Jesse: Today we're back with Rion Naus for some background on the soil microbial ecosystem. This will be an in-depth look at who the different microbes are, what they're doing, and how they interact with each other and with the soil and the plants. Rion, I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Rion: Happy to share. We live in a world that is incredibly complex, but beautifully simple at the same time. It's because of these different creatures as part of creation that interact with each other, providing both the nutrition and physical structure that we need to grow our plants, stay healthy, and have that nutrition pass into us. When we talk about our biome, we're talking about the biology that allows me to be me. That's why it's even spelled that way. Bio-Me. That's our habitat and our scale of how we exist in the world.

When we talk about the soil microbiome, we're talking about the same needs and requirements, but at a much smaller scale. We use different tools to observe and interact on that level. Having the right tools to look allows us to make better evaluations and assessments so we can be more productive and work with nature, and then nature can also work on our behalf.

That means not killing it. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, some people think that killing it is doing a great job. When we're talking about the soil and microbiome and creatures in general, we want to keep them alive. There's already enough death and cycling in that system that some even call it necromass: the bits and pieces. Up to 50% of the soil carbon can be made up of bits and pieces of creatures that were part of it. We are carbon-based life forms. We're interacting with other carbon-based life forms and that carbon is cycled, and that nutrition is cycled as well. The carbon is mostly not from those creatures though. It's through plants, through photosynthesis that sunshine becomes liquid sunshine, which turns into sugars and carbohydrates and that carbon of carbohydrates is what fuels the growth.

The Soil Food Web and Nutrient Cycling

When we look at these systems, we need to think of them as an ecosystem, things that interact and experience that world, who eats whom, the layers and levels of it. It's beautifully been described as a soil food web. This soil food web has dynamics and interactions of different creatures at different levels; some of them are structurally similar to each other, but much smaller. A microarthropod is a smaller version of what we have on a macro level. These creatures, including bacteria, archaea, protozoa and protists like ciliates and flagellates, nematodes, and microarthropods, are all interacting in that soil food web.

The cool part about that interaction is that there's a physical result of those forms performing their function: form and function. On the smallest scale that we can visualize, we can see a bacterium as a bacillus, a bar-shaped, rod-shaped bacterium. There are other bacteria out there, but they're cocci, little round circle shapes. Those long rod shapes wiggle. As they wiggle, things are being pushed off to one side and being pushed off to the other. As scale increases, that wiggle can be a nematode at a larger scale, it can be a worm at an even larger scale. At a larger scale, it can be a snake; underwater, it can be a moray eel. It is that same physical movement and function that squishes things off to one side and to the other. It is a process called bioturbation. It's the movement of things around other things. The cycling of that nutrition.

For things to go from up to down with gravity, we need other things to lift it. We need an upwelling of that ecosystem. On the surface, it might look something like this. Small aggregates mixed with minerals. You’re not sure what's going on in there, but it's dark you can see pore spaces, holes. Those holes are where air and water passage happen. It's the path of least resistance for root growth. The ability to breathe reduces compaction, but this is all a process of the biology mushing and squishing things together.

Think of a dung beetle. It starts out with a cow pie, and then it takes that cow pie and rolls it up into a ball. Then that ball rolls down a hole. This is a progression where these creatures are able to use gravity to have things move down. We even call them cold composters. When we're talking about compost and cold compost, we're talking about deer and rabbits and even moose. They have a round pellet that rolls down a hole. As mammals are even doing that function, a cow needs an extra step. That's why the dung beetle comes in to lend a hand or at least an antenna. They're tuned in to the biology and to the mineral presence of it, because those environmental indicators are cues for the rest of the system to function. When that rest of the system is functioning, we call that a quorum. Quorum sensing is the sense of what's happening and that everything is okay; it's okay to get back to work.

Nature works on our behalf. If there's a cow pie sitting on top of the field and it's been there for years, there's nothing there to eat it. I've been on other places where there's literally creatures chasing the cow down because they know something's coming out the back end soon enough. They're wanting to cycle that back into the system. As above, so below, the worms bring things up to the surface. The gophers are upwelling from the depths. The ants bring things up out of the mineral profile. Then through gravity and liquid passing through that system, the soluble nutrition goes back down. It's worked and reworked. In the process of doing that, we build soil structure, we build nutrition, and we build access to the things both for ourselves as well as the rest of the ecosystem.

The system is the important part. We are working within a divinely designed system. The more you learn, the more you study, the more you're in awe. Because of that, we're able to see things that nobody ever sees. Part of the reason for that is that we can look. When we talk about trophic levels, we're talking about how nutrition is cycled. If you think of it on our scale, we have the grass growing, it consumes sunshine. That sunshine is then converted. Then things eat the grass.

After that grass is consumed, it becomes a deer, but now what eats the deer? Now we have predation. That predation, something eating something else, allows for the nutrition that's bound up in that creature to be cycled and utilized, but there's always excess. That excess is what goes out into the rest of the system. The plants tap into it. It's water-soluble and available in that system for nutrition.

On the smallest of scales, we have these bacteria. We have some that even like cyanobacteria that even photosynthesize and are able to pull in sunlight themselves and creatures that then eat that, but then they have to be eaten themselves and cycled through that system. That's why the bits and pieces that are left over are also called necromass. It's the bits and pieces of that system. Some people would say trash, but the reality is this is a system where it's waste not, want not. Nothing's going to waste. Every aspect of it is trying to be worked and reworked back into that system. That's a robust system that is diverse. It's a system that can handle the swings of an environment because it's stable. That stability is what we're trying to develop and promote. That stability then allows for a hot day not to collapse a crop.

Archaea, Bacteria, Protozoa, and Nematodes

Jesse: Do you want to give us a bit of a breakdown? We talked about the soil food web. If you take the course and so on, you're looking for bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, those four specifically, there's probably others. If you want to take a minute to explain what the different roles each of these microorganisms have, what they're serving in the ecosystem in broad strokes.

Rion: As we get into the different members of the soil food web, let's also come to the reality that, no matter how much we learn, we are still learning. There are some things that we've never seen because no one's ever looked. There are other things that when we look and ask questions, we find out answers that we never even thought to ask questions for before. Primarily, we're dealing with archaea, which are the ancient ones often considered mostly to be like extremophiles. They have a special role, especially within agriculture. These extremophiles are the ones that can handle the super hot temperatures. They can handle the super low temperatures. Most things like that warm, cozy middle ground where we prefer to be ourselves. If I'm going to be dealing with a crop or land that is going to struggle through some swings, I'm going to tap into the creatures that have no problem living when it is hot. You're building part of that robustness.

Some of it is through gene expression. They have different genes because of their genome that they're able to tap into. The rest of the system is able to bridge and work with that. Some of it is connected to sulfur. You have hot springs that nothing can drink that water, but there's stuff that lives in it. I have some samples that if we want to take a look at, we can. see what I mean? This is where we can utilize it within agriculture. That's a different system to function within.

From archaea, we go to bacteria. That is still a label of a massive group of creatures. Primarily, these are creatures that allow for that primary gluing also to take place. When you look at some samples, they'll have all these little black lines. They're literally gluing themselves together. Some are mobile, some aren't. In general, they don't move a lot compared to larger organisms, which have a much more developed means of transportation, but they vibrate often. Some can move quite well. Their populations grow tremendously fast as well. Because of that, we need something to eat them.

That brings us to protozoa: testate amoebas and naked amoebas, flagellates and ciliates. These different creatures are the consumers of those bacteria. They can also graze on microscopic algae. Algae is a single-celled plant. Those single-celled plants are still plants. They're producing oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. They have a body structure that's made out of silica. This is beautiful to see under the microscope because you're seeing a refraction of light, like a prism, through the creature itself. That's also how they can pull apart different wavelengths to tap in and pull that energy out. We are able to see this at these different scales.

From the microscopic algae and protozoa, this is a food web. Then we get into more advanced predators like nematodes, where instead of a couple of bacteria, they're eating hundreds or thousands in any given day. This is now part of the structure of the animal, but that's also the excess that's excreted from that animal, like we poop and pee. Do they get rid of that excess. That excess, though, has now ripped open all those little fertilizer bags of bacteria and made that nutrition water-soluble out into the root zone of your plant. If you don't have anything to eat the things, then you don't have access to the nutrition and information that makes up those creatures. We were talking about nematodes a little bit ago connected to a movement and function as well. That wiggle performs tremendous work in an ecosystem. When we visualize a wiggle. We see something under the microscope moving.

If I were looking at a guitar and watching the string move, I could see the wiggle, but I hear it, too. I don't have a microphone inside the microscope. You see what I mean? We can't hear what's happening, but we can see the wiggle. A worm can hear what's happening. When you have a robust soil ecosystem around that root zone, worms are attracted to that. That's the dinner bell. That's the dinner bell that's pulling in other biology to that site, to that space. With that biology there, now even more nutrient cycling is taking place. Sound is an attractor. We know this even for ourselves. Where's the party? You can hear it down the street. You know where to go.

The Fungal Energy Channel

I like how Dr. Christine Jones talks about the fungal energy channel. This is a revision of the soil food web, where there's more to it than who eats whom. Because once we get past the, "Oh, this creature eats that," what happens with all that energy? Either on a nutritional level or even at some of these smaller levels, we're talking anions and cations. We're talking electrical charge. What's happening with that energy? In truth, it's being conducted through a fungal network, throughout the soil and into and through your plants. This is where mycorrhizal fungi are so important. The saprophytes are consuming and breaking but it's also the connective tissue of that soil ecosystem. We're not talking about, "Hey, you need fungi." We're talking about how you need to be connected to the rest of the system. What use is the internet if you can't access it?

This is an aspect of bringing life back to the system and charging it. It’s a progression in understanding how these different creatures function. We have one passing through right here under the stereoscope. I talked about movement, you see the little wave of both the legs, but that also is what rolls up those humic structures into balls. This is part, you can't have one without the other. It passing through, I wouldn't be able to show that real quick. It's a lot different when it's in this form. We don't see the movement. It's flat. It's a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality. Different part of how we experience the world. When we have both the micro and the macro working in alignment, that alignment is what I call a through line.

It's the good of that system being happy and healthy, The flip side of that is when you turn life upside down and backwards and live becomes evil. Literally spin it around and it means something totally different. When we have a healthy, thriving soil ecosystem, that foundation is what builds for our own scale and our own ecosystem. There are things that we can do at small scales, but the same principles apply.

Rotifers, Humic Substances, and Soil Aggregates

We have an O horizon, we have alluvial planes, and we have the ability for drainage. Like this is where we don't want the organic material to sit in the fluid because after at most two days, it goes anaerobic. There's nothing there for it to breathe. It's an air breathing system. This is where our ability to interact and be intentional in that ecosystem allows for the greatest opportunity for change and positive results. Here is an example of a rotifer, which is another protozoan, that is cycling. You can see the vortices being sucked in and pulled and it's eating, it's consuming bacteria, sucking them down. You can see even far away from it is affected by its presence. This creature is an indicator of an aquatic environment or a compost that’s too saturated.

The interesting part, though, is that when that material dries out, they go into a protective state. That protective state is them removing the water and staying alive. They haven't turned into a mineral. That would be fossilization, but they have gotten rid of everything they possibly could so that they can protect themselves and stay alive. Here is the same creature under, instead of UV light, it's under white light the protective state.

This is the exact same creature bound up, dehydrated. Think of a raisin versus a grape, It's a time lapse. All I did is add a drop of water back to the slide. Then that vortex starts up and they start cycling. It starts out in that protective, cyst state and then proceeds to hydrate. Then after that, it goes back to work. This is part of how nature is dealing with those hot and dry and wet and cold, saturation and hydration points. None of those things are able to happen if we don't have those creatures there to fulfill those functions. This is where, when we use pesticides and herbicides and fungicides and nematicides, and some people even have to deal with some suicides, this is how things die. We are working with biology. Biology is the study of life. We're dealing with the living parts and that living part promotes more life. Like the name of my company, we grow with life.

We even know that already because we consume food that is alive. Fermented food is alive, filled with the beneficial biology that helps to protect and preserve that and then nourishes our own systems. Here is an example of some humic structure. You can see the yellow honey color is fulvic acids. The dark brown structure and amber is humic acids. They're part of the same structure. It's one is water-soluble and one is acid-soluble. It's a spectrum. Oftentimes we separate things, but it's part of the whole.

When you do an extraction of your compost or other materials, you're pulling off that water-soluble nutrition plus anything else that can fit through the filter. You can take that same material once you're done flushing it, you can either rework compost or vermicompost, or you could then use a living vinegar like apple cider vinegar and do an acid extraction as well and get the fulvics out of that material. There's tremendous opportunity for us to work and interact with nature. From that last humic structure, I showed you have to have the microaggregates to have macroaggregates. Those microaggregates then lead to the macro stuff you can see in your hand. The macroaggregates. Here is another example of some of this biology.

When we look at a nematode, you can see that gut system, that dark band within the creature is filled with food. It's cycling so much more nutrition than the smaller predators. Like a mountain lion versus a bobcat. They're going to consume more. They're going to cycle more. They interact at a different scale within that ecosystem. This is a predatory nematode. It is consuming even each other.

Mycorrhizal Fungi and Habitat Hospitality

This is within the system itself. We talk about those trophic levels. Those levels lead to the next. This is where arthropoda, that phylum is all made of chitin. Chitin is fungi food. You are what you eat. That progression through that system is part of trophic succession. We stand at the peak of that and we hold the trophic trophy, we can be the stewards and the shepherds of that ecosystem, nurturing everything below. That's part of that through line, When we deal with mycorrhizal fungi, we're looking inside the plant and you can see that inside the square rectangular plant cells, you can see the fungal hyphae glowing because of the phosphorus, the fluorescence, the phosphorus that those fungi are so adept at harvesting out of an ecosystem and providing for plant nutrition.

When we think of fungi, there's so many aspects of it and it's amazing to me how we can kill a whole kingdom of creatures, a whole trophic level with an application of a fungicide, but they're more like us than they are like everything else. That application definitely affects us and they produce even different amino acids that animals can't produce, but we can utilize. Because we can utilize them, we receive the benefits of that ecosystem. Some of the work in the National Nutrient Density Studies over the last several years has been a tremendous insight into how even cattle consuming nutrition from a healthy, complete soil food web.

I want people to think of the soil food web as like a checklist. If you look through a microscope and you don't see this, well, it's missing. If you don't see that, it's missing. If all you have is bacteria, well, that's where you're at. Okay, cool. What's missing? We're missing the fungi. We're missing the predators. We're missing the ciliates and the flagellates and the amoebas. Like that checklist can be simple on a visual qualitative factor. It gets more technical when you're adding numbers to all of them and that's okay. On a checklist, it's easy for people to be like, I'm missing this. Cool. Well, that's where you should put your focus in. Focus on bringing that back into the system. When we talk about into the system, in any given year, we have seven days a week, 52 weeks in a year, and 24 hours in a dayb that's 8,760 hours.

That's 8,760 labor hours when you have a force in your system functioning and cycling that you might have had a cost for it, but you don't have to pay for it. That cost might be in time. It might be in money, but after that cost, it's about keeping them alive and providing what I like to call habitat hospitality because if you don't want to live there, neither do they. Having that habitat hospitality and maybe some food or nutrition helps make it a lot easier for everything. One involved. It covers creatures, but fungi are like the rebar and the concrete. They hold structure differently. They bridge structure differently. This here is a grasshopper that has been consumed. You can see the fungi wrapping and through and penetrating it.

Remember, as part of arthropoda, that grasshopper is made of chitin. It is cycling the nutrition, but it needs minerals. Those are often enzyme co-factors, so it can do its job. You can see large particle sand grains being bound together by the fungi themselves. Any person with sandy soil complains because things pass right through it. Unless you have the creatures there that literally build a web, a net to capture, contain, and catch everything falling by gravity through that soil ecosystem. Not only is it eating the things that eat your plants, it's also accessing that nutrition. Then when we talked about, other factors of what it is, plants have two access points into the world, a root and a root hair. Unless they have other parts, I don't know about, but a root and a root hair.

When we deal with soil, we're dealing with sand silt clay. Sand, silt, and clay are different sizes of material, big, medium, little. Root and a root hair, big, medium, little. Well, what does the plant have that accesses that smallest particle size, the most available particle size, where the electrical conductivity and charge is in that particle size, where most of our water is stored. Fungi have access to that. If your root hair can't get through the hole, the fungi is 10 to a hundred times smaller. That's how it can access into that system. Then both provide water and nutrition to the plants themselves. Here is an example of a fungal hyphae and some spores. You can see inside the fungal hyphae, there are these septa, this little crossbar. That dark humic structure in the fungi, is called melanin, that skin tone.

We have melanin. Our melanin changes to protect us from UV light. So does theirs. In the process of protecting itself from the environments, pulling in more nutrition into itself, and those little crossbars are like pressure gates. By closing off one gate, internal pressure forces that part, and then the nutrition goes someplace. That gate opens, that pressure shifts, now it can go someplace. Bacteria can travel through, are sucked up in like a straw, maneuver to where your plants need it. It's an amazing system, and it is incredibly functional. It can mean the difference between having an insurance check and producing a crop. Because they had access to the water that even when you hold in your hand, the soil feels dry. It's still sometimes 50% water, but we can't access it.

When we have those fungi doing their jobs, it's an amazing resource to have within our ecosystem. Here's an example of one of those branching walls. You can see how by shutting a gate in one direction, it can open that valve and send it into another direction. It's also how it can take a mineral away from your plant and move it through that fungal energy channel that we were discussing a little bit ago to where it is needed in that ecosystem.

Compaction, Fungal Networks, and Rhizosheaths

Here’s an example of what happens when we have things in our environment that don’t allow that system to function. You can see this plant, with my hand as a reference for scale. It was only working with about three inches, possibly four of total soil profile before it hit a compaction zone so hard that even this weed couldn't penetrate it. It decided to go sideways instead of down. That means that plant couldn't access any nutrition or water below that point. This type of plant can break through 300 pounds per square inch of soil compaction, but oxygen can't pass through more than 200 pounds per square inch. The soil below that root cannot breathe. That lack of breath means it's a lack of life. The life that is there doesn't need to breathe, and it’s often something that's anaerobic and inhospitable to aerobic air breathing creatures like ourselves and everything we're trying to grow.

Having a system that allows this biology to function is incredibly important. Ground compaction, tillage, physical disturbance, those are all things that disrupt and disturb to the point of death. Some people think that their land is dry, but in truth it's dead. The rains come in and yes they do bring moisture, but they also bring life. Good rains filled with life. By adding life back into that system in other ways and utilizing the rest of the biology to work on our behalf, it makes our job and lives a lot easier. Here is a great example of fungi moving in a soil profile. You can see the fungal mycelium that is penetrating and reaching across through that soil system. This is on a macro level we can see. We're seeing the highway, the interstate of what we saw in those fungal hyphae under the microscope.

This is what we can see with our naked eyes. You can see how that web, that fractal, that some people look at it like tree of life, those roots, those branches are reaching out and they're doing so in a three-dimensional plane. You can see the fine particle-sized sand that was reaching out and through. When we talk about the plant itself, here's an example of the development of rhizosheath. This plant hasn't even shot up a leaf. This is the biology that plant has already said, "Oh, you're part of my team. I'm gonna need you." When we talk about rhizosheath, we're talking about like a sheath for your knife. The rhizo is the root. It's the root sheath, That's where the highest concentration of biology is. That's where the highest concentration of nutrition is. That's the food pantry, the larder, freezer and refrigerator. When that plant needs something, it's already there versus not having it available or depending upon the farmer to provide it with whatever chemical input and nutrition. That rhizosheath is the plant producing carbon and carbohydrates and feeding, which means the populations are increasing. It's growing and nurturing.

Nature can only do what it can, And oftentimes, it can only do what it do-dos. That's part of that process, that food web of what goes in and then comes out. When we look at a plant, their systems are on the outside, The plant has a system where their gut system is surrounding their roots. This is where the digestion of the mineral profile is taking place and the production of carbon, and it's being produced into exudates that are going out into that soil to nurture that system. That's a fun one.

Roots, Minerals, and Plant Resilience

Jesse: What would the plant look like without the microbes? What root development would you see there versus what's there now?

Rion: Because of the energy stored in the seed, sometimes you'll get the same amount because it's an explosion of trying to find options. But you won't see any after that seed has given everything that the previous generation contributed. After that, it is dependent upon the ecosystem that previous generation helped it to develop. That seed has so much more to work with versus a seed that maybe even had the same root or slightly less because of enzyme cofactors and things like that, but maybe has the same root, but now no team. There's a great series of book called Teaming with Microbes, T-E-A-M, great series, user friendly, but we need a teeming team, T-E-E-M, going and nurturing and building into that system. That plant with a rhizosheath and a head start into development has so many more things working with it than something with naked roots.

Oftentimes those naked roots are indicators of chemically driven systems. Water soluble, it doesn't have to work with anything else. There's no need to build relationships. When people pull plants up, oftentimes that pulling part will shear off that outside. You need to bring up the plant and break off that soil structure be able to see some rhizosheaths because of how it's bound into that aggregate structure. This is where how you look changes what you look at.

We had a lot of high temperatures early this year, 90 degrees in February in parts of the country. Zinc is used in reproduction and healing and dealing with heat stress and these environmental factors and immune response. If that's the case, it potentially used up its available zinc early in the season and cycle, which then leaves it susceptible if it doesn't have an active, healthy, robust population later. Oftentimes we'll see that as virus stresses and diseases. When we use chelating herbicides, the reason it kills the plants is because it takes out the zinc and it takes out the. We call them essential elements because they're essential for life. If we remove those mineral elements, we remove the enzyme co-factors, you can even have the biology there, but if it doesn't have what it needs, it can't do its job. Those enzyme co-factors are incredibly important in developing defense and resilience and glues and all the things that those creatures can do. This is where by putting back that appropriate mineral nutrition, we're can enable them.

Think of a fuse in your truck. It's a tiny element, a little piece of metal. That is what runs the air conditioner, and another one runs the radio. If it fails, your truck can get from A to B. Your plant can still get from planting to harvest, but it can't handle heat stress and it's not as much fun. If we put back those missing elements back into that system, if it becomes functioning, you don't even think about the radio, you turn it on. It becomes a no-brainer. A lot of these creatures don't have brains. The plant's growing. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, reaching for its true genetic potential and developing a happier and healthy ecosystem.

On a different scale than fungi, but fulfilling similar function, those are spider webs. We got a hole in the ground. The spider has created a web. Those are bridges. If you take spider webs, especially when dew and exudates and stuff are on it, you can take that under the microscope and look at it. You will be shocked. It's amazing. I was talking about the bacillus and the nematode and the worm and the snake and progressions through scale. Those fungal hyphae fulfill that function of bridging and a net. Then a larger creature performs that at a different scale. Spiders, this is all part of a healthy ecosystem. You don't want to have your plants eaten by bugs. You need something that eats your plants. That would be other insects and arachnids.

Pathogens, Deficiency, and Ecosystem Balance

Jesse: That brings up one of the questions I had. Fungi and bacteria and so on, there are pathogenic versions. What happens to them in a healthy ecosystem? Do they get devoured, or is there not enough for them to consume?

Rion: That's a great question. In my area, we have a lot of strawberry production. The pathogen that's affecting and killing off those strawberries is called macrofomina. It will do the same thing in soybeans. It's not only strawberries, but because it does the same thing in something else, it's fulfilling a function. In strawberries, it is handling drought stress and zinc deficiency. If that plant is suffering from drought stress, which in strawberries, it's a management practice that they intentionally don't water for a long time. It can be several weeks even because they're trying intentionally to shift that plant out of the vegetative growth phase into a reproduction make berry phase.

The other part is because of the use of herbicides, they don't have the elements that are required for a happy, healthy immune response. We've told that fungus to go to work, to do its job, through of the conditions, the gene expressions from the environment resulting from our own management. When the strawberry producers shifted their practices, it wasn't a problem anymore because we told the fungus it it did not have a job to do.

Oftentimes people talk about saprophytes as if their only role is this decomposer. We notice it most in an active composting situation or in breaking down residue and dealing with the organic layer. But when the plant's alive, they’re also involved in immune response. If I cut my hand, I don't want my whole system to die. That little part heals over and dies and even scabs and flakes off. That’s not only a role after death; it is a function within that living system. When the plant goes through senescence and dies, it shifts gears and cycles that nutrition. I prefer the term recomposition versus decomposition. Yes, those residues are breaking down, but they are being cycled, bound together, changed, and put into a new form so they can be accessible in nutrient cycling once again. Through processes like competitive inhibition, when you have more of the good guys, quote unquote, than pathogens, they keep the other ones in check. When you have the appropriate nutrition, it literally can shut down what those pathogens are doing. It is important to understand that this is an interaction with a whole kingdom of creatures that is often misunderstood.

Oftentimes things we see as the culprit are really part of the cleanup crew. It's easier f to understand on an insect level, that when your plants are deficient, the antenna on those insects are literally tuned into that deficiency. Because of that deficiency, those insects fly in to consume them. The same thing is happening on a sensory level with the fungi too. When that system is unhealthy, when the system is out of balance, instead of putting it back in balance we often see that fungi as the culprit, we go get a fungicide to kill it and we haven't addressed the zinc deficiency or the drought stress in the strawberries. That's why our food is deficient of this nutrition because it didn't have the zinc. If we eat that strawberry, now we don't have the zinc. Do you see what I mean? How it's cycling through even our own systems.

Part of understanding that we are working within a living system is maybe a reinterpretation of things that we thought were bad guys or culprits and pathogens, and maybe understood that they have a different role to play. Our system is telling them that's exactly what they're supposed to do. When you have food or when you're growing something that's being consumed by insects, that's not mammal food. That's not people food. That's insect food. There's something missing. It's not as healthy. What's interesting with insects as well, because of their physical structure, all those colors, those colors are different minerals. They're calling in things built up and made up of those different minerals that they are potentially missing. Because of that, if it's a living, healthy system, it goes back to that picture I showed you, the grasshopper being consumed by fungi. If there's no fungi there, it can't cycle the nutrition that grasshopper is bringing back into the system. Part of it.

Beneficial Fungi in Agriculture

Here's a picture. This is a field day in Texas. There are a lot of acres of cotton. In the field day that was there, we had over 60 years of living memory of people who've been growing cotton. None of them had ever seen under the cotton. That right there is because they're working with the rest of the system now. They've inoculated those seeds with foundational fungi. They've been able to reestablish those beneficial systems. Now we have fruiting bodies. This is a fruitful and multiply component where that fungi is producing millions of spores to go back out into that ecosystem and nurture it even further. That fungi in particular is interesting, because if you know you're not going to drink alcohol, you can eat it. If you do consume alcohol, it'll kill you, melt your liver. A twist. Talk about some tension. I'm hungry, but the reason is, is it breaks down that anaerobic environment. That's what it's doing in the soil. It's making it healthier.

Ecological Succession, Cover Crops, and Prairie Biology

If we consume it and it does that inside of us because of our own management of the system, it could kill us. Is it a pathogen? You see what I mean? Or is it fulfilling a function? Based on our own choices, our perspective changes. It shifts. If I'm hungry, there's an opportunity there, but there has to be some responsibility there for that opportunity. When we talk about bare dirt to a mature forest. We talk about that's an ecosystem succession. When we think of like bare dirt, how did it get that way, was it by tillage? Was it by fire? Was it by chemical burn? Another different fire, but it still burns. Chemical burn. That's now blank slate. Step one, that system still has life in it, but it's going to be the most simple. It's going to be the bacteria. That's why most agricultural production and most soils are so bacterially dominant because that's all that's left. That's all that can survive.

At that point, like that checklist, we need to reestablish the other beneficial organisms so that they can fulfill their functions. As we go from monocots and grasses, it gets more complex and goes to dicots. Now we're getting to different broadleafs and then we go into vines and bushes. It's a progression of how those plants cycle through the ecosystem. Oftentimes the forest gets the largest praise for being so fungal dominant, but it's because it's so much more carbon dominant. The fungi are the ones that break down the lignin and cellulose, that carbon material. They are able to handle that hard material, and that fuel load fuels their metabolism rather than fire at that point. Grasslands and prairie is incredibly fungal dominant, like 15 to one fungi to bacteria in a healthy undisturbed prairie. There are massive fungal populations. If you think about it, this is not an annual system: lots of perennials and many things are committed to growing there for seasons. There's longevity, there's a buildup of biomass, there's cycling and nutrition. It's a fungal dominant system when it's healthy.

Part of restoring these populations is to be able to say, I'm going to mimic nature. Even though I'm going to be growing this crop, I'm going to be treating it as if it was exactly what it was supposed to be in a fungal dominant prairie filled with that diversity. We call them different things in agriculture. We call it cover crops and we call it interplanting. Of these things is adding the soil health principles of the cover and the diversity and continually growing roots and armor protecting what's so valuable. That is the best, right. Those green leaves are pulling in that ultraviolet light, creating photosynthesis or part of the process of photosynthesis. That UV light, if it's not absorbed, breaks carbon bonds in the soil.

If it's open and exposed because it takes now minerals absorb all of those wavelengths and in the process it breaks up and kills off the life that's there. We use UV light to sterilize water. We're killing everything that's in it. That green filters that out and then provides a cooler habitat and a more hospitable environment to live in and within. This video here is a worm and you can see fungi within that soil, the blue glowing. You can see on the side of the worm, these little rods that poke out of the side. See those little things that poke out the side and they go in and they poke out and they go in and they poke out. That's why it's hard to pull a worm out of a hole. They have these little spikes that come out of their sides and lock them in. You can see a little soil mite crawling across there to the side, too.

You can see the fungi there in that blue light, that fungi is being grazed on and consumed and cycled. This is a cool opportunity to see things like we say a little differently. It's because of that different wavelength of light that you're seeing the phosphorus inside.

Stewardship, Public Health, and Working With Life

When we're working with nature and the rest of the system, we see smiles on people's faces that people normally don't get to see. The smile on their faces is because they believe that. A steward is a leader who nurtures hope. Stewarding hope. Helping people see that it's maybe not as bad. It might be as bad as they think it is in that moment, but that's why new thoughts come into their head. That's why we can shift perspective. That's why that thing that was a problem forever might be part of our solution. This is where oftentimes it's in the process of not knowing that we miss out on opportunities. Most people interact with the rest of the system as a recipe. What's the ratio? What formula? How many ounces? There is no thought to the breathing. We even call it respiration.

There are a lot of benefits to working with living systems. One of the greatest benefits – I’m a certified public health educator – is that everything I filter through comes from a first-responder, public-health perspective, and then it's all about nature. If they grow healthy plants, but all the people die, I don't think that was worth it. I've got two sons of my own. There's a reality that I've taught them some common sense and you don't let people spray poison on what you're going to eat. Yet we live in a world where other people say, nope, that's how we do it. Got to feed the world. I don't consider it food.

If it's covered in poison, I don't know how everybody else was raised. If somebody came into the kitchen and sprayed a bunch of stuff with a literal skull and crossbones on the label, I don't want to feed that to my kids. It might not kill us today, because we are diverse, robust systems trying to be healthy. It may take 20 years, but we will lose years when we want them and need them.

There are opportunities for us to build healthy homes, healthy homesteads, homes, and land, but I believe a lot of great people are a little misguided. Because of that, they end up hindering the progress they are hoping to make for themselves and generations to come. This is an aspect understanding the rest of creation: that we are all part of it. It does make it a lot easier when you wake up and say, what can I help grow? What can I nurture today? What can I cultivate versus what do I have to kill? Blessing. I hope that we all remember that we grow with life.

Biological Literacy and Soil CPR

Jesse: Awesome. Well, thanks. Thanks a lot, Rion. That was a lot of good information, good visual information, and good contribution to the project diving down into the, I guess you could say the weeds or whatever you want to say.

Rion: Right. It is the same thing with the weeds. We see them as indicators; they are like that one with the compaction zone and that root, telling us what is going on. We have to have the biological literacy to understand that and make the most of it. I'm going to do something here for a second. That's why I teach a soil CPR course. That's why I teach stewardship first responder programs. You are the one standing there. What can you do? Oftentimes people, especially in no-till situations and, early successional, they don't even know if it's breathing or not.There are some basic principles and perspectives, and then there are opportunities to work within the seasons and cycles of nature.

Jesse: If people want to learn more from you or get you to come do a presentation or something, what's the best way of doing that?

Rion: My website is wegrowwith.com. My contact information is there. Feel free to reach out, send information by email or call, and I'm happy to continue.

Jesse: Great. Thanks a lot, Rion. Appreciate it.

Rion: You're welcome.