This afternoon we’re speaking with Dr. Zack Jones in Fort Collins, Colorado. Zack and I first met at the last vermiculture conference put on by NC State, run by Rhonda Sherman, the godmother of vermicomposting. We were doing market research, coming in from the manufacturing side, how to design a good vermicomposting system and from there to producing extract.

We already had a compost extractorbut we needed to learn more about vermicompost and why it’s such a powerful soil inoculant. Meeting Zack there was fortuitous because Zack had studied the microbial content of vermicompost, and he presented on that.

We’ve used Zack's researchextensively because it's some of the best visual proof of what's in vermicompost, why it's beneficial to plants, why plants like having worm castings and extracts from worm castings in the soil. We'll get into all of that and it’s great to have you on, Zack.

Thanks for the introduction, Jesse. I guess I'll just introduce myself a little bit. I grew up in California in the Bay Area. I went to UC San Diego in 2004, so just after the dot com boom before, just before, just after things started getting crazy in that area. It used to be just a normal suburban place.

I went down to San Diego, I did my undergrad in microbiology at UC San Diego, which had a great microbio program. At the time, microbiology was mostly concerned with food safety, human health, pathogens etc, so I didn't have much exposure to environmental microbiology until grad school. Then between college and grad school, I worked at a molecular diagnostic company and I got a lot of exposure to molecular bio there. I also got into aquariums and learned about nitrogen cycling and aquarium filters, and I thought, why didn't I learn about this in undergrad and all the great things that microorganisms do other than get people sick?

After working for a couple years decided to go to grad school and I ended up at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, where the Coors Brewery is. The School of Mines is an engineering school, which I was happy about because I've always wanted to use science to solve problems, fix things, help people, especially outside of the medical context, and environmental microbiology was something I was interested in.

At the Colorado School of Mines, I had the good fortune of sharing a lab with Professor John Spear, who was a postdoc for one of the people who discovered the 16S gene, which I’ll talk about later. It's the gene we use for identifying bacteria. John and his set of PhD students were doing next-gen sequencing in our lab and I had a lot of overlap with his students who were just getting into this stuff. This was back in 2010 and the technology had only been around maybe since 2008.

My dissertation project was based around water treatment and understanding microbial communities in engineered wetlands for bioremediation and nutrient cycling purposes. I got deep into nitrogen cycling and removal and things like Anammox. I was part of an engineering research center that was renewing the nation's urban water. I think what was unique about that experience for me was not only learning about DNA sequencing, but how do we can use this technology to inform stakeholders or to optimize biologically engineered systems. All of that eventually led me to the Vermi-Microbiome project and my company, Aggrego Data.

Excellent. Do you want to just give us a high level view of the process of DNA sequencing? What are you actually doing? Waving a wand or something or running it through a...

There's a lot of ways to do DNA sequencing and a lot of different instruments, but most of what we're doing now is called amplicon sequencing. We're sequencing a single fragment of DNA, which in this case is the 16S gene that I mentioned before. The basic process is we start off with a small sample, one sixteenth of a teaspoon or so. We extract the DNA, just slice the cells open by shaking it in a soapy water and salts, and then run it through a set of filters to purify the DNA out until we end up with DNA and water.

From there, we perform a PCR reaction, which is polymerase chain reaction. That amplifies a targeted gene of your choice depending on which primers you use. We amplify this gene, so you go from all this genomic DNA to this one gene from all of the organisms in your sample. What's unique about the 16S gene is that it encodes for ribosomes, and ribosomes make proteins and all life has proteins and enzymes and stuff. It's a defining feature of life. That means all life has this gene. In humans and multicellular life, it's the 18S gene, but it's pretty much the same thing, just bigger.

That allows us to do a survey of all of life in this one PCR amplification. Before we had Sanger sequencing, which allowed you to do one sequence at a time. It was a big deal if you could get 500 of these sequences per sample or system. Now all of a sudden we can get 13 million sequences per DNA sequencing run.

The DNA sequencing run is a special sequencing instrument, I won’t get into the technology, but there's a bunch of different companies coming up with new ways and cheaper ways to sequence DNA and to sequence longer reads. It's still evolving, but the gist is that we went from a few sequences to 500 sequences, to millions or hundreds of millions. DNA sequencing is not the limiting factor anymore. You're limited by computational power and the complexity of the data and how to understand it.

DNA sequencing changed everything in the world of microbiology. Before, we only knew about organisms we could culture, what we could grow on a petri dish. After DNA sequencing and the discovery of the 16S gene, we realized that we can only culture 0.1% to 1% percent all the organisms out there. So what are all these new organisms and what are they doing?

Back in 2010, looking at the microbial community of compost was thought to be too big of a challenge. It's too heterogeneous, too diverse, too dynamic to even try to understand. Now that we’ve wrapped our heads around the issue a bit more and sequencing is cheaper, we can analyze it better. With the new tools we have, it’s feasible to understand and maybe even start to an engineer a little bit.

We have our microscopy tools and people like Matt Powers and Dr. Elaine teaching the courses and, which works well for fungi and protozoa that are a little easier to see than bacteria. That's one level of testing, and then theMicrobiometer is a more basic level of testing, and then you're talking about labs like Ward Labs and so on. It's cool to see the evolution of testing, what's becoming available for people to make decisions around what they they're working with, both in their soils and then in the additives, the compost, extracts and so on.

I think it provides a whole new level of understanding. In the literature, you see inconsistencies in performance between different types of compost or the same type of compost made differently. There's so many variables, but we can start to peek in there and start to parse out these variables and understand the cause and effect better with these higher resolution tools.

Great. Do you want to tell us a bit about the Vermi-Microbiome project, how you were starting off looking at bokashi and then moved into vermicompost and how that whole project unraveled?

I first got into vermicompost in graduate school. I was learning about nutrient limitations in the world and about how to recycle nutrients in water treatment. I came across vermicomposting in Cuba, which I thought was interesting because you have this isolated island country that had to just survive on their own resources as long as they could, and they got into vermicomposting. I started my own vermicomposting operation at home and that led me to an urban vermicomposter, Victor in Denver, who I bought my first worms from. I told him about the DNA sequencing I was doing in grad school, and I ran some samples for him.

He was into bokashi as well as vermicomposting, so I tested both. I was blown away by the diversity of vermicompost. There was just so much going on there. I don't know how to understand or interpret this for you, but it was super diverse. And the bokashi was the opposite. It was lacking some organisms that were touted to be in there, but we didn't see them. That was my first “wow” moment, that there is real world application for this technology this other than just knowledge generation and exploration.

That was cool. Unfortunately it wasn't what I was getting paid to do, but it stuck with me. After I graduated, I went to Sydney, Australia for a postdoc. That didn't go very well but I was still thinking about vermicomposting and I had a vermicompost operation even in Australia. I met an agricultural professor there who is into soils and agriculture. We were talking about how DNA sequencing could be useful there.

I came back to the US six months later. I didn't know what to do with myself, but a buddy of mine was writing these small grants to do research. I thought I could probably do that too, so I decided to write a grant about vermicompost and using this DNA sequencing to understand the microbial communities of vermicompost.

This was around 2019. At the time, there wasn't any data about using this next-gen DNA sequencing in vermicomposting. I applied for a Western SARE, which is Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. It's a great program for small agricultural grants and they're found throughout the US depending on which region you're in. If you're looking for money. I think this program is still around and I think it's worth your time to apply for those grants because there's a good chance you can get them.

I wrote this grant and went to the 2019 NC State vermicomposting conference with Rhonda Sherman. This was two years before we met. Rhonda gave me 15 minutes to talk and I pitched the grant and asked vermicompost producers to sign a letter of support and agree to send me a sample if we get funded. I got 25 people to sign up, and I think that's what got the project funded. I don't think anyone on the review panel understood what I was talking about, but because 25 people signed up, they figured there must be some value.

The project got funded March 2020, which was a big time in the world and for me. My first daughter was born, COVID hit the world and I lost my lab space for two years, so the project was. But we collected 25 samples from all over the US, and one from Canada along with questionnaires about their compost, what do you put in it? How do you compost it? What system do you use?

We call that metadata. Any data besides the sequencing data is considered metadata. We associate that data with the sequencing data to understand what's going on. Ultimately, can we understand how to engineer vermicompost to make a certain community? I wouldn't say we were very successful in that regard. There's just so many different variables and this was my first time looking at vermicompost and learning about beneficial microorganisms.

I was fortunate that at that 2019 NC State Vermicompost Conference, Dr. Norman Arancon was there and gave two presentations. If you don't know about him, he's a professor out of Hawaii who does a lot of applied vermicompost and compost tea research. I learned a ton there about plant-growth-promoting microorganisms and their processes. That opened my eyes to the fact that people want to know more about the microbiology of vermicompost. That was a perfect setup for me and my project there. People have talked about the microbiology of vermicompost, but no one had done an in-depth study. The other purpose was to investigate the feasibility of DNA sequencing for understanding compost.

The data showed that there's a core microbiome group of organisms found in pretty much all vermicompost. A lot of these organisms have beneficial plant growth promoting properties. That’s why vermicompost, no matter who you buy it from or how it's made, will give some benefit.

It turned out that each batch of vermicompost is relatively homogenous. We did triplicate sampling from each person, and all were the same. I was worried that we’d always have to do multiple samples from each compost, which would be expensive. But I didn’t want to give out bad data or inconclusive data to people if you're not sure if it captures the full diversity of the compost. So I'd say we showed that it's feasible to understand vermicompost. And yes, there are beneficial microbes all in vermicompost.

From there, I went on trying to understand all of the organisms in vermicompost. At the time, I just didn't have enough time to go through and understand it all. Since then, I’ve probably looked at over 400 papers, just about the different organisms in vermicompost. Since I did that project, a ton of research has come out, much of it published after I did the Vermi-Microbiome project. The information wasn't even out there at the time.

I'm hoping to redo the project with more current data and with slightly different sequencing. We were trying to do bacteria and fungi in a single sequencing reaction, and it's a lot cleaner to do bacteria and fungi separately instead of trying to capture them both at the same time. We did it that way because of the monetary limitation within the project.

That’s part of what I'm trying to do with Aggrego Data is continue the Vermi-Microbiome project with customer data, and aggregate customer data and generate some of these graphics again and an ongoing database of vermicompost samples and how they're made. Maybe 25 samples isn't enough but maybe 500 samples is enough to get some strong statistical power to understand what's driving the microbial communities.

So are you doing DNA sequencing now for people as they're using you as a lab to generate data on their products?

I don't market my services a lot just because I'm still working on building up capacity to process a lot of samples at the same time. I generate reports and right now it’s taking me too long to go through each report. I’m hoping to bring in some additional firepower to get the reports more automated.

If people want sequencing data, I do it for them, but what I see having the most success doing these smaller consulting projects or grant projects. State regulations with labeling is the biggest problem right now because you can't use DNA sequencing data for OMRI reporting. You also can't use it for labeling on your packaging because you're only allowed to use CFU testing and not DNA sequencing testing. Some people are interested and asked me to do sequencing for them, but it's hard if you can't use my data to market your product. You're not getting the full value out of what you're paying for if you can't use it.

I wanted to do this to promote the use of vermicompost and biological products for agriculture and help people make their own products or develop or optimize their own products so that vermicompost and vermitea producers can on some level compete with companies who are selling pure culture or mixed culture of a few organisms. It turns out regulations are the biggest hurdle to gaining broad adoption. It’s hard to figure it out. It varies state by state, and it's one person, and it's not well advertised. The governmental structure of each state is a little different. It's probably not my problem to solve, but I hope it changes.

For the compost products that we're retailing, each of them has a Soil Foodweb report, which is, it's very standardized. So you can use it it's a comparison. But it's fairly limited, and to be able to go a step farther and say, what are those fungi, what benefits are they providing to the soil and to the plants.

If farmers or consultants are able to peel back the curtain and understand what’s present and what it does and how they can make better decisions, just as the as that awareness grows hopefully the demand for that granularity and in the testing will expand as well.

But is it fair to say your conclusion from the Vermi-Microbiome project was that no matter what the feedstock was, or any other variabilities that went into it, the constant is the worms digestive process and the microbes that result from that?

You're guaranteed at least a baseline of plant beneficial microbiology. I also think that because it's made in a compost setting, it's going to be more adaptable to a soil environment. Because the environment within your vermicomposting system is roughly comparable to a soil environment.

 I think that's a fair conclusion. There's certain groups of organisms that I expect to see in every vermicompost sample. The abundances of each of those groups vary, but there's this baseline level. Some vermicompost might have more nitrogen fixers, more bacillus organisms. Actinobacteria seems to be constant in all vermicomposts, but at varying abundances, which could be a result of the type of carbon you have in your vermicompost, If it’s a more woody recalcitrant carbon maybe the worms aren't able to digest it all and it grows more actinoes. I don't have a firm grip on what drives these community compositions yet, but there's a baseline community that you expect to see in all vermicompost.

Yeah, that's excellent. And I think that's, that's largely what we've seen on the field side as well. There's some that are more fungal dominant, for instance, than others.

We're just getting into fungal sequencing too, and I need to start reading about fungi like I did all the bacterial organisms. But fungal sequencing is actually better than bacterial sequencing. We get species level resolution with a lot of fungi, and there may be more fungi than bacteria that we don't understand anything about or that aren't in the fungal databases yet. Because the fungal gene that we sequence, the ITS gene, is shorter than the 16S gene, we get almost the full gene sequence that allows us to confidently identify fungal organisms down to the species level.

That's different than the bacterial sequencing where we're only getting genus level resolution. I'm excited to get into the fungal side of things now and hopefully we can start quantifying fungi soon with sequencing. I’ve just been having trouble finding a quantitative control to spike into the sequencing run.

Let's talk about a less involved project, but with one huge implications for us, and for a lot of growers in the field, which is what you did with Troy Hinke examining the difference between an extract versus a tea.

So maybe start by defining the difference between the two, both in what it does with the microbial community, but then also the preparations that you used to prepare both an extract and a tea.

Yeah, so, so this project with Troy Hinke came about at the last NC State Vermicomposting Conference. I needed to switch speaking spots to catch a flight and Troy offered to swap spots with me and I said, "Hey, can I do some sequencing for you? Can I sequence some of your vermicompost and then can you make a brew a tea from it?" A tea we define as aerated vermicompost and water with amendments added to it.

I think he added kelp meal, fish hydrolysate and humic acids. Alongside that, he made an extract, which is just aerated vermicompost and a mesh bag. They were brewed for something like 24 hours. And I was excited to work with Troy because he's an expert at this stuff. He's been doing it for a long time and was at the Rodale Institute. His vermicompost was super diverse, still the most diverse vermicompost sample I've sequenced. I'm not sure exactly what magic he's doing.

But the tea that he brewed was 85% one genus of organisms, which just seems crazy. How do you go from this diverse vermicompost community to almost, almost a pure culture of one type of organism? We saw that almost in every tea sample that we sequence. Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas are the two constants in almost every vermitea sample that has amendments in it.

We're consulting on a project with Permaculture Gardens and Nicky Schauder, where she got a SARE grant to do a vermitea experiment with permutations of many different amendments to see how they affected that community. Hopefully that data will be available soon, but yeah, you lose most of your diversity, and you get blooms of certain organisms when you add any nutritional amendment aside from humic acids. Humic acids seem to buffer the diversity a little bit.

Whether it's alfalfa meal, kelp meal, fish hydrolysate, some people add molasses to their tea, which I don't know, I think it just speeds everything up and increases your risk of making a bad brew. I don't recommend molasses for tea brewing. That was part of Nicky’s project, as well as understanding whether any of these amendments increase pathogen growth. I think we saw the most potential pathogens in the fish hydrolysate and molasses combination.

Back to Troy's project, his tea was incredibly homogeneous, dominated by one or two organisms, with a few others in there. But the extract looked almost exactly the vermicompost community. We lost a bit of diversity, but it was very representative of the vermicompost. In the tea, there’s probably a higher density of organisms, and very few organisms are actively growing in the extract. It's a more static community and it's very stable. That surprised a lot of people, and I think it demonstrates the benefit of DNA sequencing. You can't tell what's going on with bacterial communities under a microscope like you can with fungi and larger organisms.

So what do those results mean? I think if you're adding nutrient amendments to teas, they're going to have more nutrients than extract, nitrogen especially. So you're going to have a nutrient boost, which the extract won’t. Then there’s the diversity of the extract. Does it play some beneficial role in some applications, whether as a soil drench or a foliar spray?

In the literature, each one shows some benefit, but I haven't seen any side-by-side comparisons. That's research I would like to get into, especially on foliar applications, looking at the microbial community on leaves before and after different foliar sprays and maybe understanding biocontrol and disease suppression.

Most people are either doing one or the other, and typically on a larger scale they do extract because it's easier to produce large amounts and you're not dealing with a volatile substance. But if you were doing both at the same scale, I've heard some people say that an extract would be preferable as a soil application because you want that diversity of microbes down in the soil building out that whole ecosystem around the plant roots. It's also less viscous and would be easy to get down in the root zone.

And maybe use tea more for foliar applications where it doesn't matter which microbes you have, they just need to outcompete the ambient pathogens. It's a stickier liquid and it'll stick to the leaf surfaces. It'll be interesting to get more case studies of both, if that's a reasonable distinction on the application side.

That makes a lot of sense. I did some more research on bokashi and lactic acid bacteria, which are again not a very diverse mixture of organisms, and that seems to be useful as a foliar application to prevent mildew. Like you said, it's just some other organism that's there first to prevent the growth of mold.

I've seen people say you could just spray whey on your plants to feed the native organisms. But tea has that nutrient supplement as well as the microorganisms, so you get the microbes on there and they'll have a little bit of extra food there too to stay on their leaf surfaces. It’s a hostile environment to survive in because they’re getting blasted by the sun and there's probably not a lot of food there for them to eat. It would make sense if the tea was a better application for a foliar spray.

Most of the people doing extracts add nutrients when they apply it so the microbes hit the soil with the foods to get established in the soil.In tea, I'm not sure to what extent those foods all get consumed as part of the brewing process. I'm sure there's enough remaining to help the microbes get a little bit established once they're out in the environment. But for a lot of people, it does just come down to your operational constraints and the time that you have.

After spending time talking to farmers, you realize that everything they do on a field at scale has to be multipurpose, multi-benefit. They want to get the most bang for their buck when they're driving a tractor out on the field, and it has to be easy. They're not going to change the whole farming operation to fit your product or solution. You have to design your product to fit the farming paradigm you're trying to sell your product into.

We're just starting to experiment with what you can do with extracts. Instead of adding organic supplements to extract, what if we added a mineral extract? Can you have an extract and not even brew it just let it sit with minerals for a while; would the microorganisms in the extract start to solubilize some of these mineral nutrients and make them biologically available.

Then you all the humic acids in your extract which can chelate minerals and help the plants absorb them, maybe even in a foliar application. You start combining foliar nutrients with bio-control properties, getting the microbiological boost combined with a nutrient boost to create a multi-benefit product. This is something I've just started thinking about and I don't know how long it takes to solubilize these nutrients, maybe put powdered rock dust starting in your compost and then extract it. That's something I think has a lot of potential and I think the humic acid in tea is often overlooked as a soil supplement and microbial growth supplement for the soil.

Total sidebar here, but biochar is something we're running into a lot. It seems that biochar is like the wild west as far as what's in it. A lot of farmers are leery of just putting dry charcoal down because, yes it's going to hold water and nutrients but it's first going to accumulate them from the surrounding soil. So having it having all those things within the biochar before you apply it is hugely important.

Have you tried doing any samples on what you see in biochar, what they're actually inoculating it with, or what benefits it provides?

I haven't. I've talked to a tea maker who uses micronized biochar. One of the criticisms of foliar biological sprays is that everything you spray on just dies, and he's hoping that biochar can provide a home or a shelter for these microorganisms and allow them to persist longer. I have no data to back that up, but it's an interesting idea.

Biochar in general has gained a lot of momentum in the last few years, both as a climate solution and a soil solution. I'm still skeptical. Once you get it in your soil, what if it turns out to have a negative effect over time? You can charge it but, what if it becomes uncharged after five years? It can increase your cation exchange capacity… I'm still staying on the sidelines about biochar. I think it's interesting and I want to play with adding it to my own vermicompost. It's great at stabilizing systems and sucking everything up you said but then I've also been hearing that how it's made is important, the source of the biochar. There's a biochar company just opened up in town, and I've been meaning to go chat with those guys and check out their operation and learn a bit more about their process. So, yeah, I don't have any unique insights into biochar, I guess I'm in the same spot you are.

I'm just envious the overall marketing behind it because it's getting a lot of university studies and trials and different applications. It’s surprising to me because you say biochar that could be so many different things. I don't know, maybe it's a good thing, but like I said with these things that tend to stay around forever, you want to be 100% sure.

Cool. So since we're talking about future music, do you have any insights on the future of using DNA sequencing to make better decisions? Do you think we'll ever reach a point where we can take a soil sample and say, “These are the soil conditions these the crops I want to grow so this is the compost, this is the type of extract I want to make from it, these are the foods I want to add, and these are the results I'm going to get.

I mean that would be the dream. right? To generate a predictive model to say, here's your base conditions so here's what you want to do. I don't know if it's going to be as specific as this type of tea. I think it could be useful if you could supplement a specific nutrient enriched type of vermicompost or tea or have these designer microbial communities or compost to better optimize for specific soil environments or specific crops. I could see maybe out in the future, but I still think we're far away from that.

Some of the leachate data that we had there, which is I know a controversial amendment, but it had this fermentive community, and a lot of those organisms seem like they might be better suited towards grasses. Maybe you could start brewing extracts in different ways to optimize for specific organisms that are good at solubilizing different kinds of nutrients that could be applied to maybe soils where those nutrients are locked up in minerals and hey here's a community that you could apply to your soil that's known to unlock these minerals. I know there's some companies in Colorado that did pure a pure culture of a specific organism that's known to solubilize phosphorus and in Colorado there's a fair amount of phosphorus in the soil but it's all locked up in iron or whatever minerals are in there.

Could you start designing communities for specific use cases? That doesn't seem too far off, but I'm still a little skeptical. It needs to be just more than the microorganism. It needs to have a nutrient supply to perform whatever you want it to do, so could that be part of the tea and inoculant. Vermicompost and teas have all these beneficial organisms, so if you just added that to your soil, would that promote the growth of native organisms in the soil to perform similar functions or promote the growth of those organisms too? Maybe a lot of the microorganisms in your amendment don't survive, but you still get that carbon boost and the same type of carbon that's growing these great organisms should grow other good organisms in the soil as well. That's how I've been thinking about it and again, no real data or evidence to back that up, but it just seems logical.

We are accumulating case studies as much as we can. In the field it's rare to work directly with a grower who's taking a lot of data. There's a lot who will report impressive anecdotal things, but to tie it back to the data is rare. We're trying to collect those and make them as public as we can. And when this stuff hits the soil, it does make almost a universal positive difference as far as we've been able to see.

It might take more than just a season or two to see that difference as you build this up so how do you monitor and track that change. I think that's where DNA sequencing can come into play as well, monitoring and understanding what's going on knowing when your soil is at a certain point or what are these changes.

It's a great research tool. I'm still not sure if it's going to be this universally standardized approach to understand soil. Maybe it just has a role in the knowledge generation and doing larger studies and then you have this data driven approach. All these systems are complicated and it, and there's a lot of variables and it just, it just takes a lot of data to work through all of that. And it's quite an investment, honestly, in both time and money. I hope it ends up changing the way farming and nutrient delivery is done to a more sustainable and efficient way that saves farmers money and is better for the environment.

That's my goal and why I got into all of this, but it's not easy to understand it all. I'm just myself getting into more of the soil science and agricultural side of things, coming from just compost and biological amendments. Questions like, what does the application of this look like? How do we track it in the field? There's not a whole lot of studies on these field trials because researchers often don't get a positive signal or data back, and there's too much noise, too many variables. You have hot and dry seasons, wet seasons. How do you, how do you track one variable through a thousand-acre farm over years? But if you guys get a summary of your case studies, that would be awesome to look at because there's just not a lot of that data out there now.

Back to the original point, I think even the research you've done so far goes a long way towards showing why vermicompost such a powerful soil amendment. What's in it, who the the microbes? Oh, look, they're exactly the ones the plants need to bring them the nutrients and so on. So even if you're not doing a lot of data in real time, that goes a long way towards the background knowledge, and from there you can operate knowing that you have a solid scientific foundation.

I guess I've been into this a while now and get into the weeds a little bit, always looking for what's not known yet, but that’s true. When I first started this project, someone told me like, “I've had my compost my vermicompost sequence before and it looked like just a soil community.” Well, is that a bad thing? All these biological amendments, especially the pure cultured organisms grown in a lab, it's hard to think that they’ll have much of a shot living in the soil. Maybe they can get root associated or something. But if you have a diverse community of organisms that are commonly found in the soil, that's not a bad thing. You're just getting a high concentration of a diverse community that seems to support plants well and give them hormones and nutrients.

Something I've been thinking about is, why are all these beneficial organisms in vermicompost? We do see them in other compost as well, and I still need to do a broader survey, but I think vermicompost is usually the most enriched in these beneficial organisms. I think there's something unique about the worm castings themselves that I can't put a finger on. I think it goes back to humic acids and carbon.

But I don't have a good answer to the question of why all these plant-growth-promoting organisms are in compost, when there aren't any plants growing in there. They are soil organisms, and I think that a lot of these soil organisms evolved to contain plant growth promoting functionalities because the soil is a hard place to live. If you encounter a plant root, it’s a lifeline you want to hang on to.

Plants cover the soil everywhere you look for the most part, you can't keep them away. So over time, these organisms that lived in the soil figured, hey, I'm better off if I help this other thing that's helping me out. You have this evolved symbiotic relationship broadly spread throughout all soil organisms. I still don't understand why all these beneficial organisms are found in compost and worm castings. I don't have a great answer for that, but it's something I find interesting.

There has been more research coming out recently where people use metagenomic sequencing, sequencing all the genes and not just the biomarker genes, and they do see an increase in plant growth promoting genes depending on how the compost is made. That's something I'm hoping to get into in the future. It'll give a more direct representation of which functions are most enhanced, and different types of compost and vermicompost and teas and extracts. But it's 100 times more data per sample and instead of just this one gene, you're looking at all these different genes.

But the tools to understand that data is getting more available, and sequencing is getting cheaper. It's just more expensive, and regular 16S sequencing is expensive enough, so it's hard to justify spending $500 to run a sample now. I've been thinking about some ways to combine the two tech sequencing approaches so you can still pay for just the amplicon sequencing and maybe extrapolate some of that metagenomic sequencing from there.

So, yeah, we'll see.

Excellent. Thanks so much for your time and thanks for all the work you're doing. And as I said, it's super valuable to us and good luck.

 Yeah, thanks, Jesse. It was great talking to you today.