The Future of Farming- Soil Probiotics with Jock Leys

Hey, guys. Criben Govender from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. And I'm here. I'm Crippen Govender, I'm a food scientist. James, my partner, who's all things about the mind, background in psychology. We're really excited today because we're at episode number six and we have our first guest and his name is Jock Lees, and he's a guru when it comes to all things about, I guess, the use of natural biological agents in farming and where these, I guess these natural agents are moving forward into the future. So, Jock, welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thank you guys. A pleasure to be on board.

That's wonderful, Jock. So I thought. Jock, so what's your, I guess, your knowledge background, like, in terms of your study, the credentials behind Jock Lee's? Like, what did you study?

Yep, yeah, good point. I grew up on a family farm, so I've always had an agriculture and cropping sort of background from northern New South Wales. But, you know, I studied agricultural science at university, so I did that. And then, you know, I've just always worked in agriculture and particularly the cropping side. And, yeah, that's specifically my interest. And I guess I've understood the synthetic side of agriculture, like synthetic fungicides, fertilizers, herbicides, because it's still a massive part of what's going on out there and the companies that I've worked for. But yeah, what my passion most recently is the biological space and moving beyond the traditional ways of agriculture.

In terms of, I guess, the past. How did, I guess, the use of synthetic agents start? Why do we use them? James is pretty much a novice in this space. I have some experience in agriculture, being in the food industry, but I guess just for people who are not aware, why did we develop, I guess, synthetic agents to start with, and what's the benefits of actually using them? Why do farmers use them?

Yeah, it's a really good question and quite a complex one, I guess. I guess now you're going back to the green revolution. And when agriculture became more industrialized, it put more pressure on the system. They realized growing crops fairly intensively year on year, they started to have different issues that weren't there previously, like weed. Pressure became worse. Some situations you've got a monoculture, you know, you're growing, for example, wheat year after year. So the diseases, again, that might get on wheat, if you grow it occasionally aren't a problem. But when you're growing year on year, intensively, they became an issue. So I guess issues popped up that needed addressing. And that's where the. The early fungicides or insecticides came about. Trying to address some of these issues. Fertilizer as well, synthetic fertilizers, again, you're taking a lot of nutrients out of the soil when you're cropping continually. So they needed a way of putting that back. So things like superphosphate were discovered, started to being applied, then they've got into fully synthetics now. So, yeah, that's where that's all come from. But again, it's created a few issues too. Haven't always got it right, you know, you only got to read books like Rachel Carson's book the Silent Spring and going back around the 50s and 60s and some of the big blunders I had with some of this synthetic chemistry. So whilst a lot of it's good and where we're at now, with a lot of regulation and highly scrutinized, most of it's pretty good. But certainly you still have to be pretty careful as well. Sure.

I'm not familiar with the book. I'll definitely put a link in the show, notes to the book if people want to follow up.

It's worth a read. It's a landmark book that really goes right through the introduction of synthetic pesticides and chemistries in agriculture, and particularly focuses on some of the issues and negatives, I guess.

Jock, what was the. I guess the key issue that the book was underscoring? Is there anything that comes to mind?

Yeah, yeah, I guess it was, you know, even talking about some of the DDTs and things that were considered wonder chemicals back in their day that, you know, they realized that they just had such a terrific fit for the problems that they had. They had insects that were wiping out forests in North America, cotton crops were being wiped out. Some of the world's biggest crops had significant issues and all of a sudden they had a chemistry that solved the problem. But then five, 10 years later, they started to realize that, hold on, there's a few issues here. They were taking out beneficial space, like birds were being taken out, fish taking out streams. So, you know, there's just issues to be aware of and that a lot of what modern agriculture is certainly focuses on avoiding all those issues. Now, obviously, biologicals are terrific because you avoid a lot of that as well. Most biologicals are extremely safe and just avoid all those issues.

Mm, absolutely. And I can certainly empathize with the farmers as well, because I guess maybe at the moment there's a lack of understanding that there are these biological agents that could benefit and maybe farmers also have a lot of cost constraints in terms of their, their gross margins and things like that. Because I'd imagine being a farmer is not the easiest profession in the world.

No, no, that's another really good point. Especially extensive agriculture in Australia. We're a pretty dry country and overall our agriculture is fairly low input, fairly low cost, a lot of it. So farmers are very mindful of trying to get the optimum result for the cheapest price. So I guess, you know, that's where the traditional chemistry options usually get a highly effective result, sometimes for quite an effective price. But you know, you need to look at the longer term system as well. Just that the instant result versus the longer term soil health, the longer term health of the whole system, which, yeah, we've probably been weak on. I guess that's again, where biologicals have a part to play.

Absolutely. And Jock, you know, I'm huge on, I guess, the gut health and the gut microbiome. And I see a lot of parallels between what's happening in terms of gut health and the gut bacteria and the different species of bacteria, yeast and fungi that live in the gut. And paralleling that to I guess the soil organisms, the soil fungi, the soil, the yeast, the bacteria, there is so much interconnectivity. I know when I go out in the garden and I'm sure I'm getting a good dose of probiotics, but just mucking around in the soil.

Yeah, now I fully agree with that. And the, any gram of soil that you pick up, whether it's in your garden or out on a farmer's paddock, it's going to have hundreds of thousands, millions of different microorganisms in there and they're all interacting in different ways. And you know, we don't understand all those relationships now, like, I think the first steps are being made where we start to understand some of the main interactions that are going on. But I think we've got a long way to go to fully understand that it's a massively complex environment.

Absolutely. If you go back to Cox postulates and how they discovered anthrax and things like that from the soil. And I think if there's very early days, we just made the assumption that all these organisms in the soil were, I guess, more detrimental, causing disease. But now what we're starting to find out over the last 10 years, with all the work happening in the microbiome space, is that the majority of these things are actually good for us and a very important part of the ecosystem. So my goal is, I guess, to bring that awareness back into how important it is to get very healthy ecosystems, whether it's the ecosystem of the gut or the ecosystem of the soil. Because my, my angle is really about food. And I think a huge part to fix issues around digestive health is to get the soil right, because I think that'll have an immense flow on effect from the food supply all the way to gut health and treating a lot of the modern day diseases that we are currently facing.

Absolutely. Now I couldn't agree more. And some of this stuff that I said we're starting to understand is, you know, we know plants can have a natural ability to overcome diseases that they encounter, whether it's in the soil or on the foliage, when insects attack them, even competition from weeds, they have a natural ability to either overcome that or not. But what we're starting to understand is a lot of that ability is in conjunction with the symbiotic relationship with the microbiome that lives in the soil. So, for example, a plant's ability to overcome, say, Phytophora, like a common soil disease, its ability will be enhanced if it's got a strong relationship with the key soil bacteria that are living in the soil rhizosphere. Yes. And we're starting to understand which ones of those bacteria are important for that relationship. And you know, if we check the soil, if it's in there or it's not, if it's not, we can introduce it into the system and we can really start to lift that plant's ability to sort of naturally overcome the issues that it's facing as far as being productive. And quite often, if you get all that right, you may still need the synthetic chemistry occasionally, but your reliance can be a lot less potentially.

Have you come across the. There's a few papers I've been looking at in the past about the actual crosstalk happening between the plant itself and the production of signaling molecules to communicate with the, I guess the soil microbiome or soil bacteria.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Mainly from the point of view of mycorrhizae. We've been studying that and trying to work out how to enhance it. Because we do know that for mycorrhiza to colonise a plant, for example, the plant needs to signal, basically welcomes the mycorrhiza into the roots, sends it a signal to say, hey, I'm ready, I want you to colonize. And the raft of reasons why a plant might signal or it might not, and things that we can do to help encourage that signaling. So yeah, we've been looking at that. And mycorrhiza is definitely something that responds well to that plant signaling.

That's a great segue to open up the, I guess, the mycorrhiza conversation. So James, for instance, and I think the broader public would have no idea what mycorrhiza are. So let's take a step back and really talk about, I guess, what are mycorrhiza and how long has I guess this discovery been around for and where is it going?

Yeah, yeah, no problem. Yeah, Well, I guess mycorrhiza has probably been around for millions of years. Like it's, it's obviously evolved to have a symbiotic relationship with most plant life on Earth. I think the experts have suggested it's probably 90 to 95% of all plant life has in some way a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizae. Mycorrhiza is basically a beneficial fungal species. So we call it commonly referred to as AMF now, so amf, referring to our biscular mycorrhiza fungi. So, yeah, it forms a beneficial relationship with the plant, basically with the roots. The plant will signal, like we spoke about before, that will then allow the mycorrhiza to colonize the roots. So then it forms hyphae like a, like a traditional fungi. So the hyphae being the fruiting bodies that branch out and they'll spread through the soil. In some cases, it's been proven that they'll increase the plant's roots ability to pick up moisture and nutrients in the soil by up to a hundred times. Because you're just getting a massive fine fungal filaments through the soil, extending the roots in a large way, letting it access all those resources in the soil that it might previously have had trouble doing.

And how does that benefit the plant?

Yeah, so it can be proven to benefit the plant in a lot of different ways. But I guess from commercial farmers, some of the key ways, obviously that helps pull in nutrients and particularly immobile nutrients. Things like phosphorus and the other metals like zinc, magnesium, things like that are fairly immobile in the soil. So unless the root, the plant root grows up against some of those nutrients in the soil, it won't pick it up. As the soil has moisture in it. They're not very soluble. They don't move through the soil. Whereas the beneficial fungi, once it, once it starts to spread out through the soil and it's colonized onto the plant root, it'll actually pull it back in. It actually acts like an extension of the plant root and helps the plant Pulling nutrients. So from a commercial farmer's point of view, that's probably the key. These crops getting more nutrients, he potentially needs to apply less synthetic fertiliser. Yeah, the moisture, I think, was the other one.

Yes.

Yeah, we're pretty dry country, so anything that helps a plant pick up moisture, and we know that that extra extension on the roots that mycorrhiza forms, that network through the soil. Yeah, we've seen it. Certainly in dry conditions, that helps the plants hang on longer and be more productive in a dry environment. But, you know, there's a heap of other benefits associated with mycorrhiza as well. From a farmer I obviously, nutrients and moisture are a couple of really big levers that they need to address. But depending on the mycorrhiza species, and there's a lot, the seven key categories of mycorrhizae, but hundreds if not thousands of different individual species, depending on the species of mycorrhiza, they can actually help form a protective filament of fungal hyphae around the root, so reducing the impact of negative fungi, for example, like soil diseases. So we know with plants that have got a good colonisation of mycorrhizae, they're less likely to be affected by soil diseases. So that's another key one. The mycorrhizae actually produces a chemical called glomalin as well, which is a sticky carbon based substance that the fungi secrete into the soil. It's rich in carbon. So with all the focus recently on carbon farming and being able to sequester carbon into the soil, mycorrhiza has definitely got a part to play there. We know if you're testing your soil year on year, where you've got good mycorrhiza colonization, the soil carbon levels will increase year on year, which is good for healthy soil. We know that sticky glomalin substance also helps with soil aggregation. It helps stick the soil particles together and you'll end up with a good healthy soil aggregate. So again, that just helps that overall soil health story.

That's fascinating. That's really, really fascinating. And so I'm really big on the science. You know, like when we talk about these things, what's the, I guess the, the literature saying, is there studies being conducted in this space or are you guys doing studies to actually validate the benefits of these products, these mycorrhizal products?

Yeah, we are, we are. We know a lot of the basic research has been done overseas. There's been been some done here in Australia. You know that Sumitomo purchased a company in the US called MyCorrhizal Applications, which are global leaders in the mycorrhiza research and so on, based in Oregon in the US So yeah, a lot of our basic research is coming from them. We're also doing proof of concept studies here and just making sure that what's been found overseas works in Australia. So in the last couple of years we've done probably 30 replicated field trials out in different parts of the country with different crop species, tree species, even starting to look at non crop scenarios, whether it helps in turf or you know, roadside regeneration and things like that. We know Mycorrhiza has a part to play. So yeah, we're starting to do a lot of that work and mostly getting pretty positive results. You don't always with biological, sometimes you got to understand why in theory it should be giving you a good result. But yeah, it's a very complex game and occasionally you don't. But overall I must say our experience has been pretty, pretty positive.

And what's, what's the most front of mind, what's the most positive result you've seen in terms of a. Could be a plant species or crop that you're looking at. Is there any numbers that you, you have on the top of your head in terms of yields or.

Yeah, yeah, I guess so. You've got a potato result back recently. So this one was, was down on the Adelaide plains town called Virginia. So they're quite productive potato farmers growing traditionally they'll use traditional fungicides, herbicides, whatever, proper commercial farmers. We got a guy to inoculate with our four strain Mycorrhiza inoculant with his potato seed when he planted. And yeah, that particular farmer got a 10% yield increase. So you don't always get that. But in this particular scenario, and that was in a situation where we also look at reducing the fertiliser. So we tend to commonly get a farmer to put the mycorrhizer on. We'll get him to do his standard farmer treatment where he doesn't use the mycorrhizer and then we'll get him to pulled back to like a 2/3 of his fertilizer program with the mycorrhizer inoculant. With the theory being that the mycorrhizer should pull in enough nutrients to compensate for the fact he's reduced his fertilizer treatment and in some cases actually go above and beyond. He actually get a better result by cutting his fertilizer rate. And this one just stuck in my mind that we recently got back that this guy got a 10% yield increase even in the light of having trimmed the fertiliser. Right.

And that's a substantial, I guess, a cost saving for him with the, I guess input costs of less fertilizer and additional yield. So that's a win for the farmer and the environment.

It is, it is. When you start talking intensive horticultural crops like that, the gross margins can be in the tens of thousands of dollars per hectare. The cost of inoculating with something like mycorrhiza. And we haven't sold a commercial product commercially yet. We had plan to do that early next year, but we're talking something that'll be well, well less of $100 a hectare. So it definitely pay for itself a lot of times over.

Wow. And it's just so good for the planet. It's. It just seems like a win win for everyone. Does it? And is there any, any potential, I don't know, side effects or limitations of the technologies, any crops you can't use it with or. It's pretty broad spectrum.

Yeah, that's a good question. As I was saying earlier that they suggest approximately 90% of all plant species form some relationship with mycorrhiza in some way. There are some that are very dependent that without mycorrhiza, the plant will be very unthrifty and you'd be sacrificing a lot of productivity versus some that, you know, things like winter cereals like wheat and barley, oats and things like that we know colonize well with mycorrhizae, but their relationship's not as strong as some others. So to get a 10% yield increase, it's probably pretty rare in saying that if you've got low nutrition soils where the crops are very much suffering from phosphorus or zinc deficiency, you may get a 10% yield increase in a crop like that. But if things aren't too bad and the soil is relatively imbalanced, you might not. Stolen Asia crops, particularly things like tomatoes, respond very well in the broad acre space. We know things like cotton, sorghum, corn are very dependent. So without mycorrhiza, you'll have issues. On the flip side, the 10% of plants that don't have a relationship with mycorrhiza, the main species of brassicae plants, whether it's, you know, turnips, canola in the broad acre space, things like that, cabbages and so on, just don't form a relationship. And lupins is another one's a bit of a standout. We know most legume crops are quite dependent on mycorrhiza or respond well, whereas lupins don't for some reason, they just don't. Haven't evolved to have a relationship.

That's fascinating.

Trees as well. We know most tree crops form a good relationship, but there are some tree species as well that are not so reliant.

That's really fascinating. So you mentioned, Jock, that they're potentially millions of years old. This mycorrhizal fungi. How did people actually discover it?

Yeah, I think, look, it's basically when agriculture started to become industrial. I think they started to talk about a thing called long fallow disorder. And if you know what fallow is, fallow is just keeping your ground bare prior to a crop. They realized that early on that if you introduced fallow into your cropping cycle, you might grow less crops, but you grow better crops. So fallow is just purely keeping your field out of production, keeping it in fallow, so to speak. So you might miss a crop this year, but when you do plant the crop next year, you'll end up with a better crop. You've gone a full year. Accumulating moisture in the soil. The nutrients in the soil mineralise. Any stubble or trash on the soil has a chance to break down, so those nutrients become more available. So they realized that and started introducing these fallow periods until they got to a point where they started doing it for too long. Particularly in areas like Australia, where you don't have a lot of rainfall. Sometimes they were doing a two year fallow, what we call a long fallow, just trying to accumulate enough moisture. When you do plant a crop, you got enough moisture to grow it right through. But what they found was the plants, once you got to that sort of Beyond 12 months into two years, the plants started to become very unthrifty and they didn't understand why. But what it ended up being was they were depleting the mycorrhiza. The mycorrhiza needs a live host in the soil to survive. So again, you can have weeds, it'll survive on a lot of weeds. But in Australia a lot of farmers won't tolerate weeds. So if you're fallowing the paddock, any weed sticks its head up, it gets a chemical application or they cultivate it. So again, you've got no weeds to keep the mycorrhiza going, you got a one or two year period. So we're basically having scenarios where the mycorrhizer was completely wiped out, then they'd go and plant a crop in it. And it was quite an unhealthy crop not productive and they might have put a lot of fertiliser on it, but the crop couldn't necessarily access all that fertilizer without the mycorrhiza doing its thing. So again, the scientists, I think it was back in the 30s and 40s, started to understand and research why that was the case and identified mycorrhiza as the, the reason why.

So it seems like this concept is quite old, the discovery in the 1930s. So why do you think there's been, I guess a resurgence in interest at this point? And where do you see it going to the future in terms of adoption?

Yeah, I guess it's been a slow burn from my understanding and I haven't necessarily worked in a full research sphere until recently with mycorrhiza. But you know, they identified there was a thing such as mycorrhiza back in the 30s or 40s and that could have been responsible. And it's taken a long time to fully understand the different species and only now we're still learning more about just how important it is to some crops versus other crops. And you know, some of the research that's going on in the last five or 10 years has probably been as important or more than any that's come before it. So it's definitely been something that's taken a while to really pick up strength, I guess the research into this space. So yeah, that's the only reason I can think why it's taken a while. I guess the other side, sorry guys, the other side is probably just the need for more productivity too. Like now if we go back to things like the 50s where synthetic fertilizers were introduced, people were getting 30, 40% yield gains by putting some superphosphate or nitrogen on them. You know, that sort of overshadowed anything else in a lot of cases, except for possibly these long fallow disorders that they were struggling to understand. But now we understand all the others. We've squeezed all the productivity gains we can out of most things. I think we're now starting to fine tune. And as we fine tune, I think the fine tuning is going to come from the biologicals.

So I guess it's the yield improvements that are driving it. And I guess what I really hope as well in terms of where modern agriculture is headed is that it's the consumer's desire or drive to want products that are more natural to produce, I guess natural way as possible that is sustainable, that is good for the planet, that is something that will protect the planet moving forward. So I hope that will also be a factor for the decision making, aside from the commercial benefits. But I agree there needs to be a commercial benefit to drive it as well.

Yeah, 100%. The environmental benefits are definitely key as well. And we're starting to see that in the sugarcane areas like where they've got a lot of focus on the leaching of nitrogen fertilisers and so on into the Great Barrier Reef and anything they can do to reduce the amount of synthetic fertiliser they put on. And again, some of the mycorrhiza trials were done with sugarcane growers have been quite positive. You know, again, if they can come back to initially to a two thirds fertilizer that now that's going to take pressure off the reef and be a real positive.

Absolutely. So Jock, aside from mycorrhiza, is there any other, I guess, emerging products in that kind of natural biological space that comes to mind that you think is worth mentioning?

Yeah, there's plenty of activity outside of mycorrhiza as well. A lot of it's in the bacterial space. Again, mycorrhiza being a beneficial fungi, there's as many beneficial bacteria that live in the soil. There's a lot of negative fungi and a lot of negative bacteria that you know, would hear a lot about different plant diseases and so on. But for every detrimental bacterial species or fungal species, there's a beneficial one. You know, we spoke about mycorrhiza as one of the key fungal ones, but there's certainly some beneficial bacteria and we're working with some of those. You know, we've got a Streptomyces species. When you think about streptomyces, you think about human implications sometimes, but they're very active in the soil biosphere as well. And we know some of those have evolved over the years to have quite beneficial relationships with plants as well. We're working with Bacillus species as well, Bacillus amelia liquefactiens. We know some of those can suppress nematodes in the soil.

What's milletoes say?

Nematodes. Yeah, Nematodes are basically worms, I guess you'd say microscopic worms that most of them you can't see with the naked eye. You'd need a microscope. But they live in the soil. Most of those have negative effects on the soil. There are a few species, again of those that can be positive, have positive benefits for plants, but most of the time they're robbing yield and productivity from crops. We know if you got the right species of bacteria in the soil at adequate levels, they can suppress nematodes and reduce the effects on the plants, just like they'll suppress fungal pathogens. Phytophora diseases, Rhizoctonia pythiums, a lot of the common soil diseases. So, yeah, we're doing a fair bit of work on that Astraptomyces species we hope to release next year, called actinovate. And it's been proven to be active on most of the key soil diseases. And again, it mightn't be like a synthetic fungicide where you put enough on it. It'll kill the disease completely with the bacteria. We need it to colonize, we need it to build up and start to multiply. And once it gets to a certain level in the soil and around the roots, we know it doesn't kill the disease that might be attacking the plant, but it'll certainly out compete it and push it away from the roots and just allow the plant to just grow away from that disease.

That's very positive. I mean, it's almost like it's probiotics for the soil.

Absolutely. That's really, it's interesting. And we know with that one also it has some foliar applications too. We know you can spray that on the foliage of the plants if they're getting things like powdery mildews or downy mildews, some of those leaf diseases and spots. We know this bacterial pathogen has the ability to produce metabolites on the leaf that will suppress those diseases. Wow, that's an interesting space.

Yeah, I'm absolutely fascinated and I'm so pleased and I'm so excited that we are moving to companies like Sumitomo and guys like yourself, Jock, actually advancing this technology and at some point, hopefully bring it to the masses. I think it's a huge step forward. Move away from huge.

We're excited too. And you know, we sell the other products as well and they still have their fit. And as I said, the regulations around a lot of those are a lot better now. So people can be fairly assured that any of those are pretty safe nowadays too. But I still think it's always a positive if we can put biologicals into the space and they can really contribute on an economic level for the farmer who wants to use them. But then they're just better for the environment. The consumers are just better overall.

And so a lot of the people in our podcast, I'm sure, are having little veggie patches in their backyard, including myself, who's just started, pretty much started in the gardening, my gardening journey. But I'm really loving it. So for people who are backyard gardeners, how can we start to implement some of these technologies? What's your tips and tips and tricks?

Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, look, I guess there are some. Well, we have. Our products will be available to use next year, so people will be able to get some of those and give it a try. But it's also probably just starting to understand that you can increase the natural levels of some of these things without having to inoculate it sometimes as well. Inoculation is easy. You just got to put it on the seed or on the seedling when you plant it, or water it into the soil. If you understand that mycorrhiza is more likely to colonise on certain species, you can grow those species in your veggie garden or, or in your little plots out the back and you can start to build the levels up naturally as well. Just being mindful that if you're keeping the ground there for too long, like I said, with that long fallow disorder, that you're probably naturally going to deplete the levels. Most of these need a living host in the soil to keep going. So just being aware of things like that, you can start to manipulate and get the good organisms working in your favor. So, yeah, that would be just my advice.

So to clarify, jocks, this weekend I'm going to head out to the garden. So what's the. I guess the exact things I should be doing to encourage these beneficial organisms like mycorrhizal Very specifically.

Yeah. I think probably one of the key, simplest ways for, know the novice people is probably just to keep high organic matter levels. You know, as I said, some of these plants live on only live plants like mycorrhizae, whereas a lot of them will live on, on dead organic matter too. So if you, if you just keep, you know, as much in broad agrophone, we call it stubble. But you know, the dead plant tissue, incorporate it back into the soil, chaff, mulch, just keep that going. Try and keep your soil where it doesn't have any plants for too long. Try and keep plants in it most of the time so that the good bacteria has always got somewhere to live and the good fungi.

So things like adding, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm a total novice, but putting things like manure or adding mulch, adding dead leaves from the garden, just putting that on areas that have no plants in them, Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You can go too far, like if you swamp it with too much organic matter, then that encourages a certain type of fungi or bacteria that then needs to break that down. But certainly you need a decent amount. So, yeah, I'll be putting a reasonable amount of mulch and obviously livestock manure and things like. That's terrific. It's got good nutrient levels in it as well. So essentially you're fertilizing as well as introducing organic matter that helps the bugs reproduce, I guess.

And what's the telltale signs that we're on the right track? Is there aromas? Is there some visual guidance that can help us?

Yeah, it's a good question. We quite often look at some of the more soil test parameters for the commercial farmers where we're monitoring organic carbon and, you know, different ratios of nutrients in the soil and things. But for the novice people. Yeah, look at. Yeah, if you can sort of smell that organic matter in the soil and you can start to see even some of the bigger organisms like worms starting to be active in the soil, I think you're in a good place.

Awesome. Well, I think we'll start to wrap up. And James, is anything. Because I know this is pretty new to use anything. Because I think it'll be helpful for especially novices in the space.

Yes. Just how we start implementing that stuff. So as a novice, as somebody new to the whole field, how do we start really using this? You know, from someone who's a complete novice. Yeah, it's a really good point. As I say, I think probably some of the first things is just starting to have a look, bit of a read on mycorrhiza and things like that and what plants really have those strongest relationships with it. And there's certainly people that produce tables, we have them that you can start to look down and think, well, some of these species in the veggie garden or whatnot, just to help build those levels up. Obviously there's the inoculant. You can. You can introduce it artificially, which we're hoping to start next year, early next year. But yeah, that would be just my advice. And then looking at some of those basics, like just making sure you've got good organic matter, incorporate it into your soil mulch and so on.

Yeah, that's all awesome. I think that's some really sound advice for the novices out there that want to make improvements, improve the soil, start to improve the planet. And I think it all starts with just small little changes that everybody can make. Whether you're composting your vegetable scraps, putting less of that stuff into landfill, and actually starting a little Compost bin, starting to worm farm. There's all little steps that can help everybody can help make the planet a better place. And Jock, I just want to thank you so much for your time today. We are so grateful to have you, someone that's really knowledgeable in this field. And you have blown my mind in terms of the science behind this. I'm just a pure novice when it comes, but you're certainly an expert. I hope to continue to follow what you guys are up to and definitely reach out and we'll update our listeners on what you guys are up to as well. So is there any parting words that you have for our guests?

Yeah, not really, guys. I just really appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to you and look up. I really like what you guys are doing too, trying to understand all this side of things. And, you know, I strongly believe that's where the next gains in agriculture will come from, understanding the biology and the soil particularly. And I just encourage people to read into it a bit more and give some of it a go. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Joc. Guys, this has been another episode of the Gut Health Gurus. And we'll put some links if you want to get in touch with Jock. And, you know, if you want to. I'm not sure, Jock, whether you want people to reach out to you on social media. We can put the in your Twitter and your details down so people can connect with you. So, Jock, thank you so much for your time and you have yourself a wonderful day. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you.