Agroecologist Nicole Masters discusses vermicompost, microbial quorum sensing, and more! #RegenAg

Hi, friends. This is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Welcome back. On this podcast, we talk about agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health and soil health, that regenerate ecological health, and ultimately that regenerate animal and public health, of course, as well, because those are all pieces that we care about and they're all important. My guest today is someone that I've been wanting to speak with for quite some time, who grew up, spent a lot of her time and career on the other side of the planet, Nicole Masters from New Zealand. Welcome, Nicole. I'm really honored to have you here. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me, John. I'm really excited to be here with you, Nicole.

I've really enjoyed reading your book, for the Love of Soil, and I really like the title as well.

Yeah.

Because I think all of us would do well to have more empathy and more appreciation for soil and for the landscape and everything that is within that landscape. Because the degree that we have empathy, of course, is the degree that we are able to affect change and to influence change.

Absolutely.

I'd love to learn a bit more about the things that you're working on and have you share some of those with our audience. But before we go into some of those, can you tell us a little bit about your story and the context? What brought you to this work today? What are some of the memorable moments on your pathway?

Great. Thanks, John. Yeah, it's always such a big question. You go, wow, which bit do you kind of pick from? And I was having a conversation with my grandmother recently, and she revealed that my great grandfather was one of New Zealand's first extension agents. And this. It kind of blew my mind because I'm like, am I genetically programmed to want to be involved in agriculture and have some kind of genetic threads around education? Like, it just kind of blew my mind how maybe sometimes I don't have as much free will as I think I do.

Epigenetics and memory transfer are very powerful things that we do not appreciate fully.

It does. It boggles my mind. And I often think about it in terms of, you know, as New Zealanders, you know, we really came from some pretty tough stock of people that were travelers and traveled across the seas, you know, to one of the last places that was discovered. And so these people were tough. And so, yeah, I feel like I've come from tough blood that are also travelers. So most of my life has been traveling. My father was a pilot. We never lived in a place for Longer than two years. So we lived in the north island and the south island and in Hong Kong of all places. And all of that had a really formative impact on me in terms of seeing land from above. So looking down from aircraft and just being really impacted by, in New Zealand, especially like the amount of erosion. And so from five years of age, my parents remember me pointing out erosion and being really worried about where was the soil going. Which maybe I'm a weird kid, I don't know, but living in Hong Kong, the thing that I saw was like, people will live in smog that was covering all the vehicles. Like everything's covered in this black stuff that you could wipe off. And if I get into the bottom of a car parking building that's full of like carbon monoxide, I always feel nostalgic because that's what Hong Kong smells like. And there's like all these plastic bags and garbage. And I just remember thinking, wow, people will live in their own filth. And. And it doesn't create behavior change. Like what is it that actually will lead people to change? And so part of it became a real driver for me in terms of I need to speak my truth and be willing to speak up. Because if we don't speak up, nothing's going to change people. We're just going to go off the rails. But so when I was 25, my dad actually brought a property and said, yeah, let's, let's do this together. He left flying and I left university. And I think it was that, what do they say? Green on green makes black and blue. It was a little bit like that with both of us not understanding much about working with landscapes. But we restored a wetland and we planted 700 avocado trees, ran a galfie all stud. And it was a very deep dive. And at the time, well, I think it's still true now. I was a single parent and it is really hard to find work in rural communities. And my dad actually helped me out by setting me up with a worm farm business. So I brought a deceased worm farm estate and got into vermiculture. I had a background in soil science. That's what I'd studied at university. And no one had mentioned that the darn stuff was alive. And then I went to a session with Elaine Ingham and she just talked about soil being alive. And I'm like, nobody mentioned this and it's such a critical part. So I started to make a vermicast process product specifically for strawberry producers, for pastoral producers and for avocados and and so catered that biologically for what we were doing and saw some incredible results. So it just seems like a journey that we never stop learning and it never stops evolving. And because I'm not afraid of traveling, here I am right now I'm in my horse trailer in South Dakota working with the Inter Tribal Agriculture Council. Yeah, I'm just always in different places living with ranches and farmers and living in people's worlds and I love it.

So you've certainly gotten to observe and experience agriculture in many different ecosystems, many different types of environments and both to, to see what the challenges and where the opportunities are, which are often opposite sides of the same coin, aren't they?

Absolutely.

I'm really intrigued by your mention of producing vermicompost for specific applications because this is something that is perhaps not appreciated is how you can really customize microbial applications to produce a specific outcome. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What were the things that you were doing to try to produce specific changes for a given crop?

Yeah, right. So if you think about vermicast or you think about feeding worms, worms will eat pretty much anything that's lived before any kind of organic matter. And you know, they are happy just eating manure or just eating vegetable scraps. And you know, you meet people and you've got like little worm farms in their, in their houses and they stink and they make all this liquid and they're just feeding vegetable scraps and that makes a very, very, very bacteria dominated vermicast. And one thing you can do is you can actually take some vermicast or compost, put it in a seedling tray and then just leave it outside and then observe what is it that grows. So that germination signal is determined by microbiology, as you know. And so what will signal will either be, hey, here's a whole lot of broadleaf weeds or here's a whole lot of things like kosher or nettles, you nitrate weeds or actually here's soft perennial grasses. So it's a really interesting observation as to if you are buying composts, just leave it outside and see what grows. And if it just grows a whole of those annual or nitrate loving weeds, I wouldn't be using that in my garden or certainly not in agricultural context. It's quite interesting. So we, we did get into larger scale composting and we had a Sitla Turner. What I found is as I've got older, maybe I've got lazier, but by the time I left my farm, like I sold it Seven years ago, and I've been on the road for seven years is we were just making vermicast basically from wood chips, white wood chip species, so willow poplar and over here it might be cottonwood, aspen species like that. So fast growing soft white woods. And we would put in maybe a little bit of manure, maybe a bit of fish hydrolysate into that blend. And then at the start of when, so we'd get like 200 cubic meters or 200 cubic yards of wood chips and then we would actually leave the pigs on it. So feeding pigs on wood chips and it's amazing how many wood chips they'll actually eat. But then when you take the pigs off and the worms come in and we just leave it to mature and it's really that maturation that really brings that fungal diversity out. And the know, the saprophytic fungi just go nuts. So the ones that are breaking down that complex wood chip, so by the time it's finished, you know, you can still see that there's some wood chip in there. But it's the most beautiful vermicast and the smell and it's amazing. And when you look at underneath the microscope, it's absolutely a 10 out of 10 in terms of beneficial nematodes and all your protozoa and everything. And, and so really it was from being really lazy that I could make a great fungal product which, you know, things like in horticultural situations, you know, your pip fruit industry, certainly avocados and strawberries is where we're pushing for a very, very fungal dominant type blend. What I found was if we were doing stuff for vegetable production, then that could be the vermicast that we harvest earlier. We were using. I say we, it was me, I was using a lot of pig manure. So using pig manure as part of that food material for worms. So still mixing it with some cardboard and wood chips and maybe, you know, putting a little bit of guano or whatever it was, that vermicast. I don't know. It's a lot of intuition actually John, that I think about it. And then that product, if you harvested it early on, would be really good for vegetables. So I was looking at it under the microscope as I was going and I had indoor beds and outdoor beds and I actually found that they produce different types of microbial diversity. So then I could choose which beds to use for which type of crop.

I think it's interesting as we're learning more about bacterial and fungal dominated crops and how we can influence plant nutrition of those different crops. But of course, one of the challenges. The reason I asked the question about vermicompost production is one of the challenges that we have is actually producing materials that move the soil in one direction or another, particularly the fungal direction. There's dozens of effective bacterial inoculants available in the marketplace. But when you want to talk about establishing fungal populations, for the most part, those are materials that you have to produce on your own in some way, shape or form by vermicompost or by the Johnson Sioux bioreactors or some form of composting that will lead you in that direction.

So, so true. And what's kind of interesting is that. So mycorrhizae obviously aren't going to grow in vermicast or compost. But what we found was by that. And I guess it's the quorum signals, those metabolites that we're putting on when we're putting in these vermicasts is that we saw massive increases in the colonization of mycorrhizae, even though there's no mycorrhizae in it. It's that signal to germinate that the mycorrhizae was receiving from either the biopriming of seeds or putting materials down with the seed. So we're doing some really cool stuff here in Montana on rangeland, by putting small amounts of vermica down the drill. And what we're seeing is the germination of species that we're not planting, the perennial grasses that are responding to that signal.

So let's talk a little bit about this, because I've been studying quorum sensing and quorum signaling for quite some time, but I haven't yet talked about it here on the podcast because I feel like there's always more to learn before I dig into that a little bit more. So what's happening with quorum sensing? First of all, what is quorum sensing? Or. And also quorum signaling? What are we talking about?

And it's so interesting, John, that I hadn't realized you hadn't covered this topic. I mean, if you look in the literature in the last three years, this space is just blowing up. And it's so fascinating because it's something that has been done by indigenous people for a long time. And you look at, like, natural Korean farming, it's all. It's all on this basis of these quorum signals. So if you think of a cell, like just any kind of bacterial cell, on the outside of that cell wall is 100,000 receptors, and those receptors are waiting for some kind of signal because they can't see, they can't hear. And so those signals they're receiving could be electromagnetic, it could be temperature, and it could be some of these chemical byproducts. So the secondary metabolites and the different types of signals that either biology releasing. So there's different types of signals that the microbe will say, well, are you my friend or are you about to eat me? You know, so they can recognize each other and there's, there are organisms that will actually send signals to try and pretend to be a different type of organism. So they can blend in or they can signal to each other to hunt. So they saw this really cool example of this where a bunch of protozoa actually hunted down a nematode like wolves chasing down it's quarry. And it's all based on these signals. So quorum sensing literally means that you have enough organisms to form a quorum of agreement. So we have enough organisms and they get to a certain critical moment and now they switch on that gene expression in that organism. So that might be for bioluminescence, or it might be for biofilms, or it might be for virulence. So you might have these organisms in your body and you're not sick. And then they reach a critical threshold, they send a signal. Now they go virulent, they start to produce very quickly. And now you're, now you're sick. So they've developed one for cholera that you can actually drink the chemical signal to turn cholera off. And it's parts per trillion that we're talking about. So these signals are very, very, very small amounts of these signals. And it'll signal to the cholera that basically there's too many other cholera here, you should just leave and then it will actually flush out of the body. So we're seeing breakthroughs in this in terms of medical science because it could actually replace antibiotics. We could be very specific. Now what's interesting about the cholera signal is it was the same signal to turn off botrytis in a plant. So there's massive capacity out there to be thinking, how subtle can I be? How little does it need for a system to change. And we've seen some stuff we've never been able to explain until now. And we're seeing it coming in through, in the literature. Why is it so important to have a seed microbiome? Why is it so important to have that microbiology right at the start? And then what are these signals? To turn something on or turn something off? So that's what these different metabolites are for. And so the plant's doing it all the time. It's signaling to say, hey, I'm under attack. You know, I'm going to signal to some type of biology. And if that biology is there to respond, then it, you know, induces obviously all your induced systemic responses and all the other things that happen in terms of plant defense. But if that plant signals and there's no microbe there to respond, that defense mechanism doesn't kick in. And now what's really interesting, and we're seeing this with breeding, is that there are plants now that no longer have the ability to signal. So there's wheat that can no longer signal to protozoa, or there's wheat that will no longer signal to mycorrhizae. So we've, we've corrupted this system by selecting for specific cultivars. And I'm sure you know a lot more about that than I. But I mean, I just, I get so excited about it because we're seeing like phenomenal stuff. I just had someone yesterday ring me up and they were so excited because for decades they've just grown dandelion. And we talked to them last year about doing something different. And this year she was like, the dandelion's totally gone. And it's just, it's so hard to explain it until you get into these mechanisms of what are these signals? What is it that we're putting down that's changing, especially with annuals, how quickly we can change it. And what I'm seeing is when we're putting stuff down, the drill and cropping is they might do a pre emergent spray, but they're no longer requiring a post emergent spray because those signals are basically setting the scene in that soil and they're not signaling to the primitive weeds to germinate.

There's a couple of different aspects here that are worth unwrapping a little bit. I find this entire topic really intriguing because one of my mentors who passed away a number of years ago was Bruce Tineo.

Oh, yeah.

And he was a leading microbiologist here in North America. And he spoke all the time about quorum sensing. And then I didn't hear anyone talk about it for 15 years. And now we're having this conversation again, which I find really enjoyable.

Yeah.

So there's. There's kind of two aspects in, in my understanding. One of them is I'd like to separate out quorum sensing versus quorum signaling. So quorum sensing is as, as you described when you have A large enough group of organisms that they change their behavior and they begin behaving as. For lack of a better term, they begin behaving as a single organism rather than of individuals. Then of course, there's also the signaling aspect of how that group or how those individuals both perceive signals and respond to those signals. Signals. You've been talking about germination of different crops and signaling for defense mechanisms and weed seed development. But, you know, it's. It's really interesting how we all know that we can have a large bank of a certain weed seed in a given soil profile, but it doesn't germinate. And there's never been particularly good explanations for that. There have been some people who've talked about, describe the nutritional profile, say when you have a certain nutritional profile that influences the weed profile. But we all know that there's more to the story than that. Yeah, so you spoke about that a little bit. But can you give us some examples of specific case studies of what you have done to produce differences in weed populations?

Yeah, it's probably the thing I'm most fascinated about in terms of the soil is because it's so obvious above ground, and I often think of it like being someone's fingerprints. You can kind of see what someone's been doing across a landscape by the different types of plant communities that are growing. And so if we think about weeds and, you know, whatever a weed is, you know, a weed to you might be forage to somebody else. But thinking about these plants as indicator species. And so there's more than just a nutritional element involved because it could be something like, we have bare soil, right. That's going to create some plants to germinate. Could be a light response as well. Could be low organic matter is going to cause a response. It could be the microbial communities or imbalances, a mineral community or imbalances, and then a toxin release. And so one of the ones I found really interesting was seeing milk thistle, and it was in a gully. You guys say Galleys, Coolies Gulch, I don't know. And it was only this one place on this whole farm where all this milk thistle was growing. And I said to the farmer, what's under the ground there? Why? You know, that's interesting. And he said, oh, it's an old dump and we have a whole lot of batteries in there. So the batteries had been leaking and this milk thistle had responded to it. And then the second time I saw milk thistle, I was on the, on the San Andreas fault line. And all along that fault line, as far as you could see was milk thistle. And I'm like, that's fascinating. I wonder what's happening. And then of all the things, I sat on a plane next to a woman who was a nuclear scientist and she started to tell me about how, you know, deep down in the ground, when you get the plates moving, they grind and there's uranium down there and what's released is radon gas. And then it got me thinking. Well, milk thistle, we use that in the human body as a liver detox. I wonder if it's detoxing these soils. And sure enough, when we've tested in soils now where we're seeing these heavy, dense populations of milk thistle, there'll be some kind of contaminant because we saw this blow up as well. After the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, we saw milk thistle just turning up everywhere. So for me, it's the patterns of what is it that this particular plant might be doing. We know that some are really good at pulling radiation out of the ground. You know, sunflowers being used to do that, or even like marijuana and hemp, you know, they have the ability to phyto remediate heavy metals and different types of toxins. So observing where do we see these things grow naturally? And what we see is how when we do have major mineral imbalances, we have what we call the dynamic accumulators. And these weeds will specifically be making nutrients available that are low in the soil, but making them high in the plant. And then they will actually exude some of those minerals in a bioavailable form back out their root system. So not only in their leaves, but also in their roots. And then they're making that available to the next plant community. So they're actually shifting soils to become more advanced. If you're willing to sit there for 100 years and wait for them to do this shifting. So we did some pretty extraordinary stuff by measuring or doing leaf tissue testing of that specific weed and saying, what is it that this weed's trying to tell me? What is it high and what is it trying to balance out? And the only time we find the only exemption to that rule would be sodium or nitrates. So a plant that where soil is high in sodium or nitrates, we might find high sodium and nitrates in that, but otherwise we find mostly low soils. You'll find these, these nutrients high in the plant. So I don't know if you've come across Betsy Ross down at some point, Sustainable Growth Solutions in Texas. She's absolutely incredible. But she does the same practice as I do. And what she was doing was measuring mesquite and found that mesquite was very high in some trace elements, including copper. And I can't remember what the other ones were, but she basically made like a nutritional profile based on what the mesquite was high in. And then she brewed that with folic acid and some other materials, then sprayed that back onto the mesquite. And within a couple of weeks, all, all that mesquite Cambrian growth, the bark cracked open. And so you can go where she's done these spraying and all of these mesquite trees are dead. So by looking at what is it that this plant's actually trying to address, you know, is it a microbial or a mineral? Then it actually gives us a whole new access to can we shift the soil so that it no longer suits that plant? Looks like magic, basically.

This brings several pieces to mind, and one of them is the story of giant ragweed. So when you speak about bioremediation from milk thistle and also from marijuana and hemp, I perceive that there is a similar bioremediation effect from giant ragweed. And I look at the way that the behavior of giant ragweed has changed over the years. I suppose the simple way to say it is that giant ragweed went from being an aggressive weed that grew several feet tall to a superweed that would germinate at all times of the year, all the way up into September or into the fall, and seed in a matter of 30 to 40 days after germination, and into a plant that would grow 3 or 4 meters tall in all the environments that had chronic systemic pesticide applications across the Midwest. The worse the pesticide applications became, the crazier the giant ragweed went. Totally parallel correlation. If you look at the timeline, you look at the history, 50 years ago, giant ragweed was a relatively benign plant compared to what it is today.

Mm, yeah. And I think kosher as well. So you can measure kosher and see the same thing. And there's another element to it too, which I guess comes down to herbicide resistance, which is, you know, still part of what we're talking about in terms of gene expression. And so we think about how glyphosate operates on the shikimate pathway. These herbicide resistant weeds have the ability to have a, like an over running of that shikimate pathway. So it's just spinning like a treadmill. And so the herbicide can't work on that because it's spinning so hard. And what they found is it's aromatic amino acids that shut that spinning down. And so people that are really looking at nutrition and they are maybe buffering the herbicides that they're using, or they're using products that are these amino acids, which I'm sure that you are using, shuts that overexpression of that gene down. So there's so many different angles, I guess, to this weed thing that I just find so fascinating.

The next piece that I'd like to dig into, following up on these healing herbs, which we sometimes call weeds, is what are the practices that you have observed? What are the tools or practices that people can use to shift what is going on in an environment?

Yeah, I guess it depends if we're talking cropping or viticulture or, you know, if we're livestock operations. Just think everything that we do is a signal. It's either pushing for more disturbance or less disturbance. What is our timing? So thinking if you're in a grazing operation, you're grazing, trampling, manure, urine early in the season.