Episode 170: Unlocking Soil Potential: Dr. Colin Bell on Microbial Consortia, Rhizosphere Ecology, and Mammoth P

Welcome to the Cannabis Cultivation and Science Podcast. I'm your host, Tad Hussey of KISS Organics. This is the podcast where we discuss the cutting edge of growing from a science-based perspective and draw on top experts from around the industry to share their wisdom and knowledge. My guest this week is Colin Bell. Colin completed his PhD in soil microbial ecology in 2009. As a research scientist at Colorado State University's Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colin authored dozens of peer-reviewed publications focused on elucidating soil-microbe interactions and microbial-mediated processes that enhance plant growth. In March 2015, Colin left academia to co-found Grocentia, the original parent company of Mammoth, And co-invent its flagship product, Mammoth P, a patented beneficial bacterial biostimulant functionally selected from nature to optimize phosphorus and micronutrient cycling. Following a brief hiatus from the brand in late 2022, during which he collaborated with other industry biostimulant teams, Colin reacquired and officially relaunched Mammoth. Today, he leads the re-engineered brand with a focus on scalable manufacturing, extended shelf-life formulations, and making high-efficacy microbial biostimulants accessible and affordable for growers across all cultivation media. Now on to the show.

Hey, Colin, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Tad, good to see you again. How are things?

Good, man. It's always, it's always fun to catch up with you. We stay in touch off air a fair bit now. We've known each other for a long time. Uh, it's so wonderful though to connect and have this conversation. And, uh, what have you been up to lately?

Yeah, thanks for— good seeing you again. And yeah, it's been really nice staying in touch over all these years. Well, and what I've been doing lately is, I guess, ebbing and flowing and shucking and jiving with the industry, as we all are. Recently made the decision to launch Mammoth back into the market, which has been a really fun exercise. Having a lot of fun doing it. Super intellectually stimulating for me, not only being able to develop products again, but to, you know, develop the business back up.

Yeah. So Mammoth shut down for a while. Now, just to give people some context in case they aren't familiar, Mammoth P, which is the consortia of P-solubilizing microbes, which we will definitely talk about here some more. It shut down for a while. You went and worked for another company, Microbial Mass, and now had the opportunity to relaunch Mammoth P, which you've done. And, um, Yeah, we carry both products actually now through our website. Let's, let's talk about, I mean, you're the microbe guy, so let's talk about microbes. Let's start with, um, just sure people want to know what are the differences even just between something like Microbial Mass and Mammoth P considering they're both consortia of, of microbes, of bacteria?

Yeah. Uh, great question. The, uh, you know, nothing but love for, for Microbial Mass and, and MimHorticulture and, The reason I jumped on with that group after I left Mammoth late in 2022, just because of some internal issues, I needed a break from some of the decision makers in that group. And, that's why the company was under some distress, was because I love the microbes. You know me, I'm a microbiologist by training at PG Microbiology, invented Mammoth P, had a really good time building that company up, Mammoth Microbes. And, I was super excited about helping develop the business and commercialize the Microbial Mass, Microbial Mass Pro products. And so, I got the opportunity, met the group, and really dove in and had a fun 3-year stretch working with their team. The technologies for me, I think that there's a lot of different technologies that are very effective from microbial biostimulants. And, there's a lot of different ways to formulate these microbes. There's liquid formulations, there's dry formulations, There's different carriers you can use on the liquid side. There's different carriers you can use on the dry side, and there's different microbial components, species or consortia, mixtures of species that we can use in all these products. So what it comes down to is what do the microbes do? How do they perform? And how compatible are they in agriculture? So that's how I think about comparing. Or describing different products. Specifically for Microbial Mass Pro as a comparison for Mammoth P. And, you know, it's funny, the origin story of Microbial Mass Pro. I met their group before they had a group years ago, and Mammoth P was just launching. And I think the conversations I had with their group early on, I think it was even up in Washington meeting with David and some of those growers, other growers that are in Canada learning about Mammoth, they got inspired to make their own microbial product. And so, it's kind of a lot of fun understanding the origin of how these products come about. Mammoth P came from a place of developing a really natural microbial formula, collecting microbes from nature, functionally selecting them through a proprietary patented platform so we could maximize and select microbes that could maximize phosphorus and micronutrient availability. That was the idea. So, a natural microbial phosphorus bloom stimulant type of microbial function in a super natural organic carrier. And so, that was the approach that we took for developing that product. We can talk into the science as much as you want and how that was actually selected. And you can share the links to the patents if you want. Microbial Mass, the formulators who I have ultimate respect for, scientists as well, that actually developed that product, used a little bit of a different approach where they use standard, well-known Bacillus species that have the benefit of producing endospores so they can, so they can remain dormant for a long period of time. So, it really nurtures shelf life using these Bacillus species. And they use a very defined— I wouldn't say synthetic, but synthetic-like, very, very clean carrier. And so, they have a very defined solution that they add microbial spores in to create their consortia of really 4 different strains of Bacillus.

Okay.

Mammoth used microbes that we selected from nature and selected starting with tens of thousands of microbes, selected out all the microbes that weren't performing as well as we'd like them to, and ended up with 4 microbes that are active, not Bacillus species, that persist very well in a liquid media. And so, the genus and species of the microbes are different, the functional groups of the microbes are different, and the carrier's different. But they both have a lot of really good plant benefits.

So just to be clear, they, they both of these products market themselves as unlocking phosphorus, right? And essentially just cycling nutrients with phosphorus being one of the more difficult ones. Well, and we'll talk about that. But would I want to use these products? Like, can I use my different microbial products And we're just talking about Microbial Mass Mammoth P, but we could apply it to any biostimulants, really. Should I be mixing them together, or should these sorts of formulated commercial products be applied by themselves?

It's kind of a management decision. I would say there is no compatibility issues with mixing many different microbial products or technologies together. And I think about this from an ecological perspective. You think about in nature, even in a teaspoon of soil, they say you can get tens of thousands of different bacterial species and fungal species occupying that one little space. Well, there's a lot of space that plant rhizosphere or the root zone provides for microbe life, which is microscopic, very small. And so there's a lot of life that can pack into that rhizosphere. And there wouldn't be necessarily a competitive pressure because there's a lot of resources within the rhizosphere for the microbes to thrive.

I could see that once they're out on the soil. I would be a little concerned if there was a brewing period though, and they were sitting in the same tank, for example, tank mixing for a time, for a period of time. And I'm thinking of Trichoderma too, which as you know, is a more aggressive microbe. Could there be compatibility issues potentially with something like that, for instance?

Think about it in terms of probability. And so how you think about occupying space or competing, or maybe competing from the sense of just generating more in numbers. Bacillus species are always applied in a dormant state, in an endospore state. And for those of the audience that don't understand that, you can really think about it analogous to a plant. Seed or a fungal spore. That seed or that spore or that bacterial endospore is just a protein coat, a seed that contains some DNA and some very, very minimal resources to allow the DNA to vegetate into an active plant or fungi or bacterial cell. It's viable, but it's not alive and active in that state. And so typically, whenever a seed or a spore or a bacterial endospore formed by Bacillus species— most of the Bacillus form these endospores— are in an environment where there's no growth potential, it's in a dry, maybe no nutrition, no carbon, no water, it can remain in that environment for a long period of time. Once it senses a habitable environment with water and nutrition or in the rhizosphere, After a couple of days, it will germinate to a vegetative state and activate. In a tea, that's a very nutrient, or at least carbon-rich environment, and so you can expect in a 24 to 48 hour period, Bacillus species will germinate or vegetate from an endospore dormant form to an active cell to start growing. And then, it takes a period of time. What bacteria do is they clonally reproduce. And so, they're in their environment, they grow to a certain size, they have these triggers when they get to a certain size and their cell functionality isn't as efficient because they're having to function in a larger space. They just clone and bud and one cell becomes 2. And, that's how they separate. They continue to do that, clonally reproduce.

Okay.

It's not really reproduction, it's just clonally produced. They replicate. The bacteria in mammoth, as a contrast, are active microbes. And so, they're immediately going to grow.

Active as in motile?

They're motile and they're not spore formers. And so, they do a really good job of— they actually have an amazing, shockingly amazing shelf life as well. I was pretty shocked early on in the research to realize that these microbes can persist so well in, in the environment, in a liquid environment, and they're very robust. But so they'll immediately respond to an environment. And so there's a period of time where a dormant spore will have to vegetate and then start reproducing or clonally replicating. The active microbes will respond quicker. And so, as you spoke of thinking about Trichoderma as an example versus active microbes versus dormant microbes, there's food sources that can be preferential to different groups of microbes.

Yeah.

And if there's a preference, they're going to grow better in that environment. There is some type of growth phase that all microbes go through from lag, which is slow growth for the initial first period within any one environment, to exponential, where they were actually experiencing enough density or biomass that they start growing exponentially. Exponentially is 10x every generation. And at some point, microbial growth curves at the species or community level will level off. And that's a stationary growth phase. And that stationary growth phase represents where death equals life. And there's a microbial turnover, and that's mostly caused by resource saturation.

Okay.

where that environment has maximized its holding potential for microbe life. And that growth period is what's going to determine the probability of how many microbes and the diversity or complexity of the community depending on how they reach that phase.

I mean, you said it more eloquently than I usually do, but as you know, I Came from the aerated compost tea side of things with my dad being one of the first soil food web advisors. And that was, you know, all my training and learnings came from Dr. Ingham originally. And so like, I'm looking, I'm looking off to my right because I have my phase contrast microscope over here as I'm thinking about it. Well, 2 thoughts. So the first one is, yes, your microbes were very persistent. I was shocked because I, I got a sample from you and this had, this had to be, I mean, this was one of the original Cannacons in Seattle back in the day. So it was a long time ago and it just sat.

Yeah.

on my desk for a few months. And then finally I was like, you know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw this under the microscope. And I did. And I was shocked because one, there were motile bacteria in there, which you don't typically see. That yours is the only commercial formulation I've ever seen with motile bacteria.

Yeah.

And two, I mean, this thing was sitting in my like window in my house on my desk for, like I said, at least 3 months. And I was shocked that there was anything moving around, much less how much, how active it was. So, Yes, I wanna highlight that. And that's when I think I reached out to you and was much more excited about learning about mammoth pee. The second, well, 2 more things. So another thing I thought of is I was also convinced that in a highly active living soil, mammoth pee would not have any statistically significant impact, or let's just say microbes in general, because there's just so much already in the soil. We can see it with direct microscopy. And yet I was surprised when we did trials at a commercial facility that we saw a statistically significant increase in yields by adding in, in this case, Mammoth P with the trial that's on our blog page. People can check that out. So that surprised me. But then lastly, and then I'll shut up here, is one of the things I see with compost teas is if you start a tea, again, using high-quality compost, you aerate it and you add a food source, you're probably at maximum diversity right there, right at the start, because some are going to die off. So you're automatically losing diversity right off The gate. And the ones that are able to survive in that liquid, highly aerobic environment are going to reproduce. And over time, say 12 to 18 hours, you start to hit that higher ramp up like you talked about of exponential growth. If you keep brewing past 36, 40 hours, what we see, and I haven't found the perfect way to talk about this, but what I'd see is pretty much all the fungi will disappear and you'll just end up with one morphology of bacteria. And one morphology of flagellates. And then they will kind of prey and predate on each other. And I use the analogy of like, what if you opened up all the gates at the zoo? What would be left? Well, at the end of the day, you'd probably have rats and lions. You know, everything else would have been eaten by, you know, these 2 highly successful niche ecological species. And so what we see is then like the bacteria will bloom and we'll have a huge bacterial growth. And then The few fungi that are— the few, sorry, flagellates that survived will start to eat and reproduce. And then over time, it's all flagellates and there's barely any bacteria. And then there's not enough food for the flagellates, and then they die off, and then the bacteria takes off, and it just kind of does this roller coaster thing, which is exactly what you were describing. Like I said, probably more eloquently.

Yeah.

Me trying to simplify it is that, that's sort of my experience with these products. So here's my question to you. I've been telling people don't add microbial products like Mammoth P, like Microbial Mass, like any brand product like that, you know, shoot, there's so many out there these days, to an aerated compost tea because it might just become a very expensive food source for these other microbes that are coming in with the compost. Is that bad advice?

I don't think it's bad advice. I would share that people have asked me that over the years. been doing this for a while. And I'd suggest that, you know, adding early on a functionally targeted microbe improves the tea's chances of adding, incorporating that functionally targeted microbe into the community. But there is going to be turnover. And so, it's such a volatile— now, I'm not using that as a bad word, but a dynamic environment when you have a tea.

Yeah.

There's a lot of outside influences unless you're working in somewhat of a sterile environment that you probably have different things happening batch to batch. You have some consistency and there's a chance you have some, a little bit of variability that's hard to measure time in and time out.

Oh, you absolutely do. And I think people should realize that when you make an aerated compost tea, no 2 batches can be the same, which is why it's so challenging from a research perspective to ever study it or for any, like, scientist or researcher to really recommend it. So I understand why people don't like compost tea because it's inherently variable. It's just we're, we're too macroscopic to be able to create the same environment every single time. As you were saying that though, it got me wondering, like, what about adding a handful of your soil, you know, your living soil, to the mix to introduce the microbes that are already preexisting in your soil? When making versus outside compost sources or something when making a compost tea with that or make, you know, using a product like Mammoth or microbial mass, would that be a good approach?

I think it'd be an interesting approach. I think about it from a very fundamental microbiology perspective. You have a food source and if you're growing microbes, you inoculate that food source and what you inoculate it with, as long as you have a controlled environment or the degree of a controlled environment, increases your probability of what you're going to grow. But it all starts with the starting place. And so you're definitely not going to grow those microbes if you don't add them in there. But if you add in some desired functionally targeted microbes or the— or a handful of soil from the living soil, you're going to increase your chances of incorporating that biodiversity or those consortia into that tea mix. And so I think that you can, to some degree, engineer or at least directionally steer the community composition of that tea. Like you said, there's going to be variability and it's not going to be complete and there's going to be a lot of other stuff in there as well. I'll give you an example that, that's kind of cool thinking about the origin story of Mammoth Tea. You know, we started off with tens of thousands of microbes that we collected from hundreds of soil samples. And everything I grew, I wanted to grow as a starting point. And so this is kind of a relevant example. And what I did is create an environment that I could control. So we could control the outside environment, we controlled the food source precisely, and we wanted to see what microbes would grow in that specific environment. Really measured specific, consistent nutrient ratios, stoichiometry within that media. Everything was the same. The environment was the same. It ultimately nurtured, and we'd grow the microbes up generationally. So, we treat them like a plant trait selection, grow them to this stationary growth phase, which was about a 2-day process. And then, we had test them for their ability to cycle and produce the ability to cycle more phosphorus. And then, we would take the winners out of thousands of replicates and repeat that generationally, generation over generation, just like you might Select a plant trait, but it's a much quicker process. It's microbial instead of plant. Over the course—

Colin, can I ask you a question? So are you doing that by like measuring the amount of available phosphate then in the liquid at the end of a, you know, period of time, a selected period of time?

Yeah, so the process is actually pretty cool. That's exactly right. So we'd grow the microbes up. At the point, we didn't care what was there. We just wanted to let the process or the environment select for or select out the microbes that weren't going to work well. And so the environmental selection pressure of that platform did a lot of the work for us. We created a media that kind of mimics soil that had low phosphorus concentration because we were trying to steer microbes towards producing more phosphorus in an aqueous environment. And they're microcells, so we had hundreds and hundreds of replicates. After we grew them up to stationary, and we could measure the growth phase, and so we could measure where they were through turbidity and spec— in a spec, we could understand where they were. And then we had different tests that we could use that we would inoculate, and we could see how the microbes are liberating phosphorus, and we could measure that liberation.

Wow.

Through enzyme production and through the actual effects of measuring available phosphorus through these assays. And so, using that for every one of those replicates, we could literally quantify the communities through random selection at that point that were performing higher, and we would re-perpetuate those communities into another 1,000 replicates. And we would continue the process over and over.

So did you get these microbes originally from various soil samples?

Totally. That was it. That was the idea. This started off as a fundamental science experiment that we're turning into applied. What we did really well at the Natural Resources Research Ecology Lab was identify soil biology, was collect soil samples. And so we collected soil samples from all over the US. We had a lot of research collaborations. Overseas, we were able to bring soils in from overseas from desert systems. So agriculture systems, desert systems, grassland systems, forested systems, we had all these soil samples. And so created an assay, pretty general assay to grow the microbes up, all of them in a pretty general media. It was defined but not super specific as the next stage.

Mm-hmm.

And all the microbes we could possibly grow in that media. We wanted to, knowing that there were probably the majority of microbes, if you think about the potential of all the microbes we don't know because we can't culture them, we weren't trying to find those unique, weird, you know, magic unicorns. We wanted to grow microbes that were robust, that would be— that would easily propagate or grow in a media. And once we had that, we could understand what that community looked like. And again, it was tens of thousands of microbes. And then put them through the selection process one generation after the next. And the interesting trait is early on, and we looked at this from the molecular level as well, you could see not only the unique species, but you could see the concentration of those unique species, the probability or the percentage of those species that made up that community. And obviously, the microbes that are in mammoth pee were in that initial community, but they were minority species. They were very hard to identify. And slowly but surely, the environment selected for these singlets, these very unique strains of microbes, and perpetuated them as the dominant species. And the platform weeded out all the other species that couldn't persist well in that environment or that selection pressure.

Yeah, it's interesting because we see the same thing with, uh, like biopesticides like Beauveria. You know, they— these companies have to find an insect that's infected, and then they have to find what that particular species is, and then they have to ensure that it's commercially viable, as in it can be cultured and stabilized and shipped and has efficacy in all these different environments and host ranges. There's a lot that goes into it. It's really fascinating. But what you're describing is the exact same process that created, you know, all of these Beauveria products, Kassaria, a lot of these entomopathic fungi, same sort of like scientific method. So I think that, I think that's really interesting. One other thing I want to touch on is something you've told me is that the reason these products are consortia is because 1 1 1 1 does not equal 4 when it comes to this, this phosphorus cycling or nutrient cycling. It equals 5 or 6 or 7 or whatever. So the sum is greater than the parts. Can you explain that a little bit?

Yeah, this is more of a fundamental approach also, and it was a conscious decision that we made early on when we were kind of speccing out what an ideal, really reliable product may look like. And it was a hypothesis at the early stage of, hey, this is what we're thinking. What we wanted to do was apply our, you know, me and my partners and founders' decades of inherent fundamental research and understanding of how microbes existed in soils to support plant growth. And in nature, just quite simply, species don't exist. Everything exists as a consortia and a network, and there's a lot of trade-offs occurring. And we felt like That concept of the consortia and functional soil in nature was what needed to be applied into agriculture-intended or applied products. That was just the basic fundamental concept. And so we always felt like we would develop a consortia early on. And this was a little over a decade ago when we'd kind of look at different agriculture-related products. A lot of times it was a single species or maybe 2 species. They're always bacillus. And, you know, knowing enough agriculture people and speaking with them, the intention of those products wasn't for maximized functionality or performance. It was always to maximize scalability. And that was the priority for these large agriculture companies doing that. There's a lot of work that needed to be done to really refine variability when you're working with consortia. But if you could use an independent species and you could grow that up, especially if you put it in a dry solution, it was very scalable and very repeatable. And that was much more attractive to the agriculture companies who were mass marketing and selling those biostimulant products over really understanding the product and really making sure the efficacy and the performance was optimized. Us as fundamental researchers and scientists, we were more interested in optimizing and making a very cool functionally targeted microbe And we knew it had to check all the other boxes. It had to be highly compatible and efficacious, meaning working across a lot of different environments, working a lot across a lot of different management practices, whether it be dosing or pumping or all those things, mixing well with fertilizer tanks and across a lot of different crops. And we trialed those things, but we learned all those things because we went out and we started talking to farmers of different agriculture, of crops, different industries within the agriculture umbrella. listened to the technology and they thought and shared with us how they would potentially use the technology. And so we learned through the process of market discovery the requirements needed for a highly effective product. And that's ultimately where we landed and how we intended the product and formulated it to the cannabis industry because we also talked to cannabis growers and understood how they could use the product and how it can maximize, um, their, their productivity. And there was a lot of benefit to working directly with growers instead of trying to figure out how to work with agriculture. There's a lot of risk working with agriculture for a lot of reasons, business and technically, and we wanted to be as close as we could to the people using the technology, and the cannabis industry allowed that for us.

You touched on something when you were talking there about consortia and how these organisms work in different environments and how environments are always changing. I wanna talk about that a little bit, 'cause I think as a grower, we tend to think of our soil as a giant mass and it being static. We forget that pH in that soil, when we take a pH measurement, is not taking into account all the different micropores and spaces and everything, because pH is going to vary directly in the rhizosphere versus further away from the plant based on the plant exudates and things like that. So, pH, moisture levels, microbial composition, aerobic and anaerobic pockets, soil is a whole universe down there. It really is a galaxy. It's an entirely different world.

Yeah.

And it's a world that's happening at a rate that's exponentially faster than ours. The reproduction rate of these microbes, the coevolution that's happening between plants and microbes is fascinating. Can you just talk about that a little bit? Because I feel like as a grower, we just look at soil and think of it as just like this solid mass of the same thing, and it's really not.

Yeah, it's why I fell in love with the area of study. I'm a soil microbiologist and environmental microbiologists. And it's because of the real expanse of soil. I remember the first conference I went to a long time ago. We're talking— we're going to date me back in the '90s. And I went to this Soil Ecology Society conference. And at that point, we were challenging agronomy, or the conference was, because soil in agronomy was always treated as this black box, static. So there's a real legacy or history of treating it as this static factor, and everyone is focused on above ground because it's easier for humans to focus on above ground because it's macro and it's tangible. And so the conference was focused on opening up the black box of soil, and I'm a soil microbial ecologist, and so that was right up my area. And so there's physical, there's chemical, and there's biological components to soil, and all of them represent this crazy ecosystem.

Yes.

An ecology that's ever-changing. And, you know, there's temperature too. You know, there's temperatures that can change biology. There's competition. There's these different pore sizes you think about. You know, I had an aha moment a long time ago when I knew just soil texture. And if people don't understand that, it's pretty basic, but it's sand, silt, clay, and these different ratios.

Mm-hmm.

And it makes up the hydrology and the ability of cation exchange capacity, the ability of soil to hold nutrients, the porosity of them to Hold moisture or to drain, to be drained and hold oxygen. All these things are critical, not only for the biology that lives in the soil, but for the plants, you know. And you think about even temperature. I remember at one point I had— I was working with a facility and they were using tap water for whatever reason. It was a long time ago to water plants. And it was like in Colorado, it was in the winter, it was ice cold. And I just thought, and I kind of mentioned it softly, I was like, you know, if this stuff was room temperature, it might actually respond a little better because even that temperature and these variations, it's not that much different, I don't think, than for me. I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to being cold. I don't like being cold. And I don't— I just cringe to think about being in an ice bath. But think about getting ice cold water just dumped on you. It's the same thing for a plant root. It's the same thing for biology. And so, there's— the nice thing about nature, more so than humans, is there's a lot of plasticity. There's a lot of room to move within certain ranges, within certain boundaries of environmental fluctuation. Because if life in general didn't have that, life would be limited because life in the environment fluctuates quite a bit. And so, environmental plasticity is really important. But, you think about, once I went to— I'll just share this, I could gab about this too long too— one of the natural museums of natural history, and it was in Chicago, and I was giving a talk in Chicago, and they had this soil and soil ecology special exhibit. And, as you walk through, you started off and you were the size of a normal person, but then they scaled the exhibit as you got smaller and smaller. Now, pretend you're a nematode. Now, pretend you're a microbe.

How cool.

Wow. They created this environment. But, at the end of the day, you walk in this room, it's this big black room. And, sand, silt, clay, they have different particle sizes. And, clay is the smallest and sand's the biggest. And then, clay has these little colloids and these little— everything has texture and has these pores and pockets inside of it. Then, you walk in and you're like, now— and, there was this big room and there's this big dark room. It said, now, you're a bacterial cell. Inside a pocket of one colloid of clay. And so it just kind of gave you this perspective. You think about how many thousands of microbes can inhabit one colloid of clay versus living in a silt particle or a sand particle. And in that combination, it's just a mosaic of chemistry and physical attributes, hydrology and physical structure and biology all moving through it.

Yeah, I had a soil scientist at a talk once say, we know more about the surface of the moon and the bottom, the depths of the ocean than we do about what's directly under our feet. Granted, this was, you know, 15 years ago, but that always stuck with me as just being one of the most fascinating things. And the fact that this, your soil is always in flux, I think is really interesting. So my big aha moment was I got to go to the ISS I think International Soil Society of America, SSA. Yeah, too many abbreviations.

Yeah.

They needed someone to talk on cannabis because they didn't have anyone, and my name got thrown out. This was years ago in San Diego. And while I was there, I got to hear other talks. And one of the talks was a woman who was a graduate student, and her research was on Fungal to bacteria ratios in relation to hydrology. And it was fascinating 'cause they basically looked at every available microbial species that was in the soil. And then they looked at what happens when they have a watering event, a rainfall, a flood event like that. And you saw this massive flux. The microbes, when there wasn't a lot of water in there, they weren't reproducing. As soon as you gave them water, they exploded in populations. And so that fungal to bacteria ratio would change dramatically 'cause the bacteria, as you know, just is gonna grow so much faster. And that to me was a place where I started to move a little further away from some of the soil food web dogma and a little more towards, I guess we could say, looking at soil testing and soil balancing. Because I realized, in my opinion, we're oversimplifying this process that's so highly complex that we barely understand it. The key to me is like, number one, microbes are super important. They're what drives our organic farming system, our agricultural systems. So we want to create environments that are good for them, but let's do that no matter what. And then what tool do we really have? Well, we have a chemical soil analysis. We can use that to adjust the chemistry. And if we get the chemistry right, we're probably creating the optimal environment more or less for these bacteria and fungi and protists and all these things to reproduce and cycle nutrients. So like you mentioned, get the physical properties of our soil right, get the chemical properties right and, and, you know, have good organic matter in there, have good microbiology. And so that was my big aha moment for me, uh, in, in terms of all of this, I guess.

Yeah, it's— we've been talking about this with cultivators for a long time. Microbes can span from super extreme environments to very mesic or very, you know, hospitable environments. They have a wide range. Not all microbes have that range, but there are certain microbial components that fit within that niche or that range because the environment selects. And if you have the environment— they say ubiquity, life is everywhere, microbes are everywhere. To a large degree, that's true, but the environment selects, meaning that environment will nurture the microbes that can best fit within that environment. And, and that's kind of true for the diversity of plants too. You see from the tropics up to the Arctic, a huge diversity swing happens because these different ecotypes select the different plant types through temperature and chemistry and all these things.

Yeah.

And so I think it's fascinating. I was for years a desert microbial ecologist. I loved the desert systems. That was my passion. It's still my favorite ecosystem, and fungi dominated those systems. And I always thought that fungi, you know, early on as a scientist, I just overthought it. And I was thinking fungi just dominate all systems. So to dominate here, I didn't think through it well enough. I didn't have enough experience. And I started becoming more aware and experienced around that environment. And I started working with these researchers that were studying bog systems in Florida.

Okay.

And the fungal to bacterial ratios in bog systems, if you can imagine high aquatic, low oxygen, there's hardly any fungi in those systems. Fungi are not aquatic, except you mentioned this one, I think we were talking about offline, an Oomycete, which is more of a river aquatic pathogen for amphibians. All saprobes and fungi don't like aquatic environments. They're not anaerobic. They have to have aerobic environments. So the bacterial community and biomass explodes in those environments. In mesic environments where there's more clay and there's more hydrology, bacteria will do well. If you look at soil depth, at the upper horizons, there's definitely more fungi than bacteria, a higher fungal to bacterial ratio.

Mm-hmm.

And as you go down in depth, because of oxygen and hydrology, More bacteria compared to fungi will occur in these in these lower regions. At some point, I started to evolve my thinking around, and I was surprised to come to this. But you know, I think bacteria in a lot of ways are a lot more effective for applied agriculture systems because they have functional targets. They're dynamic. They're small enough. And even in in agriculture, there's a lot of fungal systems that get disrupted through the mechanisms of tilling and all these other things where bacteria. can be applied in a more precise manner through precision agriculture. But saying that depends on the fungal group. Our arbuscular mycorrhizae have a huge role to play, and there's groups of fungi that do very well. But no, I'm still back and forth.

Well, I would also add that bacteria tend to be more generalists, and they tend to reproduce at an exponentially faster rate.

Sure.

So I think those are also 2 good reasons to consider bacteria for the roles that you're saying. So yeah, I think that's interesting. And we could probably, you and I could talk about this for a while because this sort of like, I don't want to say theory, but this philosophy around soil health and microbes is just so, this relationship is so fascinating and we're still learning so many new things. Like Dr. Punja in a recent interview or a recent talk I went to of him, he was talking about Endophytes and how we're finding in cannabis all these different bacteria. And then he actually had a photo of mycelium inside the cell. He didn't, he didn't know what particular fungi was good, bad, innocuous, but actually inside the cell, the tissue of one of these plants. And he, you know, it was pretty surprising what they're, what they're seeing.

On above ground?

Yeah.

A little bit above ground?

Oh yeah. Yeah, within the plant cell, like in a, in the stem or leaf tissue, for example.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And then, you know, the work by Dr. James White showing that these bacteria can actually shed their cell— go into the plant roots, into the plant cells, or in between the plant cells, shed their cellular walls, sort of leak nutrients, and then get kicked back out and reform a cellular wall, and then do it all over again.

It's just this—

the amount of like co-evolution and relationships between microbes and plants is just— And microbes and humans, and plants and humans. It's this whole ecological system. And it's just so fascinating. And one of the things that I think about with living soil, when we reuse media, one of the things that theoretically makes sense to me as to why living soil produces, in my opinion, better quality cannabis, is because we have this coevolution happening over time. When we're reusing the media and we're growing the same crop in the same soil over time, even over the course of one plant, one flower cycle in a bed, for example, That bacteria and those plant roots are co-evolving together. We have multiple, multiple generations of bacteria happening. And so it's just this— it's just so fascinating.

Yeah, I love it. It's such a fun topic. You're right. And that's my experience too. You just get a whole different expression from plants when you're growing in a living soil and some organic type of substrate and environment. And one of my takes on it also is that, you know, Humans have evolved to be kind of this apex presence on Earth, but the thing is, they've never been able to recreate nature, and they'll never be smarter than nature. And if you have a completely defined growing system where you're intentionally adding— let's just say synthetic, because it could be a very well-defined nutrient and a substrate—

Yeah.

It's really hard to conceive that you're giving the plant everything it can possibly need to maximize its phenotypic potential and expression of all the traits to make it the best it can possibly be. Where I always think nature has this sense to bridge those gaps. Of course, we're smart enough to deliver the macronutrients and maybe micronutrients and these other details that we You're aware of, but there's chemical signaling and there's all these inducings of literal communications at the chemical level between the plants and the biology that can stimulate the plant's ability not only to maximize uptake of nutrients, but to take in unique nutrient species, chemical species that will allow the plant to give it everything it needs so it can actually express those, those.

I agree with that. I think it's arrogant as humans to think that we can give a plant everything it needs nutritionally to, like you said, maximize its phenotypic potential. That being said, I would like to push back a little bit on one thing when you say this idea that nature knows best or that nature creates. I think a better way to frame that would to say, like, nature is chaotic, and all of these different ecological niches that these microbes exist in and that these plants exist in, they're all just everyone trying to survive and create and evolve a living system for their own reproduction. And through all of these selfish organisms, whether it's plants, humans, microbes, we end up with what we call nature, I guess. Does that make sense? I don't think I'm stating it well enough, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'll buy that. I think there's a A little more— I think it goes a little far, a little beyond chaos, but it is all these different organisms trying to survive, and they're doing what they're trying to do. I think there's some evidence that suggests unique plant exudates, and the plants can actually feed microbes unique, unique food sources, which actually selects for an environment that perpetuates or nurtures certain microbial groups or species that can directionally influence what's happening in the rhizosphere, not wholly in a chaotic way, but there is some directional signaling, I think, that occurs.

I would agree with that. But the reason I think that's okay when I— and the reason I use the word chaos is because we think people throw around the term Mother Nature, like it's this entity or being that has a purpose or a goal or a direction. And really, the way I say it, like I say this more like a physics person, like everything is headed towards chaos, you know? And so, and I'm probably not stating this as eloquently as I would like here in the moment, but basically your example of a plant putting out specific exudates to select for specific microbes is a co-adaptation that favors the plant. And that's why the plant does it. And these microbes have evolved to consume these specific exudates because it favors those microbes and allows them to have access to a food source that other microbes may not have. And so it gives them this evolutionary advantage. So all these things are working for themselves selfishly to try and survive. And that's what it means. Like, it's really just a survival thing. And that's why I say chaotic. It's because there is no end goal. It's not like all these things are harmonious— harmoniously working together to create this end product. I don't know.

Yeah, totally agree. I think that's right. It's— if you think about the beginning of time when, you know, maybe Early on, Earth was just a microbial world, as a unicellular world. And at some point, plants evolved into that, and they evolved into it through the help of a microbial interaction. I mean, that just didn't happen discreetly. It happened over millions of years. And so, they were— they've evolved to interact and to kind of pull each other's strings. And the end goal is selfish in nature, is to succeed. Every— everything in life, in nature, wants to succeed, pass its genes to the next generation.

Yeah.

And it's evolved all these traits to do whatever it can to maximize its probability for success. And so, yeah, I think you said it exactly right. And it— that's it. It's hard to conceive because there's millions and maybe billions of interactions that are occurring that are all these unique things that are that are occurring simultaneously. It's just hard for a person to, a human to—

Conceptualize. Yeah, every second in the soil, you know, and so it's fascinating. And then to further complicate things, when we talk about what living soil is, it's not sand, silt, and clay. It's not true soil. It's soilless media, which acts very different, has different ecological niches. And so you can't just say something that works in soil is going to work in soilless media, which is what we're most of us are actually growing in. So it is fascinating, but all right, we didn't plan to talk about any of this and we're already, we were worried we're gonna have stuff to talk about and that wasn't a problem. I kind of, I'm gonna throw you a curveball here, Colin. I would like to do a sort of a fast question, Mammoth P related questions that I've gotten over the years that people have asked me. So now I can just say—

Let's do it.

Hey, I threw 'em all in one podcast. Go listen to this conversation. All right, so, okay, I'm seeing I have other questions too, but real first stuff, like, give me your 30-second answer. Why should we use microbes at all in our garden?

Well, I think microbes and plants have grown together since the beginning of time. We see the results when you add microbes into a type of sterile grow where the plants express different traits that are, that are, that are not only beneficial to maximize plant growth, but are But that are desired. So microbes stimulate, boost, enhance plant health, growth, yield, and it's just, it's just a valuable thing to do.

All right, uh, can we use Mammoth P in all types of growing environments, and which ones are the most successful?

It's a great question. So yes, but you know, that's just from experience over time, and that was something that we hypothesized that we would have to trial. We've found the Mammoth P microbes work very well from the old school, even hydroponic or deep water cultures, through these soilless medias, through coco, through peat, through rockwool. And there's a lot of benefits that the plants get through those microbe interactions, although there's different modes of actions that we believe occur in some of those different substrates. And of course, and you know this well, the living soil environment where the microbes Thrive very well and support the nutrient cycling that those, uh, those environments need to maximize the plant's ability to take up nutrients and, and thrive.

All right, uh, you know, you call the product Mammoth P. It unlocks phosphorus. Does it unlock anything other than phosphorus, or is it just—

The mechanism, the mechanism of phosphorus and unlocking phosphorus solubilization unlocks and, and maximizes the nutrient availability for a lot of the micronutrients also. It's the same of mechanism. We wanted to focus the message that technology was engineered or developed to target phosphorus, but learning about the technology and obviously the modes of action and the function of those microbes, they'll also chelate also naturally and allow for the maximum maximization of a lot of micronutrients and trace metals, iron being one of them that it does really well with.

That's actually really interesting because iron is also, in fact, I would argue even harder to unlock than phosphorus. High pH soils, which is what we run with a lot of organics. So cool. Now I learned something new there. That's a good, good answer.

Yeah.

Okay.

What's the shelf life on Mammoth P?

Shelf life historically has been 2 years and it's really robust and it persists longer than that. We recently, when I took the company back over, kind of repurchased that and we got it back up, done a slight reformulation because I wanted to extend that. Right now we have Mammoth P And we're confident that we have a 3-year shelf life on the product. You know, obviously we'd like you to use the product and 3 years is probably overkill. So it was more of kind of a, of a personal endeavor to see how far we could stretch the shelf life. And so that's what we've done with the technology, just to maximize its effectiveness and efficacy.

Am I better off applying a whole bunch of Mammoth P at one time at, at, uh, the beginning of, say, flower, or would I be better off applying a bunch of smaller doses throughout the growth cycle?

I recommend smaller doses and once-a-week applications that are really concentrated, still at 0.6 mL per gallon application. And we want to just inoculate the roots once a week. We see really effective early rooting, which is a nice first inoculation. A lot of growers historically have just used it in bloom, and we see great results. If you can get this into a precision dosing where you can just inoculate, at least for a few minutes, you don't even have to do the full cycle. once a week into the room, you're probably going to see the best results because you just have this continued pulse of the microbes continuing to support the, the function. And the roots will continue to grow out and the microbes will grow along those roots, but it just helps occupy all the spaces over time.

All right, if I'm on a budget, should I use it during veg or flower?

Listen, I'll tell you what, I would say flower. It's what it's intended for, but we've We've really changed the way we manufacture and we've made it scalable. And that was one of my missions. I didn't want to launch a company unless it could be techno-economically scalable. And it's a— the price has been reduced from the historic legacy company by almost 70%. And that was by intention. And so, it's about making the product available for everybody. And so it's the most affordable product in the market. And you don't really need to be on a budget to incorporate this.

How long does it persist in the soil when I add these microbes? How long are they lasting in, let's just say, living soil?

It's a great question. And, you know, different environments, you might— there's probably going to be a little variability. When we did trials, we actually tested the microbe, the rhizosphere. We had an experimental design. We tested the rhizosphere. of plants every single week across a growing cycle and doing the 0.6 ml per gallon applications per week. And what we found was there was a— before the inoculation, there wasn't a presence of mammoth pea microbes. And then after each inoculation, there was a presence along with other, like, endemic species or existing microbial species. And over the course of the growing season, The concentration or presence of Mammoth P microbes increased week over week over week. And it had a pretty— I wouldn't say dominant presence, but an increasingly increased percentage along the rhizosphere through the growing cycle. And that was partially engineered because we kept on adding more every week, you know, at the 0.6 ml applications. Interestingly enough, once we let some plants die, we cut them off. And we let the— we tested the roots over time. The microbial concentration declined week over week after the plants were dying, which suggested that the plants were instrumental in actually feeding and supporting the microbial community.

All right, I'm not going to hold back on these last few questions. So I've gotten asked this a lot too. Can I brew mammoth pee to make it go further?

Listen, people have done that before, and you can't stop people from doing it. I discourage it, or what I would say is know the uncertainties with when you're brewing any microbes. You might brew mammoth pee and you'll get those microbes, but you don't know what else you're going to get in that brew. It's not going to be pure mammoth pee. It's very hard to grow to, to confidently brew a consistent formula, just like a microbial tea. So people have done it. I haven't heard about it in a while. We've made it so affordable now that it might not be necessary and it's so concentrated. So I would say that you're introducing risk into your grow if you're trying to brew mammoth pea solely to make it go longer.

Well, what I've told people is you may be losing a little of that consortia too, because you're coming up with a food source that's going to feed All the bacteria in mammoth pee might be a little bit more challenging. So you may have one that can dominate.

Great, that's a good answer. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's true.

All right, well, good. So I haven't been totally misspeaking. It's true.

The roots feed the microbes really well, and we've shown that. And so if you can just get the mammoth pee microbes to the roots, the roots take care of the feeding.

All right, I'm going to get successively meaner or tougher with these questions.

Come on, bring it.

All right. One thing I've heard is Mammoth P contains alfalfa, which is— it contains triacontanol. So the only benefits of Mammoth P is triacontanol. What do you say to that?

You know, I heard that a long time ago when I selected alfalfa as the food source to grow a scalable media, organic scalable media. The reason I chose alfalfa was because all my work in fundamental science is a forage, and alfalfa had a, a lower C:N ratio. We talk about that, which means it had inherently more nitrogen. And I needed a little higher nitrogen source in any kind of media to grow the microbes to the concentration I wanted to for the final product. So we used alfalfa to grow a natural media to grow the microbes, and it worked really well. And it's a really nice source. Some microbes actually produce that substrate and create some really interesting metabolites as well that benefit plant growth. I had heard way after the fact that alfalfa was a source of tricantinol, and I didn't know that. I was embarrassed I didn't. And so we tested it. And we tested a bunch of different samples of Mammoth fresh brewed from different batches of alfalfa because what you know about alfalfa is it has very different levels of tricantinol depending on the, the crop. And it gets cut 3 times in a season. And typically I think the tricantinol is highest in the final, in the final harvest of a season. And I'm not an alfalfa farmer. I might have gotten that backwards, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

Okay.

Anyway, testing the tricantinol levels in mammoth, it was untraceable in 2 of the 3 samples. And in one, there was a very, very, very, very, very small parts per billion trace of it. And so, it's true that there might be traces of it in there naturally, but they're so low that— looked it up, it shouldn't have a real effect on plant growth. And it's very inconsistent and it's not intentional. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm just asking the questions I've heard over the years. And one of the things I learned about tricontinol that I did not know, and I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly, but I did an interview with a plant hormone specialist a number of years back now, Jim Barrett. People can go back and listen to it. He's someone Suzanne referred me to. And basically what he said was, if you're using alfalfa, the only way to get any tricontinol, because it breaks down so quickly, which is kind of what you were saying, would be to take the alfalfa and chop it and put a mulch layer on the soil. Otherwise, you really need to buy a synthetic version of it if you want to get that actual hormone into your, into your soil. So that was something I had learned. So, so really, when we're using alfalfa meal or something that we get from the grocery store or something, it's not— or in a fertilizer, it's not going to contain significant levels that's going to make any difference.

I don't think so. And, you know, you think about the way we process it also. We have this substrate and we steep it as a tea, and it's mostly to get the nutrients out to grow the bacteria. That's the intention of it. Then removing that substrate and heavy boiling it to make sure it's completely sterile and filtering it for, you know, it's a boil for a significant period of time, a hard boil, and then a filtration process of that to make sure there's no microbe life in that. So, Mm-hmm. I always thought that, you know, trichinella is gonna have any trace, a low trace is gonna have a hard time. persisting in that, in that preprocessing before the microbes grow in it too.

Yeah, I heard it breaks down pretty quick. So that, that would align. All right. Last and final question is mammoth pee safe? So you've heard this. There's, there's a rumor going around that the, the species of bacteria that you saw, the strain of bacteria that you see on the label are the same as some known human pathogens. So mammoth pee is human pathogens. What do you say to this?

It's just not— it's, it's, it's not a fact. And, you know, that was obviously a consideration early on as scientists. We had to learn a lot about, you know, how to register products. And registering products and microbial products means that you have to go through the regulation process and make sure that those microbes can be registered. And not all microbes can be registered. Canada is a very tough country, as an example, where Bacillus thuringiensis isn't even allowed in the, in the, in the country. And so you have to make sure that it's registrable. And that's the guidelines we followed. And also we tested the microbes for an array of potential to make sure that that wasn't the case. Product's been in the market for way over 10 years now. We haven't had one case of anything other than very successful plant growth. It's used as an additive and a soil additive. A fertigation additive registered through the Department of Agriculture internationally and nationally, domestically. What were that— I think where that came from was past competition, probably, you know, trying to compete and spread some fear, which kind of is unfortunate that those type of activities persist in people's minds. It's just not the case. And And the microbes that, that are in mammoth pee, just like many microbes, hundreds of different microbial species, there's, there's genus and species, and there's different variations of species, which we call strain specificity. An example would be even E. coli. You know, E. coli is known as a coliform bacteria, fecal bacteria that's very dangerous for human health. You don't want to eat E. coli. But the truth is there's versions, there's strains of E. coli that are perfectly safe and docile and others that are very pathogenic. And so, you know, there's no cases where I would have any concern of using Mammoth at all, not only through experience and having it in the market for so long, but just scientifically. There's strain specificity. These strains have been well vetted. for not having any traits of pathogens. And, that was well far and beyond what we needed to do to even register the products in the market. And, I'd love to talk to people about that just to kind of geek out. If people have concerns, you can put my contact information on here, but it bugs me because someone sowed fear in the market, irrational fear, and it's tough.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't want people to, to feel that way or to have to live in fear around these products that are so cool.

Yeah, I want to, I want to go back and touch on that because one, as a resource, you sent me a whole bunch of documentation that I put up on the KISS Organics website. If you go to our latest blog page under the Learn tab, you can, you can download it for yourselves and see some of the study research that Colin is sharing and talking about right now around its safety and efficacy. And then 2, this This is something that I just talked about. I haven't published this other podcast yet, but it'll be published by the time this one comes out with Dr. Nicole Gaucher, essentially saying, you know, hey, things like Fusarium, for example, there are a ton of different species that fall under the Fusaria genera, but realistically, very most of them are innocuous. Most of them don't infect our plants, specifically cannabis. It's really, you know, like Fusarium oxysporum, and then there's another one that I less common understood name that I can't remember, but. But basically, those species, highly pathogenic to cannabis, can cause problems, but not all species. So just because you see the name of a bacteria or a microbe or fungi doesn't necessarily mean it's, it's going to damage your plant. And then a lot of these microbes are ubiquitous in our environment. Like, she said, you know, in, in the video or the interview, she said, I could go any plant that you have in your environment or in your house, I could go find some species of Fusarium on it. Is it hurting your plant? Probably not. So, we need to not demonize all microbes. That's like saying all humans are fill in the blank. It just doesn't work that way. So, you know, some are good, some are bad, most of us are in between. So, yeah, I just, I just wanted to touch a little deeper on that whole classification thing, because if you really wanna, wanna make a statement like that about any product on the market, you really need to dive super deep into the strain specificity that you were discussing, uh, in your answer. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Well said, Ted. Yeah, that's how I feel. And as a microbiologist, it's just intuitive. I understand this and, and I'm super empathetic and, and I want to make sure people understand microbiology to the level they need to, to, um, to be able to use again these great products. Because biology is, as you've already said, really important to maximize plant growth. All these microbes, or the microbes that we have in Mammoth T, actually came from nature. And we want to make sure that, uh, everyone's confident with it.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day-to-day to chat. I'm super excited that Mammoth P is going to be available for people in the future again. I mean, it is right now. It's up on the KISS Organics website. A lot of people are carrying it. If you haven't tried it, you can try it out for yourself or go check out the blog post that Dr. Ben Higgins did through KISS in Living Soil and showed The results that they got at Gold Leaf Gardens probably a decade ago now.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, we've been doing this for a while now. Well, thank you again for your time. I look forward to, uh, talking to you again soon.

Yeah, thanks, Ted. See you.

That was Colin Bell, and you are listening to the Cannabis Cultivation and Science Podcast. If you like the podcast, please leave us a rating and review and give us a follow on Instagram and YouTube. And don't forget, at KISS Organics, we have a wide array of products we offer on our website, ranging from soils amendments, and beneficial insects, to soil test analysis and commercial consulting. We carefully research all the products we offer and manufacture to make sure they are science-based and meet our highest standards of quality. Thanks for listening.