probably 60% of our business is experimental because you have to put these ideas into practice in the setting you're in. Right now we do a lot of case studies and work with clients, but many of those projects are experimental in nature. We'll say, let's try a few different ways of improving your biology and see what works best. We're fortunate to be able to do that, and we're learning all the time. Our hope is to start working on a bigger scale, including more market farms.

We already work with some market farms, but we'd like to be able to put our business out there with confidence and say, we'd love to help you get out of the chemical cycle, reduce those costs, fix your soil, and improve the rest of your business by improving your soil. That's the hope: market farms, city parks - let's fix the national park. We're big park people, so we'd love to do that kind of work someday. Right now, though, we're still in the experimental phase for a lot of things.

Making Biologically Complete Compost

Jesse: Excellent. You're making compost following the soil food web methodology, correct?

Krisi: We teach a class about making compost where we cover as many different composting methods as we can. There are so many ways to make compost. What we like about the Soil Food Web process is that we consistently get incredible results. We know we're going to have the biology. Even when our piles fail, they still have all the biology; they may also have weed seeds, and we don't want to sell anything with weed seeds, so those become our own piles. But biologically, the results are incredible. The process is accessible and doesn't cost us much beyond labor.

It does take labor, but we're able to harvest materials from our own property and take things from the community that would otherwise go to waste. We really like the process. It's very labor-intensive, but it's intensely labor-intensive for about two weeks. After that, it's quite easy. You're monitoring moisture and watching how the pile ages, but that part is pretty hands-off.

Compared with systems where you're constantly adding material, we like having the work concentrated into those two weeks and then being able to take a break. I sometimes compare it to doing a diet: I can be super committed for two weeks, and then I'm like, I need a break from this. That's why we like making piles this way. It's a strong commitment for a short amount of time.

We make about 10 to 15 piles a year, so we have a lot of those two-week periods, but still.

Why Compost Extracts?

Jesse: And then you're making extracts for your clients, right? That's the main application method.

Krisi: We sell both compost and extracts, but we sell far more extract and encourage our clients to use extracts. From a semantics perspective, an extract to us is basically washing those organisms into water. Some people might think of it as compost tea, but for us, compost tea means adding other ingredients. When we say extract, we're talking about liquid soil microbes. For us, that's the most practical way to spread organisms and regenerate soil. Everybody has a watering can and can apply it at whatever pace they need. It's much easier to handle than compost.

It's less bulky and less heavy, and you can spread it evenly. We're really focused on extracts. Bringing in your extractor was a huge level-up for us; we still can't get over what a game changer it has been. Sometimes people unexpectedly show up at the farm and say, "Hey, could I buy some extract?" We usually only sell on certain days, but the other day we were able to say, "Sure, it'll take us ten minutes." Being able to make extract on demand is a big deal for us.

The scale, more than anything, is super helpful for us and helpful in continuing our experimentation.

What Microscopy Reveals About Soil and Compost

Jesse: Good. So let's get into the analysis side a bit. What can you learn about a soil or compost by taking a sample and putting it under the microscope?

Krisi: You can learn a lot very quickly. You can make a good assessment of how compact the soil is and get a sense of how many weeds might be in a particular plot. You can also get a good sense of the health of the plants growing in that soil. If it's compost, you can get a sense of what kind of amendment it will be. Is it mainly a quick nutrient boost - here's some organic material - or is it something with longevity that's going to continue taking care of the soil? A microscope can show you a lot of that.

You can't see those things just by digging the soil up. Obviously you can tell if something is compact by putting a shovel into it, but there are many things we can't tell without the microscope. We can see that our plants are performing poorly, but we may not know why.

The Four Key Soil Organism Groups and Nutrient Cycling

Jesse: So which organisms are you looking for specifically if you want to just even break down what all those different organisms are, what they do?

Krisi: We're primarily looking for four categories of organisms: bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and nematodes. We look for those four because they're all required to promote nutrient cycling in our plants, which in our opinion is one of the biggest assets of the soil food web. Many things happen when you have a balanced ecosystem, but nutrient cycling is one of the most valuable and easiest to understand. There's a common misconception that we need to keep adding nutrients to our soil to feed our plants, but mineral particles already contain nutrients.

Mineral particles contain magnesium, phosphorus, lime, calcium, and other elements; they're just not necessarily in a plant-available form. These organisms work together to pull nutrients out of those mineral particles and make them available to plants. The easiest way to grasp the concept is to think about an old-growth forest. Nobody fertilizes it, ever. If you put an old-growth forest sample under the microscope, you're going to see incredible creatures working together to naturally fertilize everything that's there.

When we look at many of our own soils, which have been downtrodden by human impact, we're lacking those organisms. We add nutrients to support the plants instead of fixing the environment that would naturally make those nutrients available. We compare it to pouring yourself an Emergen-C while you're sitting in a bathtub full of vegetables.

Everything is there, but you're choosing to take the vitamin instead of fixing your diet. We believe very strongly in having all four of those essential organisms, especially for nutrient cycling. We're also looking for microarthropods. There are a huge variety of them. We love to see rotifers, and we love to see tardigrades because everybody loves to see a tardigrade. But the primary things we're looking for are bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and beneficial fungi.

Measuring Soil Biology

Jesse: And then you evaluate the sample by counting how many of those organisms you're seeing?

Krisi: Correct. We primarily use the Soil Food Web School's SMEP software. We look at a certain number of fields of view and physically count how many organisms we see in each category. We enter those counts and calculate what they approximate for the whole sample. We also have faster methods for what we call quick checks. We've taken about 50 SMEP reports and broken them down to determine, for example, what percentage of fields of view should contain beneficial fungi to meet our own standards.

Those quick checks let us work faster without counting quite as tediously. But if we're looking at a fungal-to-bacterial ratio, there is going to be tedious counting; there isn't really a way around it. There are technologies that try to automate some of that, but it's unclear how good they are. We prefer to do most of our work at the microscope because we can feel confident the organisms are there when we see them alive.

What to Do When Soil Biology Is Missing

Jesse: If you're looking at a soil sample rather than compost and you aren't seeing as many microbes as you'd like, what actions do you recommend?

Krisi: It depends a lot on who you are, what you have available, and the scale of your project. If you're a backyard gardener without a big budget or plan, but you have time, you can start by focusing on permaculture principles. You may see many of these organisms return if you're mulching and putting organic materials back into the land. A quicker approach, though it can still take time depending on the scale, is to start applying living extracts. We call them living extracts; other people use different names, including biologically complete extracts.

Whatever you call it, use an extract or compost that has those organisms confirmed by someone with a microscope. Don't believe someone who simply says, "Yeah, it's totally in there," because they can't know without looking. People often ask, "How do I know if the bag at the store has the organisms?" If it's been sitting in a bag on a store shelf, odds are it doesn't have an active community anymore.

If organisms have been sitting on a big-box shelf for months without access to oxygen, they've probably died. Some may have formed cysts and may come back, but there's no way to confirm that without looking under a microscope.

Preparing a Compost Sample for the Microscope

Jesse: Now that we know all that, can you show us how you set up a sample so we can see the microbes?

Krisi: This is a compost sample we just took from one of our piles. We test all of our compost at the same dilution ratio because dilution matters when you're calculating how many organisms you have. We're particular about that. The ratio we use is one to eight; many people commonly use one to five.

The primary reason we don't use one-to-five is that, in our area, we tend to see a lot of mineral particles and clay. Sometimes that gets mixed into compost samples and it just creates drama under the microscope. We start with three milliliters of water. Anyone who has taken the Soil Food Web courses probably knows the little pieces of this process already.

Then we take material from a variety of places in the compost sample so it's representative, and we'll add about one milliliter of compost. It always makes a total mess of my desk, especially on wet days like today. Depending on the age of the compost, sometimes it's really chunky and you'll pull in a whole wood chip. This particular sample is about six months old.

We bring the mixture up to our one-to-eight dilution by adding the remaining water. That's our personal standard, so nobody hold me to this - you make up your own standard that brings you joy. Then we shake it to mix everything together. We generally shake for 30 seconds. There's an art to shaking hard enough to mix the sample without damaging what you're trying to observe; you learn it after doing enough samples and seeing what breaks.

We pull the liquid from below the line of floating organic material and put a single drop on the slide. I think that gives people useful perspective. We took one milliliter of compost, mixed it with seven parts water, and then took one single drop of that mixture. When we look at that drop on the slide, we're looking at more than 3,000 fields of view. Everything is that tiny.

It's a good perspective when people see these creatures on screen and think, "Oh my gosh, look, they're so alive and they're kicking," and then realize how small the actual sample is. We put a cover slip on top and move it over to the microscope.

Live Microscopy: Finding Protozoa, Fungi, and Nematodes

Krisi: We usually start at 10X, scanning around for nematodes and getting a rough sense of what's in the sample. That's not a nematode, but let's look at him - he's doing something fun. It looks like a rotifer, but I can't tell because he's behind that material. We tell people that when you pull up a sample, it should be fun. You should be saying, "Oh, look at that. What's that doing?" He's hiding in there. This looks like a ciliate pulling bacteria in as we watch.

You can see how he's sucking the bacteria straight in. Oh, and now he's gone. We've got some nice pieces of fungi here, and we've got a flagellate, another type of protozoa. That guy just wants to pop into the party and leave again. We've also got this nice fungal hypha. Basically, we want to see life. Every few frames, you want to see something and go, "Wow, that's really cool." There's a great testate amoeba there.

So far we've already seen fungi and protozoa, and the bacteria are here too. We see plenty of bacteria. We want to see cocci and rods rather than big groups of chained bacteria. To be honest, I almost never see what we'd consider bad bacteria. I'll see too many bacteria, but rarely bad bacteria. These fungi are interesting. We see them a lot and sometimes wonder, "Oh my gosh, are these bad fungi?" But we also find clamp connections on them all the time.

Even though they're bubbly, they've proven to be good fungi for us, although they look a bit like an oomycete. These green ones have clamp connections all the time, which could not be more confusing. For our quick-check minimums, we want to see at least two nematodes per drop. I think the biologically complete minimum is only one, but we want at least two and usually see four or five.

For protozoa, our minimum is presence in at least four of 25 fields of view, and for fungi I think it's at least nine. Those standards came from the different reports we did, where we found the medians, made some averages, and then raised our requirement a little so we were never flirting with the line.

Those little bubbly fungi are so weird to us. At first we always freaked out about them, and then when we started seeing clamp connections, we were very confused. There we go. He's right on the edge, which makes it hard to get a good look at him. You don't want to say hi, do you? All the creatures in this sample would like to hide from us. It's not uncommon to see them on the edge, but it doesn't make for a very good video.

Jesse: Is that the mouth end or the tail end?

Krisi: That is the mouth end. Yeah. So you can see the cuticular valve right there. So it's a bacterial feeder. But you tell me if you want me to pull a different sample, I definitely can.

Jesse: If you increase the concentration, there might be something else to see.

Biological Completeness, Re-Inoculation, and Fungal Diversity

Krisi: I can do that here. While we're at it, this is a rotifer. They move so fast. That one's another ciliate; the rotifer is gone. Let me grab another sample and we'll put one together. We test these piles about every other week, and if anything is low we put an extract on it from a different pile so the pile can be re-inoculated.

As piles get older, the populations ebb and flow. That's part of the cycle of a pile because these organisms have predator-prey relationships. You'll see highs and lows, with different populations rising and falling. As long as we hit our minimums, we don't really care. The minimums are lower than you might think. Of course we'd love to have those incredible fungal piles some people get. Ours are above the minimums, but we're not the people getting a thousand micrograms per gram.

I don't know how they do it. I keep trying.

Jesse: Those fungal populations can take a lot of time to propagate, can't they?

Krisi: I think so. We've had piles start to hit a year plus and we still don’t. I think a lot of the time it's a matter of finding the right fungi. We'll go to an old-growth forest and bring back a small sample, or use material from other piles. This sample is full of worms - a bunch of little red worms. People ask us a lot about vermicompost, and vermicompost is great.

We find that worms naturally find our piles, and that's about our commitment to vermicomposting. A lot of people will take biologically complete compost and feed it through worms, but we don't usually feel we need to do that to meet our goals. This sample is way too thick, but hey, there's your nematode right off the bat. He's trapped in the goo. And there's another one. Look, you've got plenty in here.

Dilution and Reading a Dense Sample

Jesse: So that is one advantage to diluting it then, I guess, is that you can see everything easier.

Krisi: Yes. The primary reason for diluting is to see everything clearly. We use a one-to-eight dilution instead of the one-to-five dilution many people use for compost because it makes organisms easier to identify, especially in piles like this one. This sample has so much humic material that it has a really dark, muddy color, along with a lot of broken-down organic material, so it's hard to see through.

We chose a slightly higher dilution so we'd consistently be able to see more clearly. Soil samples get even trickier, especially where we are in "clay city." Sometimes we have to dilute as far as one-to-fifty, which seems insane, but it's the only way to cut through all the clay particles that aren't what you're there to see.

You dilute until enough of the field is clear enough to see through. Even at 10X, you can quickly tell when you're looking at a useful field. You can see the deeper browns, organic material, and other pieces. If you know what you're looking for, you can even spot a testate amoeba from farther away, and you can see fungal hyphae in places as you move through the slide.

This sample is a little denser than I would normally use. It's at seven parts water, and we usually dilute at eight. You can see this little organism moving in the middle, although it's hard to see. There's fungal hypha here, another nice piece there, and maybe a ciliate there. Here's an empty test, and here's a full one.

You should be able to see all this cool stuff and think, "Oh man, no way." In many soil samples, all you're going to see is bacteria. In our compost piles, we see testate amoebae everywhere, which is great. They're overflowing in this one, which is pretty common for us. We see good fungal clusters, though we don't always get the incredible strands some people do. There's a flagellate there, and another flagellate there.

Another thing we do is add spores to our extracts if we feel there aren't enough in the compost itself. Certain types of fungi can only survive in association with plants, so you aren't going to have them growing in compost, but they can be valuable because they're meant to work with plants. And see this guy cutting through there? There we go. Of course he's moving at the speed of light.

Sometimes people will flame their slides before looking closely at nematodes. Unless we're doing a full report, we're not too concerned whether a nematode is bacterial- or fungal-feeding. If we're checking for a root feeder, we'll stop it so we can identify it, because when they're moving this fast it's hard to see the structures. The odds are very high this one is bacterial- or fungal-feeding because there are no roots in this compost sample. It could also be predatory, and any of those would be a good thing.

There's Arcella. We like to see fungi, too. Very quickly, we can say: yep, this is a good sample. We wouldn't need to do the full math to know that.

What a Healthy Sample Looks Like and How to Feed the Biology

Jesse: Well, it is addictive.

Krisi: I know - you can stare at it all day. It is very addictive. When you see something you haven't seen before, it's thrilling. I saw one the other day while I was giving a presentation, and I'd truly never seen anything like it. It looked like a Loch Ness monster. It was incredible. I had no idea what it was. It had this crazy flat head and looked like it was sucking things in through its body.

It was so cool. I quietly recorded it while trying to keep giving the presentation because I thought, I need to come back to this; I have to know what it is. Here's a nice quiet one for us. That's a nice chill guy. This one's bacterial-feeding, and he's not crazed about it. You're always looking for cool stuff.

I think I have another sample on the desktop that we keep around as an example of what it looks like when there's almost nothing there. It's an interesting side-by-side comparison. This is much closer to the average soil sample we see. Sometimes it's even more bacterial, but a lot of samples look like there's almost nothing happening.

When you compare that with a sample where so much is happening, it doesn't take a background in soil to see the difference. In some of these fields of view, there's life everywhere. That's what we're looking for: more testate amoebae than we can count, grazing on all those bacteria and helping balance the system. One common thing we hear is that people add sugars to compost teas.

Molasses and similar sugars will breed beneficial bacteria, but it's actually more common for people to already have too many bacteria. Without looking under a microscope, people are taking a shot in the dark: "I saw somewhere on the internet that I should add molasses to my tea because it'll help the organisms." But is that the organism you wanted? You may already have too much bacteria, and now you're feeding even more bacteria.

Without looking under a microscope, you can't be sure what you should be doing. You might just be feeding more of something you didn't need. Most people need more fungi, though, so if I had to default, I'd say feed the fungi.

Jesse: That's kelp and fish hydrolysate, right?

Krisi: Fish hydrolysate, kelp, oatmeal, humic acid. Another advantage of making your own compost is that you can make your own humic acid. It's quite easy, you don't have to pay for it, and it's much more effective fresh than dried up from the store. We recently found a hammerhead worm, which was very scary. You do not want those.

Jesse: Thanks a lot. That was really cool.

Krisi: Yeah, of course. I'm always happy to share the microscope - to share the world under our feet. Let us know what you're looking for. We've got a few more videos planned with the extractor, and then we're going to do a little photo shoot.

Jesse: Great. Thanks a lot, Krisi.

Krisi: You are very welcome.