John Kempf discusses seeds as carriers of rich microbial communities (e.g., corn seeds reportedly contain ~7–9 billion microorganisms) and argues that planting diverse plant families (especially diverse cover crops) will introduce a wider range of seed-associated microbiomes, producing more resilient, nutrient-efficient, and disease-suppressive soil microbiomes.
Chapters
When I was at Rape Clark's last summer, having a conversation with Christine Jones, there were a number of other very inspiring people there as well. Walter Goldstein was there, James White was there. And there's this one topic of conversation that came up that in some ways wasn't a surprise, but still, the implications gave me a lot to think about. And in this conversation, Dr. White made the comment that a corn seed contains between 7. If I remember correctly, it was between 7 and 9 billion microorganisms. So we have a corn seed that is loaded with all of these tiny. We know there's bacterial endophytes, there's fungal endophytes, and there are microalgae algae endophytes as well. Perhaps I would expect it's reasonable for us to expect that we'll discover more as time goes on. So all of a sudden, what this means is we need to begin thinking about our seeds as vectors of microbial communities. We need to begin thinking about seeds as microbial inoculants. So if we want to build a diverse and robust soil microbiome that is disease oppressive, that increases nutrient availability, that has all these beneficial effects, the best way to accomplish that is to plant seeds from diverse, different plant families. So here I illustrated a corn seed. But if you have grasses, such as small grains, let's say it's reasonable to expect that there's going to be some microbiome overlap between a rye seed and a wheat seed, for example, perhaps significant overlap, we're about to find out here this coming year. But you can expect to have a very different microbiome between a small grain and between a plant in the rose family or in the Daze family. So when you, when you combine cover crops from very different families, you include flax and you include safflower, and you include some of the more unusual cover crops, you're going to end up with a much more diverse microbiome that is much more resilient to and is much more effective at delivering nutrients to plants in all kinds of challenging conditions, nutrients and water. So one of the foundational pieces as we think about developing our soils and soil microbiomes going forward is we have to look at having a diversity of plant species so that we have from different families, so that we have a diversity of microbiome that has greater inherent resilience.
