Episode 148: Digging Into Regenerative Soil with Matt Powers

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. I always say that this is the place where we have fun conversations. And today you're in for a treat. We're really going to have a fun conversation. I'm here with the indomitable, indefatigable, incorrigible Matt Powers. Matt, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. This is amazing.

So, Matt, you have been. When I think about your work in the space, in this regenerative agriculture space and permaculture space, I think you and I share some things in common in that both of us tend to be, we tend to be aggregators of the wisdom of many smart people and pulling that together and incorporating our own insights into that and trying to communicate that effectively to other people. And, you know, I often, when I have people here, I ask them to start by sharing a little bit of their own story and their background because I find they're much better at telling their story than I am at introducing them. But I have so much good stuff that I want to get into with you. So I'm going to ask you, tell us a bit about your story and your context and how you got here, and then we're going to have some really good stuff we're going to dig into.

Okay. Thank you for having me, John. Well, you know, as, as an aggregator, you're one of those people that I'm folding in and learning from and I, I just always appreciate all your insights. I'm always learning from you. And that's, I feel like that's really what it's all about. It's, it's about being in this environment of, of learning and teaching interchangeably. The highest level of learning is actually teaching. So I get so much out of teaching and I wasn't always a teacher. My story actually begins with me being a musician. I was a bass player in a band with Saturday Night Live's drummer and Rachel Ray's husband as the frontman. And Rachel used to like, go over all my books when I was in college and I knew them before they even got married. So I got to see her rise and everything. We got to suddenly get spoiled. We got to go to really nice studios and in the midst of it, I met my wife. And two years into our marriage we have this beautiful one year old boy and she cannot keep up. Her energy is tanking and they discover a growth on her thyroid. Many of you have gone through this. Many of, you know, loved ones who find a growth. They're going to do a biopsy they took the whole thyroid out without her permission. They told me they were taking it out because it was cancerous. There was really no choice. Three months later, after we listened to them and did the radiation, she got cancer again. When I asked the doctors if it was caused by the radiation, they got really weird. And then I started, like, getting this bad feeling. And then a month later, she got another bout of. Big bout of cancer that almost reached her lymph nodes. And so. And it wasn't. It wasn't the thyroid cancer that was gone. It was the melanoma, which is often caused by that. And so I started asking questions. I got. I'm a young dad. I. I don't know anything about babies, so I need my wife. And. And it's also, I'm young, new, newlywed. So, like, they peaked everything in me. All my attention, all my energy is on this. And I asked a question, a simple question. I said, when will it be safe for the baby to be around my wife? And I got a range of answers. Three different answers, three different doctors, two to six months in range. And I. I lost it. I was like, these guys don't know what they're talking about. These people are going off of a playbook. And I realized that they're not. They don't have the best interest of my. My wife. They're just doing their job. And it really hurt to, like, realize, like, how out of control we were and how I needed to figure out what to do. And it took a while. We started doing things like the Gerson Therapy, and I couldn't afford the organic food. I couldn't. We moved away from that band. I quit the dream job. Everyone thought it was crazy I was making so much money just playing bass, and I would still have the job to this day. The person I got to replace me is still in the band 16 years later. So I. I quit the band. I. I left the music industry. Everyone thought I was crazy. I started subbing to get health care so I could get the testing done because I couldn't afford. I was. I'd gone too far into debt and I was desperate. I was working bass playing at, like, blues clubs and. And casinos for $70 a night. You know, like real desperate times, folks. And it's embarrassing to go 350 an hour as a bass player to $70 a night. Not good. And so I was just so desperate. And I realized after all this and years of doing this, that food is the only thing I could control. And I started growing. And then it Was really hard. And I turned to permaculture because my soils were 140 degrees in the sun in Central Valley, California. So, so I, I realized that it was, I wasn't, I had to figure this out because I was living in a garage at my in laws parents house. So my, my wife's grandfather's house. And so, and it's like concrete floors, metal peeling paint. I've got a newborn and you know, a 4 year old. And so I was like, I have to figure this out. And the pressure of that drove me to becoming the local high school teacher, English teacher, head of the English department, then teacher of teachers, master's degree and education. I got the health care. We started slowing down the cancer. I know for a while we thought we had like got rid of it completely but, but always is going to keep coming back because of what happened. You know, the, the radiation fundamentally set her down a different path. So we have to like respond regeneratively and fix these things as they come up. And then as I went deeper and deeper, I realized soil is the linchpin to all plant health, which is the linchpin to all animal and, and human health. Right, right. And that. And then, and then I realized we don't really know a lot about soil. We've got all these different camps. And I was like, holy cow. You know, I was being mentored by Elaine Ingham one on one. And then I was learning about natural farming from Chris Trump and effective microbes from Tarraganis and Dr. Higa and all these people applying it. And I was like, it's working for them there, it's working that way for them there. How are all these things sometimes working and sometimes not? And so I began to try to find the connection between the chemistry and the biology. And so I went down into the literature to the biochemistry. And there by looking at the biochemistry of natural systems, not manufactured natural systems, asking, well, how does this happen in nature? How do we cycle molybdenum in nature? How do we cycle copper, iron, all of it. And, and, and then this new picture began to emerge and I was struggling to actually to. I was writing six to seven pages at a time. And so I started making pictures. And these pictures became the cycles, the first visual cycles for a lot of these micronutrients that, that were holistic and from a natural perspective. Because in college they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're going to be environmental science. So they're thinking about leeching of like Heavy metals and toxins and eutrophication and then ag, they're like, worried about losing things, so they're focused on like calcium NPK and these macronutrients. So there's this huge thing I was able to address and when I wrote regenerative soil around, completely changed everything. And so I've really been on this journey to try to figure out that connection from soil to our health and, and map that out so that we can help people really address their health from the ground up. And in that process, I've. I've. I've written over 24 different publications. I have 15. Over 15 online courses, over 10,000 students. I've done six online conferences, over 75,000 attendees. And it's been this unbelievable process because as I've been able to address the things affecting me and my family, it's connected to so many people all over the world and provided solutions for them.

I'm so disappointed. What do you do when you're not twiddling your thumbs? That's really incredible scope of work that you just described.

Oh, man. Well. Well, it's a joy because I see the benefit in others and it also allows me to connect because I'm a high school teacher, you know, that got trained by all these graduate student and doctoral and PhD, all these people at different levels, and farmers like you. And I'm still from that space where I'm like, oh, well, everyone's gonna need jobs, everyone's gonna need solutions to do their job. And all these people are doing good things in their own different way. I'm going to prepare my students to learn from them because they're the niche, they're the college, they're the graduate. And so I've been in this mode of aggregating to give people that foundation of comprehension to understand you, John, to understand the applications that you're doing.

Well, I think. Okay, so let's dig into this, Matt, because I think you're more than just an aggregator like we have. We, I think you and I, in many ways share a common set of inspirational teachers, of heroes, of people that we admire. People who have been innovative pioneers like Olivier Husson and like James White and like Jerry Pollack and people who. Yeah, people who have really pushed the envelope of our understanding in the domain of biophysics and biochemistry to. To establish a foundation for a completely new type, a completely different type of agronomy, a completely different way of thinking about plants and ecosystems. And, you know, when you take the insights from these different pioneers and you bring them Together, you invariably, you come up with your own insights. And so I know you've interviewed these people and you've had them on your show and your work. I've interviewed them, they have published information that's available online. And it would be awesome to get into some of the conversations about what we've learned from them. What I would really, the question I really want to ask you is as you've been on this journey, what have been your own unique insights? What has, what has emerged from you that was kind of a composite of everything that you've learned from other people? What has been your contribution? And don't say you don't have any.

Thank you for that. Well, you know, it's really interesting is in the process of aggregating, in the process of mapping things micro to macro, I have come across contradictions, come across exceptions, ranges of expression for things. And so I've been able to push the science in different places a lot further. And like for instance, effective microbes, they're primarily Streptomyces when you're talking about the actinobacteria, but mostly yeast, lactic acid bacteria, and then purple non silver bacteria and specifically Rhodosodomonis plustris. I did DNA testing on like the best composts, but all the compost. So Johnson, sue and hot compost from, you know, Elaine Ingham's top students, commercial compost, like wormies and all the best compost has the, the microbes that are in em in them. And so one of my early on mentors, she had said, you know, em, they're all anaerobic, they're terrible, they're bad. Meanwhile, the compost she's like pointing to which is like the one has it in it.

Yeah, exactly.

And so I was able to fig to, to do a lot of myth busting. I was able to. And then what happened was I got into microscopy and I don't know what happens in laboratories. Maybe common sense gets like left at the door. But there's so much that happens in laboratories that you're like, hey buddy, why don't you slow down and repeat what you just said aloud? Because if they just said it aloud, they, they would like realize how dumb some of these things are. So one of the things I figured.

Out is maybe they develop microscope vision instead of tunnel vision.

Right, right. Yeah. And so because I, I come from the aggregator perspective, I tend to see through the silos. And so you have these, these folks that are, when they're doing, when they're doing counting, when they're doing multiplication and trying to get numbers for soil. They're either tamping down to 1mL where they're compacting it, losing the air, or they're displacing it, filling up the water and displacing it, which is more efficient at getting rid of the air. And then they're counting those numbers as if a sandy soil where there's no real air, it's already compacted and this like really loamy compost or really loamy soil, as if they're the same volume of space. And so you have all these people doing this. And then in the laboratory it's even worse. They're like, let's bake the soil first and remove its structure and moisture and shrink the biology. So it goes past the ability for light microscopy to see because you can shrink when you remove the moisture, you shrink the microbes and past a thou a thousand X, they can't see anything. So they're like skewing the results before they even look at it. And then they're weighing out a gram. Different soils are going to weigh different amounts. And so, and then they like multiply and scale it up to the acre. And so I was like, oh, like you can never do this properly unless you do ratios. And I realized, because other branches of science, they don't count all the fish in the sea, they don't count all the sharks, they establish a ratio, you know, the wolves and the elk ratios. And so, because then you can scale it to any context and compare.

Right.

You know, and so I, I, I have been bringing common sense like that to microscopy lately and soil testing lately, and it's been amazing, just the benefit.

Of a fresh perspective. So what have been the insights that came out of that?

So, so for instance, a lot of people, well, I'll be talking about it later today in a, in a, in a webinar about how I really started on this. Well, we had a lab, a commercial lab in Europe that was given a sample and another soil food web certified lab was given another soil sample and they gave completely different recommendations. And because this whole multiplying from a small sample set up to a large sample set, without understanding that, you went, it's like taking off in a plane and being five degrees off with your calculations, you're not going to end up in North America, from Europe, you're going to end up in south or the ocean, you know, and so it's like the, when people realize how far off they can get, they, they start using other tests in addition to microscopy and using microscopy as the place where all these things play out. And so you get to see who's there, you get to see how they're interacting. But you, but you take a non definitive perspective on a lot of these things unless you establish comparison. So my whole thing is, is everyone's comparing everyone to everyone. So you're comparing Maine to Texas and all this stuff with these numbers, when in fact you need to know your soil type and compare their soil type, your crop type and your bioregion type to those ratios. And so people are finally getting clarity, finally being able to track their results in a way that's fair because, you know, the person in Maine, you know, can accrue so much solar organic matter so much faster. And then the person you know in Texas looks at them like, you know, like they don't know how it's even possible. And so by bounding testing, by having the ability to test and compared to other people that are within your own, your own type, your own crop type, your own bioregion, it gives people unique abilities. And I'm building a database to facilitate this that will eventually be public. And it's been incredible to see all these people that are trained in microscopy. I have, you know, I've got professors like Boise State, Idaho, you know, I've got this professor that was going to retire. They've been teaching microscopy for decades and now they like want, they want to keep going, they want to get into it further.

New frontier.

Yeah, yeah. And it's because I was able to take all these steps back and be like, all right, well, for instance, no one in the, you know, the soil food web world was testing for nitrogen in their compost. And it's oxidized, thermophilic, usually alkaline, unless they're doing something very, very drastic, usually with aquatic plants, in order to keep it reduced enough. So everything I test, except for one compost out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that I've tested, has ever been even approaching neutral and not acidic, approaching neutral from the alkaline side. So most of the time it's pH8. And so you have all these people adding pH8 in California to pH like 7.5 soils. And, and they're getting that nitrate boost. But then the soils overall at the end of the year aren't doing as great as they did at the beginning of the year. And so they're like, what's going on here? And they're just not looking at simple, simple tests that allow us to think in a 360 degree manner. So, so much of this gathering work has allowed me to be like, well, put on your thinking cap. Are you testing this too? Are you testing that? Are you putting these tests together? And it's been incredible to see students apply this at 200,000 acres at scale and seeing changes in the landscape, worms showing up, microbes showing up that they've never seen before. And it's amazing.

Yeah, I know. This aspect is so rewarding and so much fun to see the implementation happen in the field and to see systems change. And the fascinating piece, there's this quote, I don't recall who gets the credit for it originally, but the essence of it is that what is dangerous is not what you don't know, but what you are certain you know that isn't. So it's the false information. And this is where you mentioned a key phrase a little bit ago about myth busting. I think our own experience in our work at advancing eco agriculture has been that many cases, farmers are using proper amendments, they're using the right thing. They might be using the proper form of boron or the proper form of calcium or what have you, but they're putting it on at the wrong time and in the wrong amounts because of misinformation, because of things that they were certain were true that turned out to not be so. And the same has been true in the compost world, where there's been all this discussion about the need to have aerobic compost. So I'd love to hear your perspective from your work with microscopy and all of the rest of your work. You mentioned myth busting. What have been some of the most significant myths that you've enjoyed busting?

So this idea that you need to reinoculate every year with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, there's a lot of people paying out the nose. There's a lot of people. And even in the niche world, people are like throwing away soil and not even realizing they can make their indoor soils regenerative and just keep going. But this idea that microbes are regenerative and you can, you can verify them. So mycorrhizal fungi, people, it's expensive. And, and this is one of the reasons why farmers haven't been applying it is because they don't have any way to verify that it took. And so they're doing it every year and they're like, it costs so much. You know, I think it's working. It looks like it might be working, but I'm also doing all these other things. You know, and so they, they don't know if they can trust it. And so I think one of the biggest breakthroughs I've been able to map out for folks, because it's really their breakthrough, you know, what I mean, is mapping out how to use the epifluorescence unit on this microscope. This allows us to see our buscular mycorrhizal fungi for the first time. And it allows us to look at the inoculants before you apply them. So a lot of the inoculants are just spores, and that's not so great because you don't know when those spores are going to pop. They actually, the life cycle of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi is to live in the root while the root dies. And then, and then it waits for the next year's roots to show up. And so what's most likely to happen when a plant is putting out seed right above the soil, that it's changing? Well, it's changing the soil for next year for that seed. And so you actually have that seed putting down roots and reconnecting with last year's dead roots and reigniting, regenerating that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. And that's how it's existed in nature forever. And so these guys are applying mycorrhizal fungi. They don't even know if there's fields already have it. They might, you know, they might, you don't know. And, and, and, and so they're not testing. They're, they're buying this costly thing and they don't even know if it's spores or if it's propagules, which is those roots that are inoculated. And you can see those roots, those chunks, because they glow. And you can see their cell walls. You can see that this is a root. It's not hard. And so you can vet, whether a farmer or working for a farmer, you can vet your inoculant and quality control as well. So as it comes in, you can have someone just continually test that, make sure it's still good. And then you can apply it. And then you can show up six to eight weeks, depending on your crop. During the vegetative stage, midway or near the end of the vegetative stage, you check and depending on how big the, you know, the crop.

Matt, when you're looking at mycorrhizal fungi under the microscope and on these root systems, how long of a time window do we have after we pull the roots out of the soil? Does it, are we sensitive to a day or two. How much time do we have?

Yeah, that's a great question. Because many people who have poor soils or really fragile biology in their soil actually being fresher is better. But really good soil, really hardy, really, really vibrant soil, actually can stay years. And you can see the value still in it, though within a few months, the nematodes and the fungi will start to senesce. But when it comes to roots, it's supposed to last over winter, it's supposed to stay in the soil and stay viable. And it does every year. So just a few days in a baggie in the mail is absolutely fine. It's not going to make any difference. You can actually look at these. These roots completely dried down and they still will glow. It actually focuses the glow. The, the phosphate dries down and focuses into the center of the root. So it's all very easy to do. All very easily verifiable. And it's so hearty. So you absolutely can do that.

So, Matt, I'm trying to find the balance in our conversation here between keeping things practical and also nerding out, because I know you and I could just really go down this earthw. But let's talk about microscopy a little bit. It's my understanding and I'm. I'm not. I haven't gotten into the microscopy world, so you're welcome to tell me that I'm misinformed. But it's my understanding that what you've brought forward is very different. You've brought different lighting techniques and capabilities to the microscopy space that allow us to reveal things that have. That we have.

Yeah. So I. Everyone's doing. For a long time in microscopy, everyone was doing light from below. And so everything created a silhouette. And. And that's why you couldn't see through thick roots. You couldn't see all these things. And I asked a fundamental question, why? Which was really weird because as soon as I started lighting from different angles, I discovered that roots are actually, when we talk about, you know, they capture like. Like the plants capture light and they do photosynthesis. Not many people, they transfer light. They're actually, you know, like. They're like fiber optic cables.

No, they're not like fiber optic cables. They are fiber optic cables.

Yeah.

One of my, One of the stories that I've shared occasionally, I was, I was still. I was just starting out down this path. It was 15 or 16 years old in our local library, was awesome at getting me practically any book that I asked for. And I asked them for one of the books that I asked them for was Fritz Albert Popp's work on biophotonics. I forget the exact title, but it took about three months to get this book through interlibrary loan from Germany. And I remember just being blown away by the fact that rocks are transmitting and emitting light and that plants are collecting light and channel. Why do we have photosynthetic microorganisms down in the soil 20 inches deeper, deeper. It's because plant roots are picking up light and they're exactly like fiber optic cables.

Yeah. And I didn't, you know, I'd read about that and until I started. And there's an angle. So there's a particular angle. And when you hit it, the whole root, like a fiber optic cable, lights up. And so for pictures, it's unbelievable. It looks like National Geographic level. But no one had those images before because no one had done this. So I was able to show that, A, you could visualize roots much easier than a silhouette where you're like, I think I see what's going on. No, you actually can see what's going on. And then B, it really showed how those studies were completely true. But in a way you could show a child. You could show a child this and they'd go, oh, wow, they look like they're made of glass. And it's like, yes, yes. Roots, Plants. Plant leaves. Plant leaves are green glass. You get up closer, you know, they're bottle green color glass. And so they're capturing and transmitting that light. But they're also little glass greenhouses in a way. And so that's why they're capturing energy and being able to do something with it. And this is also why certain microbes are able to use light as well. We have this complex system that people don't understand. Sand, you know, silt, clay, they're all silicates. They conduct information and energy. But guess what they look like under the microscope? Chunks of glass. Yeah. So what happens in the sun, it conducts it down to those microbes. So. So opened up a huge, completely new way to you. And in fact, this is a prototype for a new form of lighting that LW Scientific's creating. To do this form of lighting on a compound microscope, stereo for those we're.

Recording audio only for. So can you describe a little bit what it is you're holding in your hand?

Yeah. So this is a dimmer based light that attaches around the objective of your microscope and then casts a light down around the objective from an angle. And this was, you know, didn't exist. It didn't exist. And to me, it seems so simple. But, you know, da Vinci is credited with this. But this is something I heard at a very young age. I don't know if he really said it or not, but simplicity is the greatest innovation or. No, simplicity is the greatest sophistication.

Yep.

And. And so I, I'm actually, that's what I do is I'm like, how does this actually turn into an action? How does this actually turn into a response? And so I've been able to do that, do new lighting. I was able to expose and change the way we do interpretation and microscopy in a huge way. For a long time, people are looking at the mouth parts of nematodes and, and saying, oh, you have a fungal feeder. That's good. Oh, you have this. That's good. But without. But the reality is nematodes are dimorphic. Their mouth parts change. So the food that is there or the amount of males because a female will turn into a predator if there's too many males. So all these things, they're. They're changeable. The environment itself determines the expression of the morphology. And I've been able to find this in the literature. I've been able to prove this out with my microscopy. And it really is a new way of seeing things.

All right, Matt, hang, hang on, hang on. I just want to get this through my head. You know, James White gave me something fascinating to think about when he described fuserium as being able to change from a pathogen to a beneficial symbiont based on the environment.

Yeah.

All right. That's something I can wrap my head around. Other people have talked about the changes in behavior in bacterial organ organisms being able to. Apparently we would call it changing species based on their environment.

E. Coli, that E. Coli is called the universal chassis in the GMO world. And so they're literally taking up pathogenic virulent genes from the environment, and then they're having virulence, and then now they're pathogenic. We call them that species, but really they're. They're interchangeable between those species. It's a different paradigm. Yeah.

So this may want ho wrote a beautiful book titled Living with the Fluid Genome. You think about genetic fluidity, it's. It's pretty incredible. But what you just said, I mean, okay, we're talking about bacteria and fungi, but now you just said the same thing about nematodes, that nematodes can change their morphology and change from a beneficial fungal feeder to a. What we would designate a Pathogenic root feeder based on the environment, if I heard you correctly.

Right. And they both have, they both have stylets. So they both have that spear. So we're talking about the thickening of the spear and nodules at the base and the muscles forming around that. And so it's. And then, and then people are, are seeing these things, literally just develop teeth. That's what it means to be a predator. So they go from a non predator to forming teeth and then suddenly becoming a predator. So these are fundamental changes. And the craziest part about this is they don't know. They know food, they know male pressure. But there's also a third instance where they have no idea what caused the change. So they've detected this change happening. And I suspect these microbes have the sense of taste or smell that allows them to have predictive behavior, to anticipate the changes in the overall environment of the microscopic space they're in, which makes sense.

Environment determines genetic expression. Change the environment and everything else changes, doesn't it? Yes, everything changes.

Yes.

Wow. All right, let's go.

And it's within and without. So with us, it's, it's. We get, we get information from outside, but it's our, our gut biome that is literally within us, changing our own genetic expression as well. So it's within and without. And these microbes are in this chain, this feedback loop. So the E. Coli that is commensal in our plants is also in our gut. And so it's. Where did it come from? Well, it starts in the soil. It's in the compost. It's inside the plant, and it's inside us. It's actually an information feedback loop with the world around us.

Well, if we want to take it one step further, and I think we should in this conversation, you and I, and that is for those of. You can't see Matt, he's bouncing around on the balls of his feet. The. Within our, with our, within our internal microbiome and the way our body regulates itself is that it responds to our emotions, our thoughts and intentions. Like we, we create our reality and our microbiome and our, that is, that's really a reflection of our thought world as much as it is an expression of our physical world or perhaps even more so.

Yeah. Epigenetically, we, if, if you, if two people are imprisoned in a POW camp, the one that believes they're doomed is probably going to get sick and die. But the one that doubles down on their faith, the one that turns to God in those time Periods, Those are the ones who invariably survive. And, and they're incredible stories. But that's the truth is that our. We have so much control. You could be convinced that what you're eating is poison. And guess what? It could be good food and it's poisoning you.

Yeah, well, that's, that's a key point is if we go through life and we become obsessive about all the bad things that are in our food, we know the dirty doesn't list and we know about every pesticide. Like, I went through this. There was a period of time I studied the mechanisms, the modes of actions of different pesticides very deeply, and I was very familiar with molds and mycotoxins, everything. You could put a plate of food in front of me and I could unharness that thing from one end to the other and tell you about all the things that were probably very detrimental. And if you live like that, guess what? Your health is going to crash. And I had to consciously shift into a different, into a perspective of gratitude and appreciation. And guess what? Your body responds. You can, gratitude and appreciation can overcome so much of the damage that we might inflict on ourselves.

And we really are in, in a very real way, empowering the microbes in our gut to, to process these things in, in an efficient way. It's, it's profound. And so I, I've been able to map out a huge portion of this cycle, you know, and that's why Mind, Body and Soil is a book that after I'm done with the Regenerative Soil trilogy, I'm going to write, I'm going to start interviewing doctors and do that whole thing. But what's crazy is it's like we're seeing this already play out. I, I think of, you know, Dr. Allen, you know, from Eco Ag, talking about how these fungal numbers are directly linked to these health numbers in the beef, which is directly linked to our health.

Right. And it's one continuum.

Yes, yes, one continuum.

We are, we are not at the apex of a pyramid. We are a part of the continuum.

Yeah, yeah. And actually we're a sensor in the whole system. And so we're like a sensor in the wheel as these things go through and we can see, you know, the contamination, or lack of contamination through our own health.

My goodness. All right, which earthworm hole are we going to climb back out of? Let's go back down into the microscopy. Earthworm hole.

Yeah.

A little bit ago you spoke about being able to measure mycorrhizal fungi colonization. And I know this is a challenge. So two questions. One is, how is that different from what you've been describing so far, with different lighting and so forth? And then the second question is, how accessible is microscopy? How difficult is it to learn? And how much time does it take for average farmer John Kemp, who has way too many projects and not enough time?

So the crazy thing about this is the universities were making this whole, you know, ritualistic behavior around doing all this stuff. So they had stains, they had all this stuff. This is an LED light. I pull out the arm, I take the root, and I put it underneath, and I look at it on the 4K camera, and I just scan the whole thing. And arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, when it's properly inoculated, inoculates the entire root. So this is a best practice. A lot of people have been trained to do transplants and then throw the inoculant on it. And, boy, you're going to use up a lot of money. You're going to use up a lot of inoculant. But the reality is, if you dust it on your actual seed, it stays in tandem with the growth. And you can see this with the micro microscope the whole time.

So, Matt, you're an experienced microscope user. You have it set up right behind you. That's why Matt's audio is going out a little bit. He's turning around to pet his toy. And you're an experienced microscope user. You're very familiar with it. Somebody gives you a root sample, how long does it take you to identify whether it's colonized with mycorrhizae or not?

Minutes. It's really so easy. The thing is, you can teach this to kids because it glows like someone painted it with a highlighter. And then it has the fungi, the hyphae, and the spores. And really what you want to see is all three stages. So you want to see the highlighter yellow, yellowish green, that is actually phosphate. And so. And it's a little bit of nad, too, which is funny, because people are like, nad. Guess it's that nad pretty wild. We love amf, don't we? You know, the plants certainly do. And so that. But that highlighter green is indicative that it's doing its job. And it's phosphate being delivered. And it starts on the ring around the cell. It goes around the cell and it circles. It circles for you. And so you can see it very easily beginning. And then the whole thing becomes so bright, you got to turn your brightness down. That's when you know you have a full inoculation when it's so bright and it's the whole root, anyone can do that. It's just a light, there's no stain. And it's so powerful, it's so simple. It's the easiest form of microscopy actually because it's so big, it's physical, you know what I mean? It's not like we're doing a drop, we're mixing it up and then we're putting it on and then we're doing the thing and then we're scanning up and down looking for nematodes. Testate amoebae. That's another thing that I was able to show that you want testate amoebae. The best combos have testate amoebae because they have a shell that protects them. And guess what? The naked amoebae, they're also overlapping with the pathogenic amoebae. And the most common ones are found in soil and water here in the south. And they're the brain eating ones. So testate with a shell, they're non pathogenic and they're in all the best compost in all the really good, healthy soils. You might see a naked amoebia once in a while, but it's that kind of clarity that I've really been able to bring. Stepping away from the multiplication, the counting multiplication, and also de emphasizing counting, I developed a way that with stain you can compare like the good to the, to the bad with yours in the middle, so that you can actually see numeracy. Because if we put 50 marbles, 200 marbles, 500 marbles on tables, a small child can tell you which is greater. We can do the same thing with bacteria, we can do the same thing with stains. Because even if the biology is not being able to be seen perfectly and it's swimming and just past your, your vision on the microscope, you can stain for it and they will absorb it. So we can create a color code because, you know, Salvita is color coded. All the, you know, all the, the spectrometer stuff's color coded. Color is actually very important. So you can color code this out for the first time and see the things that are unseen by letting them absorb or not absorb the dye. So I've encountered all these limitations in microscopy, but I've been able to use DNA testing to see past and then figure out what's best and what's silly. There's a lot of people that did things that were terribly silly in microscopy.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, I think the way that I've described it is that for a long time it has been more art than science. And I'm not, not just referring to microscopy generally, but the, the art of managing soil biology in general because I mean we didn't have DNA sequencing a decade ago.

Yeah. And also let me just reveal something fundamental about DNA sequencing. If you look at the time spent on the actual extraction on the machine, you'll notice that they do it for only a short period of time. I did my first run for 23 hours and I had to dump everything off the computer, had to like erase apps to keep it going and stripped everything off because it filled my whole computer with this one file. And it was shocking when I got to the end of it because I had over half million reads from, you know, a fraction of, a fraction of a fraction of a drop of diluted compost. And, and I just was kind of so shocked by my numbers. And then I realized no one had been willing to pay because what I did with it, I burned through a whole. Yeah, it's a twelve hundred dollar thing. I burned through. They're wanting to use that twelve hundred dollar thing for multiple research projects. So they do it for like an hour and then they're like, this is the biology. Meanwhile, I stopped it at 23 hours and there were still new ones showing up. And so our understanding is limited by our understanding of the research, our understanding of the context. And so, so much of what I'm doing is getting people to step back and be like, listen, you can't count and multiply up from that drop to an acre because this is your context, this is the range of expression, this is how possibly off you are. And what we need to do is you need to have all these other forms of testing to balance that. And, and, and, and, and also comparative testing. I'm all about comparative testing. And that's why I'm. My whole database, the RSOL database is rolling out. We've got a team of seven people involved. It is going to be amazing and it's going to allow farmers to showcase before and after with the actions they took in the middle. So it'll be like actions. Biocode Gold, baby. And then, and then they'll show the result. And it will benefit aea, but it'll also benefit Terraganics. It'll also benefit Green.

It'll show reality. I think it'll do. The vision that I have is being able to make data informed decisions. Yes. To know two things. One is to know whether applying any product might be beneficial or not. And B, to identify with some degree of precision which products are most likely to be beneficial. Yeah.

And the amount of the same thing.

We'Re doing with SAP analysis, I mean, we get a SAP analysis result back. We don't accidentally apply extra levels of manganese because we think we have low zinc. And we don't have that same degree of precision with biology yet. But that's coming.

It really is. And the crazy thing about biology is it's so forgiving because, I mean, think about when, when I'm talking about yeast lactic acid bacteria and purple non sulfur bacteria. Those are plant endophytes. That's the reason they were in Elaine Ingham's compost.

That's the reason these words are too familiar to your tongue. So I don't think anyone understood purple non sulfur bacteria the two times you said it. So I'm repeating it slowly.

Okay, so purple non sulfur bacteria, we're specifically talking about a very special one called Rotosano minus palustris. And R. Palustris is short. If you want to look for it in the literature. They'll probably put R dot palustris. This microbe feeds four different ways. When you were talking at Eco Ag about, about photosynthesis, I didn't want to derail because you were 10 minutes to the end, but I wanted to add that Rhoda, Sodomonas palustris, this purple not sulfur bacteria has been found in the chloroplast inside plant leaves, photosynthesizing alongside the plant.

Isn't that incredible? Yeah, that's amazing.

It's these plants that, these microbes that are doing the digestion for the plant. Inside the plant, lactic acid bacteria turns, you know, nitrates into amino acids. Yeast, you know, restarts the whole process. So you have too many sugars. They're going to sop those up and turn them back into CO2 so that they can restart the process. There are studies that show that corn, up to 45% of the CO2 that they're using is from internal microbial release.

Wow, I had not heard that data point before. So I've got a really heretical question for you. We have all these various plant hormones that we call phytohormones. What's the possibility that they're mostly synthesized by microbes?

I think it's very high. Because what happens, and we can think about it from a problem solving perspective, right? When you apply those plant hormones, you see this, like immediate reaction, right? That means that that would have happened if those Things were actually there. So there's a mechanism that creates those plant hormones, and the plants that are sick don't have it. But we know the highest levels of plant health, secondary metabolites, all those things that are created when they're healthy are dependent upon the microbes.

Well, we now have this whole group of microbes that we've designated as PGPRs, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria. Why? Because they synthesize phytohormones. And when we recognize that the historical research that suggests that plants produce these phytohormones completely ignored the presence or they never accounted for and they never measured whether there were active microbes in the plants. And we now know that there's quite a high probability that there actually were. And so all of a sudden it starts raising the question, well, all right, maybe plants do have the ability to synthesize these phytohormones, but what proportion of what they respond to do they actually reproduce? And what proportion are produced by the biology? I have quite a suspicion that the significant majority is synthesized by biology, not by the plants themselves.

Well, are you the microbes that are inside you or are they foreign?

Well, exactly, that's the question. It's like we know, we know that our bodies have, what is it, like, 10 times more bacterial cells than we have human cells? The same thing is true of plants. We've got more. We've got more microbial cells inside plants than we have plant cells. When are we going to begin accounting for them?

Yeah, when are they going to stop being seen as foreign? I think it's a legacy thing from. It's a legacy hangover from the, the germ theory, the idea that that bacteria is bad, that we need things clean and sterile because it's exactly the opposite. Good health is abundant with microbes.

Let's get that. Maybe we need to put compost on the shelves of all of the other hospitals and Staph aureus would no longer survive anyway. Sidebar microscopy. How accessible, how affordable is the optimal microscope setup?

Yeah, I will answer that. I want to first answer the idea of how easy this is, or I started to, but. But the whole thing is so much easier than people realize. What's happened with microscopy is people have made it complex. And I think it's to keep people out and to keep people like, convinced that the work they're doing is super hard so that they get respect or something, or get a kick out of it. I don't know. But there's a lot of sciences like this where they use language as a way to separate, as a way to like silo, you know, that information and microscopy.

I'd like to just respond to that. I think there are benefits in using precise language when communicating with other scientists. They allow you to communicate things more easily. But when you're commuting to a, not communicating to a non scientific audience, you have to make it accessible. And boy, my goodness, have we really failed at that in the agricultural community.

And I think it's also comprehension. If you actually truly comprehend something, you can explain it to a child. And so a lot of these people comprehend their piece and that's not like really deep understanding and that's also limiting that science in general and that person in general. So the microscope, way easier to use than people realize. The microscope, there's, there's such a simplicity to it. You're simply shining a light from above or below or from the side or at an angle and you're sharpening it with a rough focus and a fine focus and then you're controlling how much light is passing through the condenser and that's it. It's really that simple. It's not hard and accessibility wise it's gotten way more accessible. So the bright field, the light microscope, you can get those things for under a thousand dollars and have it be priced pro. You know, you can really do that now. You can get a portable one like a revelation with one of the discounts. Like my students get up to 40 off right now on LW scientific microscopes, specific ones and up to 37 on all their gear. So you can do that with Brightfield. But the microscope that has the LED epiflorescence is this is the only one in the world. Right now they're using mercury halide lamps in universities and these microscopes traditionally were up to $30,000. Now they're starting to come down in price. You can get one for like 15,000. This one, you know, it's close to 7,000 with all the parts and pieces, but you can get $3,000 off if you are my student. And, and, and so, so it, that's incredibly like an incredible deal. It's way more affordable than what it once was. And we're at a cusp moment where those farmers, they really need a way to see the inoculants so that they can trust that it's good and then.

It'S something for farmers. But yeah, but also for agronomists and crop scouts. I mean this thing doesn't need this device, doesn't need to be limited to one farm.

Oh yeah, no, this is so easy to use and it's so simple that you could be using it over and over and over again for the whole community. It could be part of a community lab. And because it's so easy to use, the person's not going to be on there for two hours looking at their roots. They're going to go through their roots and do their work and then be done. And then the following year, after you verified that it was 100% inoculation, you can show up to that same farmer or that farmer can go take it to that community lab and then verify. Yeah, I don't need to add this ever again if I continue doing good practices because it's now regenerative. So they, the, the, the, if they treated that soil right, they put a cover crop in immediately after they, they crimped or tilled in or whatever they did to, to transition between crops. If they put a cover crop in, that AMF will bond to that new crop and then carry you through. And then, you know, at the end of the winter, whether it's snowed down or you crimp it down, it'll be in the roots. And then the next year when you prepare it, you plant in that and it will meet the, those propagules and it will be regenerative, just like rhizobia is. All farmers know. You do rhizobia, once it's bulletproof, it's going to be there next year, it's going to create those nodules. You're going to be good. It can be that too. But you can't put down phosphate fertilizer in large amounts. You can't do, do some of the things that you used to do, you know, those farmers used to do and, and maintain it. But this role, this getting farmers to be regenerative is a critical role that farmers can do themselves, that soil consultants can take on and help. But it's something that we're going to do as a transition. And once it's there, it can be up to 30 to 40% more yield. The drought resistance, the secondary metabolite boost the difference in flavor, the difference in size, the difference in yield. It covers the whole spectrum. Because, and this is why this is one of the most important aspects of this work that I'm doing. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi co evolve with all plants. So, so the 90 plus percent of plants that are arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, there's like 5 to 7 that are ecto. You know, those plants that evolve with AMF don't have prior ancestors for AMF, don't have prior ancestors of themselves. AMF was there the whole time, right? So there's no, we have no records, there's no time that we can ever detect where they were separated. So they rely upon each other and they have always been there. They, you know, depending on what you believe, they were meant. They were designed. They were, they are meant to be together when we return nature to itself, to the actual way that it evolved or was designed, depending on, you know, this.

What you're saying in essence is there is a true dependency relationship here, an interdependency.

Right. And that's why I believe it is the. It is the greatest point of like. Like it is going to shift everything because, I mean, people have been trying compost, they've been doing cover crops, they're doing all these great things and we're getting better at the compost, Right? You know, the people are still, people are still selling anaerobic, terrible vermicompost and people are still applying it at scale.

Scale.

It's unbelievable. I don't know how this is still happening, but this is such an easy win. It's going to be something that we do and we figure out and it's done. So. So I really value it. I think it's probably, probably the greatest aspect of the contribution that I can give is this, this aspect, this micro. Bringing this back, bringing it into the foreign, a way that's verifiable so that people can finally trust upon it and then get it to its regenerative and then we're done, you know, so let's talk about compost.

It's funny that you started going into that because that was exactly the next place that I had in mind to, to go. You've now developed this very different perspective or very different way of looking at the microbial communities within compost and within soil. And you made a comment a little bit ago that out of the thousands of samples you've looked at, you had one that was not at. At a particularly alkaline PH level. We know we understand more about Redox today than at least than I did half a dozen years ago with Olivier Husson's work. Just, just gelling all of that down, condensing it down to the bottom line. Summary. What have you found to truly be the, the consistently winning types of compost?

Johnson said 100% Johnson sue. And the reason is because Johnson sue combines everything. So it's the hot compost at the beginning, but then it's also vermicompost. But it's also grandma's static compost because you're not turning it. So it's always the most fungal. And I would. I would put a caveat on this. So Johnson sue is the best, but most people don't know that there's a level above. And that level above is tailoring that Johnson sue compost to the exact site. So do that. So it's. It's. It's pretty wild. So in my book, I talk about how you add the minerals in organic forms to the compost and then you arrive at the right. You know, you arrive with it embedded. Todd Harrington has been doing biology testing with a microscope alongside parts vermilion testing since the 90s. And when we first met, 10 minutes into it, he leans and goes, I do ratios, too. And we became like instant friends. Instant. It was amazing. He looked at the book and was like, oh, you know. And so he. He's been doing this the whole time. And so he literally feeds the microbes the exact. And he prefers to get ferments and do natural processes for releasing the nutrients, but then he feeds them to the microbes in the exact amounts to get the parts per million in the. The compost tea or extract that he'll be applying to the field to be correct per acre. So it's not like it's part here and then goes down the field and it's diluted. No, no, no. It's at high enough levels here to dilute it and go out in the field and have. Be correct. And he says you have to be very careful because this can be dangerous, because you can go too far with certain minerals and kill things because certain sites can be so depleted. Right. That you have to go so high in those minerals.

Thinking of boron and copper and stuff like that, that has a biocidal effect.

Yeah, right, right. So. So he's like, you have to be careful, but you feed exact minerals and nutrients and then you get the partial million. Right. And then what you do is you plant the plants that you're intending to grow in the top of that compost.

There you go. That's the piece I was waiting for.

Yeah, it's.

You can't have mycorrhiza or a whole bunch of other stuff without living roots.

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you know, it can be in the compost and you can be distributing it because the exodus. And you inoculated it. That's great. But I still think it's a best practice to inoculate the seed so you have the guaranteed relationship the whole time, at least for a first season, like your first season cover crop, add it with the rhizobia, you know, do that whole thing. But, but yeah, no, I, I, I, I, I, I value this so much.

So I, I kind of cut you off a little bit there. You started saying you need to plant the plants into it that you're planning to.

Right.

Plant in the field, the exact crop. So you're, you're, in effect, you are creating, you're concentrating the microbiome that you then want to distribute it to support the crop that you're growing. What if you take a different perspective? And what if you, what if you plant the plants that are the noxious weeds that you want to get rid of?

Well, then you'll steer it that direction. So, for instance, I got, you know, Mike, Amaranthus, the godfather of mycorrhizal fungi, the person who created the first company, the first inoculants. He, his last name is Amaranthus, and he was lamenting that fact. And I commensurate, commiserated with him because my first viral video, and it's still my top video, I think is on amaranth. And amaranth is just terrible for soil. So it's going to drive things, it's going to oxidize things, it's going to release hydroxide, it's going to, you know, it's pigweed, right? The farmers, you know, it's, it's literally there to just make your day hard. And, and same thing with like, shard beets, kapodia, you know, all these things that are going to release quarter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're gonna, they're gonna release things that set you back. So, so yeah, you can totally go the wrong direction. Unless they're reparative weeds. Sometimes, hey, you've got lupin, sometimes you've got, you know, good weeds, reparative weeds that are from the natural biome, that aren't invasive, that are good, that are doing something that you normally would maybe got vetch growing. I had vetch wild, you know, below Yosemite in California, growing. So it's like, I'm not going to remove you. That's you're doing great. And so, so, yeah, no, that's what I would say to that.

So the historical perspective that I've been exposed to is that all weeds are reparative. All weeds are there to solve a problem. So you're telling me that's not the case.

Yeah. So, so when we look at invasive plants in California is like the best example. Look at yellow mustard. What's it doing? It's releasing that gluc. Glucone. Glucosinates.

Glucosilonate.

Yeah, yeah. And that is literally killing the fungi which is, and it's going into the forests and then it's shifting the entire ph and of the system because they're getting rid of the fungi. So it's automatically becoming more alkaline and then it's, it's, you know, we use yellow mustard and brown mustard in remediation but also biofumigation or nematodes. So, so all the nematodes on top of all the fungi, all these things are being removed. And so you have a sterilized, not purely sterilized, it's bacterial but this essentially partially sterilized soil emerging. And then the oak chaparral is senescing. You got all, all these problems happening. Phytophora is taking over inside the forest of California. So yeah, there's just like people and you know, just like some animals are terribly disruptive. You know, you take the toad and you bring it to Australia, it's like terrible, you know, and so, or the rabbit in Australia. So I, I, I love plants, I love, you know, nature. But we have to keep our, our thinking caps on and recognize that not all plants are beneficial. And I, you know, I, I feel that it's, it's an emotional, we want to, to be perfect, we want every plant to be good because we, we respect life, we respect creation and, but there's also a give and take, there's also lessons in this, you know.

So I want to ask you a different question about mustards and nematodes. Previously you spoke about how nematodes can change morphology. So I've got a field and pick a random spot, Arizona or California that is dominated with intense nematode pressure. And you're telling me that the optimal tool is not to use mustard. So from your perspective how you are approaching this biological management, how would you suggest approaching reducing nematode pressure?

So something that's, I'll do this a couple different routes. So there's a longer route and there's a shorter route. You can attack them directly or you can start changing the environment and change them. So to attack, attack them directly naturally and just shift them out, you could use oyster mushrooms or other polypore mushrooms and you literally, if your salinity is still in bounds because sometimes adding oyster mushroom blocks or any mushroom blocks will Will move your salinity up. So test the companies.

Many of these, yeah, many of these oils already have high salinity.

So you want to make sure that this is not an issue. But literally you can go to these mushroom companies, these mushroom farms, and they will have so many of these mushroom blocks. And literally it's woody organic material or it's digested seeds. It is highly nutritious organic matter that is filled with nematocidal fungi that doesn't have to be alive or dead.

Right.

It literally can just be a dead. And it comes into contact and kills the nematode. So you could till that into your fields. You could, you could. And you can even feed it to your livestock and deworm your livestock from intestinal worms, not heartworm. So, so you could be using this in the field. And that's, you know, a way that you could turn someone's waste product into a benefit for you and have like, you know, your, your costs not. Not be through the roof. And what's wild about this is within days of killing all those nematodes, you have a surge of beneficial nematodes appear. And this has been seen in studies. And it's just part of secession. They, they these otherwise because oyster mushrooms, turkey tail polypore mushrooms are literally everywhere in nature in environments filled with nematodes, like vibrant forests. So there's always a give and take. There's always a. You know what I mean? It breaks down first, but then it gets broken down.

And so that's the, that's the big stick approach. What's this, what's the smaller. What's the conversion approach?

The conversion approach. And I would, I would say you have to do this too, but this takes longer. You gotta find why that's happening. There's a symptom, there's a reason why that's happening. So called irrigation water.

That's very saline.

So you have to track down why it's happening. And there. It could be the salinity levels. It also could be that, that that field has been traditionally managed for so long that you've got an infection. I know that there were people in Oklahoma. I had a student helping someone who had root, not nematode. And it had this whole field and they kept trying to treat it, they kept trying this caustic things. And it's like. Yeah, but the thing causing that, the conditions of your soil itself have not changed. So. And also they're planning the same thing every year. No cover crop. You know what I mean? No, there's no release you know what I mean? So it's going to stay locked in position. So I would say identify the lack and then start moving everything up into coherence. And it really. We've talked about coherence. You're the person I originally learned that term from. And, and it really is throughout. It's like, do you have all the soil food web members? Are they in the proper ratios? Because I see people say they've got the right ratios, except it looks like their bacteria is bottoming out. And that's, that's the actual feeding base for everything. And this is why, you know, at the end of the season, you've got like, we were just talking about Fazarium. There are blights, late season blights of all sorts that are actually good friends of the plant for the whole season up until then. And why? Well, the sun angles a little bit lower, photosynthesis is dropping off, and now there's not enough photosynthetic sugars to feed those bacteria to have the endobacteria inside that, that, that potential pathogen to feed it. And so just like Dr. James White taught me, if a fungi has enough endobacteria, it's not pathogenic. But if it's lacking its endobacteria, it can change pathogenic.

So, Matt, what have been your most rewarding experiences? What are some of the highlights? What are some of the memorable moments that really stand out for you?

I think some of the most memorable moments are seeing people in my course go, aha. Because the thing is, you can't predict what those will be. As an educator, we're facilitating those. So I set up it all so that they've got this, this comprehension, they've got these tools, they've got these lenses. I give them these case studies, I show them these how to use things and how to analyze. But it's that moment when the student has that breakthrough. Like, I had a student realize that, that, you know, the beer yeast that I'm talking about with Saccharomyces cervicia, that is arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, that it's ushering in lager yeast, ushers in ecto. And this student had an epiphany in the middle of class over this and really.