Soil Fertility & the Phenomena of Plant Development | Independent Austrian Researcher Harriet Mella

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate soil health and plant health, that regenerate ecosystems, that regenerate the economic health of farmers, and ultimately that also regenerate public health as well. My guest for today's episode is Harriet Mello, who I am absolutely delighted to have here and to introduce to all of you. Harriet is one of those rare individuals who is very widely read in all the different fringe sciences that connect to agronomy and to agriculture and was able to connect the dots in a really beautiful way. I've known Harriet for a number of years and I've really enjoyed the conversation that we have had talking about all the different science areas. So today is going to be an awesome conversation. Hang on to your hats. You're probably going to hear about 20 things that you've never heard about before and you will enjoy every minute of it. So Harriet, thank you for being here. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and the context of your growing experiences and some of the things that you're fascinated by and that you're working on?

Hi John, thanks for having me on the podcast. So I think if I try to find the one major line of all my agronomical experiences, it's taste, simply taste. I have been with 18, I've spent a year in Australia woofing and that's where I have been on the vegetable farm of Deadlift Fredericks, Brisbane, in the area of Brisbane. And I have come in contact with fantastic vegetable taste. And so afterwards, when I got back home, some years passed and I started to put together a self sufficient garden. Nothing tasted well at all and the beans were stringy and everything. Nothing worked basically. And I had grown up with a garden crazy mother on a sandy soil. And here I was on a very silty compacted soil and just nothing worked. Nothing. And at first I thought it's a question of modern varieties. So this is when I went on the quest for heirlooms. And after having fiddled around with them for some years, I realized that there is another part to the story. And this is how I got into culture methods. And eventually I stumbled over the materials of Master Cho, this Korean natural farming. And I had picked up at that time already a cooperation with Mark Christensen in New Zealand about hallowed tomatoes which were screened for the highest values of this orange lycopene, this Tetrarcy's lycopene, which is absorbed easier in the intestinal tract and apparently powerful metabolite against cancer. They were working with prostate cancer at that time. And we were looking at tremendous variations in the content of this metabolite in the tomatoes. This is how I got transferred to John Kemp by Mark. And so I began to connect the dots between the things I knew from university, from biology, transferring them or connecting them to the field experiences I got. And slowly and slowly improving the product of my garden so my children would start to eat it as well and not say, oh, mama, can't you go to the supermarket and buy some pumpkins there?

So when you approach plant development from the perspective of taste and flavor, you described how you worked with heirloom tomatoes and some of these varieties, But I know that you've also done some work with breeding, or perhaps breeding is not the right word, but you've made some observations about changes in epigenetic expression and how plants begin expressing themselves differently when they have optimal nutrition and are supported with a healthy microbiome. Can you tell us a little bit about what you have observed there and what you've experienced?

Yeah, actually, I have some breeding projects with heirlooms around. I've been working with peas, you know, this very large snow piece, 16 centimeter long pods, these things. And pumpkins, that's my favorite ones. But the biggest change of perception I had in the last years was how powerful epigenetic modifications are in heirlooms especially. I mean, I have also had some. Some hybrids around. But the problem with the hybrids is that they're not allowed to learn. They cannot pass on the experience they make with the spot and the conditions they're growing at to the next generations. So many things that you can observe in helms, if you repeat or reproduce them for several generations, you will never see in a hybrid. So I am extremely surprised because I do not find anything about that. About two things. One is the vividness. A plant deals with the triggers that come from the outside. For example, solar tracking. If you have heirlooms that are reasonably happy and they have microbes around their roots, you will see leaf movements that you have never seen before. If you have, for example, leaves with single leaflet, the patio between the leaflets will bend in itself towards the light to catch it. You see the whole leaf move up and down. You see petioles move, and this is in both directions. You have avoidance, for example, of light, depending on the inner metabolic state of plant. Or you have better catchment. And I was really surprised. The only thing that I found in literature about that is that A bad potassium status causes light avoidance reaction in the leaf. But all the other things and the speed and the extent of that, I've never found much about that. I found some hints in biodynamic literature where they call that plant based gestures, but not in the scientific layer. And the other thing is that I'm really surprised about is the flexibility of plant architecture depending on microbiome nutrition. And also these zodiac rhythms that are described in biodynamics nutrition. You have probably heard a lot about that from John's webinars. Like the hidden hunger 1. It is when you see, for example, the number of plant organs at one node. This is highly dependent on plant happiness or nutritional status and it changes with the generations. For example, I have seen this year the first time pumpkins that branch immediately from the node where the first leaf, the cotyledo is at. They immediately branch at both sides and immediately they produce and that branch flowers. They have flower buds there.

Wow. So they would be flowering within a few days after germination at that rate.

Yeah, if everything runs smoothly. Yeah. I was really. I thought this is impressive. Or several buds like double or even triple crown flowers. And peppers. I have seen that happening last year first.

Yeah. Peppers are one of those plants that are only supposed to have one plant or one flower per node.

No, I've seen, I have. It looks weird. You know, it is there in one row. They're not beside each other, but they're underneath each other. And as always, if something changed and the plant becomes unhappy, they just shed the flower, the additional one. So seeing it doesn't mean that you have a fruit or pumpkins with three female flowers in one node. I have never seen that before. It's just begun to appear in the last years.

So this is really intriguing. You use the expression that it looks weird and it only looks weird because it's not normal for us to see this type of expression. And I'll repeat a phrase that I've used many, many times, which is that we don't actually know what really healthy plants look like anymore because many of our crops are not supported with the nutrition in the microbiome. So what are some of the practices that you have been using to bring about these changes in epigenetic expression and to bring about this multi flowering and multi branching expression.

Wait a second. I would like to come back to that. Weird. There is developments that you look at and you perceive immediately as harmonious. You know, if it is symmetric, if it is rounded, if it is balanced, immediately look at that and you Accept it. For example, I have seen the first time, last year, eggplants with two first genuine leaves instead of one in some heirloom lines. Or this year, first pumpkin with two first genuine leaves. And this is something you really. You accept it at once when you see, for example, an eggplant with four flowers and one sits in the spot where you usually would expect it. And then you have two or three on a little stem beneath it and they just kind of stick out in a weird angle. You think this is not perfect yet, but I will see where this is going to.

So what you're describing, what you're explaining is that you believe this is a step towards a greater state, a higher state of perfection, that this is an intermediary step. I think I may have even shared on the blog some photos that we had of a grower we were working with with eggplants that had four blossoms per node that were all on the same stem. All on a single stem.

Yeah. For example, when I saw peas very often are treated like closed inflorescence. Like the number per flowers in this inflorescence is fixed full stop. And then in some years they had a tiny little stem coming up on top and you know, it was just pointing out empty, you know, just a stick. And then a third flower began to appear there afterwards. You know, so you see that this takes some generations to happen, but all of a sudden it's there. And then you see three flowers appear like they had been always there. And then on the three flower inflorescence, you see that little stick appearing on the top. So I don't have the idea anymore that this is a closed thing and that's it.

So I think this begs the question, if you are observing plants changing their expression through epigenetics from one generation to the next, what do the possibilities look like? What really is the future potential?

I think it's totally open. I mean, if you can multiply a flower per inflorescence, and if you can multiply the number of inflorescence per node, and if you can go down in the node with the time of initiation of reproduction, it's totally open.

Yeah.

And also the delay of senescence, I have seen that in the beginning or bolting. You know, in the beginning I was seeing premature bolting all the time. It was a nightmare. And then you see all of a sudden, this year, for example, we had frost until nearly now, and I've had broccoli. I put it out in the end of February. We had a very brief but very warm period. And I thought it would be like all the years before. So I put these guys out there and they were looking perfect. You know, I was really proud of them. This is also a breeding project I'd run. And then I thought, well, that's it. They're going to bolt. No, they don't. They have been hidden by frost for six weeks every night. They did not bolt.

Wow. Wow.

There. They're perfect. They're growing, they're beautiful. They're waxy. And I think, wow, I've never seen that before. So also the other end, you know, the prolongation or the resistance, sometimes it works. You know.

This reminds me of your story about the peas. And forming multiple inflorescence per node reminds me of an experience that we had with a soybean grower some number of years ago where these were actually also open pollinated genetics on soybeans. And he ended up harvesting well over 90 bushels per acre of soybeans. And the reason for the high yield was because he had a range of between 20 and 24 pods per node with nodes spaced about 2 inches apart where the normal is 2, maybe 3 pods per node. What is considered to be normal.

Also what I see is that volunteers of plants appear that in the beginning I never saw, you know, like being volunteers in our climate or soybean volunteers. I was really surprised when I got the first ones. Usually they rot away in the winter.

So these plants are actually germinating in your. You're saying that your soil expression has changed so much that these seeds are germinating there without you planting them?

Yes, some. Some beds, you know, I want to be honest. Some. I'm still, after all this observation and studying, I'm still far away to really fully understand why a certain spot is developing in one direction and the other is falling back. I have my ideas, but I'm still not controlling that to the extent I would like to honestly.

So tell us about some of your ideas. Why do you think this might be happening?

Okay. One that I've seen that it's extremely beneficial for science is senescent perennials. So if the root of multi year plants, senescence in the spot and rot in this spot, it improves the texture of the soil tremendously. Like parsnips or carrots or whatever, you know, when, when you are a seed gardener, of course you replicate them in the second year. And the best improvement of a bed I've ever seen was after a parsnip crop that I just left. I took the tops off and I left the parsnips in the soil to rot over winter. And in the spring I was there with this black earth teeming with worms, structure perfect everything. I thought, wow, that was one experience that made me really change. And for example, when I did the carbon course and I had a look at the material of Christine Jones, she is propagating that idea to saying that perennials, even if you cultivate them only as an annual, for example, in green manures, they will change a lot in the soil because they have just. Or I have read a lot about that now, they do different exudate patterns, they have different root setup and all this. So they are very, very important for soils.

So I want to go back to the question that we missed when we were talking about weird or about the changes in expression. What have you shifted and changed in your growing conditions to bring about these changes in expression?

I think the main overall change is that I got rid of the very bad compaction that I used to have in the beginning and that I intuitively have sequestered carbon. That's the second. The third is that I have begun to play with lithobiont microbes as Annie Francais recommends it I've just tried. The fourth is that I have changed the way I compost or I got the hang of it a bit eventually. And I think one very important practice too was to begin with folio feeding. And what I have done since the beginning is to work with these zodiac rhythms as I had picked up from the Fredericks. And of course I have now and then worked with the biodynamic preparations. He always said, oh, keep doing it, keep doing it. You know, it takes a couple of years until it. Until you will see the effect, but keep going with it. So I have done it and in the end it's the problem that you very often do not know exactly what has produced that shift and if it's possible to produce the shift with a single method, or if you have to apply the whole bundle and you can't tell that apart in the end, I'd.

Like to touch a little bit on and learn a bit more about the zodiac rhythms. So I know that with our SAP analysis data collection, for example, we've observed very clear correlations between the plants capacity to absorb nutrients and lunar rhythms. Where we see this very clear 28 day cycle where two weeks are average, one week is exceptionally good, where the plant absorbs nutrients very readily, very quickly, and one week is very bad. Plants do not respond as strongly at all in that week to nutrient applications, nor does it appear that they are absorbing nutrients from the soil nearly as well. During that one week period. I'm aware of the work that was done by Maria Toon in Biodynamics on the zodiac rhythms, but I've. I've personally never experimented with it or evaluated what differences are produced. Do you have any insights that you can share with us?

Yes, many. The problem with these biodynamic methods is very often that they have a certain vocabulary. And if you can't cope with that vocabulary, you think that this is junk. And I had seen in Australia that the plants were just behaved extraordinarily well. They just did what they were supposed to. They, they did not bulk prematurely. They just developed that part of the plant that was supposed to develop. And at that time Detlef Fredericks was working with hybrids. It was only later that he switched also to heirlooms a bit. But I just was impressed. Wow. It was really interesting because when I went to university, I would have liked to work with these lunar rhythms. And I was turned down. I said, no, we are not, we are not touching that topic. You have only one reputation to lose. And I was really surprised that only recently in the Boku in Vienna, that's a soil university in Vienna, a young woman, she has investigated the Toon work in a university context and she could reproduce a lot of that. Some things not as beautiful as in the, in the Toon context, but basically it works. And I quite like that. Of course, the thing is, I think we can deduce some hints from the frame conditions that Maria Thun points out, where she says, okay, no irrigation, low salt conditions. So that means no crude fertilizer, neither inorganic high salt conditions nor raw organic fertilizers. And then you need a basic stable humic content. I think it was 2.5% or something, or at least 2%. And I'm not talking of just fresh free material chucked on, but really stable bound humic substances. And this is when these rhythms begin to emerge. When I was thinking about that for the course and I thought, how can we translate these things into ordinary language? One thing that I hit was that high salt conditions in the soil, they just flocculate organic matter solutions. So microorganisms cannot work as they should or as they would like to with the organic material in soil solution if you have high salt conditions. So that's one thing that's crucial. And the other thing is Alec Podolinski, he reports in one of his books that we're working with Schlieren Optic, that's a very, very sensitive method where you have a slide, a special slide from quartz glass. And you have your water that you want to test. Or your liquid that you would like to test. And then you drop into this liquid are the drops. And you have a look at the patterns that begin to resonate in this slide under the microscope. And there comes a point where the thing becomes chaotic. And the number of drops you can drop into that dish. And these patterns are not disturbed. Tell you about this inner order in that liquid test. So Podolinsky says you cannot do these measurements. If you have a transition from one zodiac sign, the moon, and one zodiac sign to the other. If that happens while you do your measurement, you can throw it out of the window. Will not work. What I think is that somehow there is a connection between these lunar rhythms and water superstructure. So if you have a look, there is a nice little review of meiwon Ho about water superstructures. And what I expect one day to be found is that zodiac rhythms will preferentially give rise to one of these superstructures in relation to others. So what they have seen is that these superstructures persist in a solution of bulk water. So you have them in there, they look like little rods or like little whatever clouds or. And you have them in this bulk water. And they have really interesting properties. And these properties, they differ from the bulk water. So what I expect to happen is that if you have. Or if you touch this plant soil water interaction. And this is one thing that the Thun state, they state, if you have to open the soil, you have to work with the soil. You have to open up the structure. Otherwise you will not see this change. And also irrigation will level out these rhythms. So I'm really sure that has to do something with water. And if you look, there is a bunch of research about water that has been treated either with magnetic fields or whatever electromagnetic fields you can imagine. And many of them promote plant growth, but not all. In some of these treatments, you see that the water will stress the plant. Also, the problem is that in all these researches. Upping the plant growth is not necessarily a better quality. So the outcome of the studies very often is not comparable. But if you can read a bit in between the lines and you are lucky. And metabolites have been investigated as well. For example, if you see that strawberries that have been treated with this or that magnetic water all of a sudden begin to accumulate fructanes. Then you know, oh, this plant has been stressed. And has really been severely stressed by this water. I mean, this Topic is endless. You know, there is sound, for example, has been shown to be beneficial for plant growth. And no one has a clue how it works. I think it all comes back in the end to the interaction with water. You have sound frequencies that resonate with water will, and you have windows of frequencies that do not. And what I think is that all these impulses, they will influence the water in the plant, which in turn will influence enzyme activity through the changed behavior of the water. Either that it differs in electron conductivity or whatever. You know, hydrophobic surfaces have a coating of water vapor. And in this coating of water vapor, for example, electrons show a totally different behavior. They can be transferred in a zip. It's just a lot easier than in solution. I think what happens is that if we have these different water superstructures triggered by either different minerals around or sound resonating with this water, or a zodiac constellation that does whatever with the bacteria in the soil and whatever metabolites they all begin to produce, we just don't know. This is something that we don't know. I'm just talking of an idea how to connect these dots. We will have different enzyme activities and thus different programs that a plant can run into its metabolism easier at these times. And so what I think is that we have a metabolic wave. And this fits perfectly this idea from tunes. Where you have carbohydrates on leaf days, where you have protein synthesis on fruit days, where you have secondary metabolites on flower days, and we have salt uptake on on Earth days. You know, I don't think that we are looking at different phenomena. I think we are really looking at the same phenomenon from a different perspective with a different wording.

Fascinating. So when we consider water superstructures and how they are influenced by all of these different, perhaps cosmic influences. You know, I'm really intrigued. In the last few minutes you've referenced the course that you have put together. I want to talk a little bit about this. So for my listeners, you know that I have been very intrigued by many of the unexplained phenomena in plant growth and plant development. How is it possible that we are growing a, let's say a zucchini crop that is supposed to go from seed to harvest in 57 days, but we have growers that are taking it from seed to harvest in 30 days when it's direct seeded. How does that work? And how are we able to get these rapid growth processes? I've been doing a lot of reading in different fringe areas that describe some of the impacts and influences on Plant growth areas like paramagnetism and Jerry Pollack's work on exclusion zone water, and Olivier Husson's work on Redox and trying to understand how do all these pieces fit together and how do they influence plant growth? And Harriet has put together a course that is the most comprehensive course I have ever participated in or ever observed that ties all of these different pieces together and describes how they influence soil health and specifically how we can do a much better job of sequestering carbon and building carbon in our soils in a really beautiful way. This course is now available on Kind Harvest, and I would highly encourage you to check it out. Harriet, can you tell us a little bit about how did the course come to be and what was your thought process? What were you trying to accomplish when you put that together? Obviously, 12 hours is a tremendous amount of information and there's so many different pieces that people have not heard of before. I'd like to ask you to give us a summary of the course, but I'm sure that would take an hour in and of itself.

I don't think so. I don't think so. I began to work on this carbon issue because once I made a big, big mind map to sort through all these factors that we have been talking about, and I thought, where could one start? What is the most important factor in this game influencing most of the other factors? However, I always came back to soil organic matter. This is the factor that has its finger in any soil processes. It influences all. This was why I set out to put together how we could control better. I don't want to say carbon sequestration, because it's not only putting it back into the soil, but also breaking it down on demand.

It's carbon cycling rather than sequestration.

And I was a bit embarrassed. I put in a quotation of Albrecht, who said, it's no point to hoard carbon in the soil like a miser. And I thought, oh, man, this has been a while since you said that. And we're still working around at that point. It's a bit embarrassing. It's not only a question of putting fringe findings together, but to revisit the whole soil mechanic in a way that we can get a grip on the factors to get the desired results at the time we need it and in the timescale we need it. You know, it's no point to say, oh, yes, if I do that for 300 more years, I will have a bit of more carbon in my soils. And I don't think it's necessary to wait that long, you know, these processes can, can kick in pretty fast. The big deal I tried to accomplish was to put a framework or to underlie a framework that is really comprehensible to science because the details of really brand new publications, they are really hard to grasp if you do not have an idea about soil functioning. So I had to go through all these issues of soil aggregation of microbial growth in soil and how to guide these factors. And I tried to integrate new points of view that we have now, like for example, the EZ water. How is this going to influence aggregation? How is the different groups of microbes? If I want to have humans that breaks down fast, or if I want to have one that keeps longer, it's no point accumulating carbon that will break down in winter. If I have a cool climate, I have taken a great deal of time to try to find literature about that. Or for example, which species of plants produce lasting humus and at what time should I, for example, sacrifice a green manure. All these very practical things also. So it's not only forces and, I don't know, heirlooms, but it's really very solid data how you can control these processes in your soils. Basically, there is two main things that could be a revolution in your agriculture. And the one is that a fair proportion of additional humus comes from dead microbes. That's called necromass. And it's wise to work your soils in a way that you get this necromass and that will preserve or stabilize this necromass in your soils, because this is something that you can get for free and it makes a major impact on soils. And the other thing is that I would like to talk about a bit is that many, many, many of the scientific studies we have are with the framework of Arabidopsis, which is a Brassica, and with soluble fertilizers in laboratory conditions. And of course we are going to see effects there that maybe are not relevant for a plant that runs on rhizophagy outside in the field. For example, this plant, it will be considerably influenced by the Birch effect, which is dying microbes from drought and then the subsequent absorption of their remnants into the plant, which results in a little fertilization. And this, for example, is something we can use if we plan our irrigation schemes. Do we want just water or do we let the soil dry out a bit more? Can we afford that? So these are basically two worlds, and I have called them the wick theory. The plant is a wick that is stuck in the soil and it sucks in the nutrients only with diffusion flow through the bulk water in the soil. And the delivery theory, where we have organisms that transport nutrients towards the plant or else, and this is a wild theory I have, that the plant root itself can influence or can attract certain forms of metal minerals to the roots. I have spent a bit of time elaborating on that in the course. Maybe this is an attractive model for you to explain, or attractive concept to explain some findings. But what we will see certainly is if the plant receives carbon dioxide either as a gas from the soil or taken up through the root, through the xylem, coming up into the leaf and refixed inside the plant, of course, it will not have to open the stomata and evaporate all its water. The quest for carbon dioxide. So what's going to happen is that very likely it will push out this water down as exudate, you know, so you have this internal cycling of water up the plant and then down as exudate. So you have this incredibly improved water use efficiency if you get away from this sucking in nitrate with the transpiration flow. So if you have climates that are a bit demanding, I think that shifting into this gear that can run the plant in, especially with soil fungi, it will make a big change.

I understand some of the implications of what you were talking about when you say not consuming nitrate, but there are about a dozen dominoes in that chain of a chain reaction of how this changes plant mechanisms and what is happening with rhizomes of phagian root charges and so forth. So can you just elaborate on that a little bit? What happens when the plant no longer is absorbing nitrate that allows it to be so much more water use efficient?

Okay, so number one is I have in the course, I have kind of different gears. You know, I have the plant in an inorganic setting only. You have the plant with bacterial bodies and you have the setting with fungi and bacteria. And this is, you know, a plant has to have redundant mechanism. It cannot fall dead as soon as a cow pees beside it. So it will have to cope with urea or nitrate or whatsoever, but also without it. And the thing is that we have now in general in agriculture that disfavors fungi and what we do is we rub the soil with long distance trading possibilities. So in terms of nitrate, does this mean that the reduction of nitrate is shifted towards the fungal partner so the plant doesn't have to reduce the nitrate itself? That's one big part. So the nitrate does not accumulate if the plant has to transpire or if it has the stoma open for the quest for carbon dioxide, it will. If there is nitrate in soy solution, it will have to take it up, it cannot avoid it. So you will end up with the nitrate in the leaf and the vacuoles with bitterness for the consumers. You know, grazers, they do not like it. Every child knows that if you just pick the grass beside the dog's poo, the rodents will refuse it. The cows do not like to eat nitrate loaden grasses. And then you have the problem that the plant needs to counterbalance this osmotic load inside the leaf, inside the vacuole. If it has, it can use potassium. If it hasn't, it will use other stuff like amino acids, proline also, or polyamines, which stink, attract floods, for example. That's that problem. And it's energy consuming to synthesize that. So if you do not have this active osmotic load in the vacuole, the plant can save on that and it will not. If you have a leaf of a salad plant in the hand and you crush it, salad growers do that very often to test the quality. The plant's leaf will either crush if there is a lot of nitrate and the tissue has no good quality, or it will just spring back. If you cut a plant, a lettuce, for example, that has microbial bodies that feed it, you cut it, you put the dressing on and you leave it and one day later it just looks the same, it doesn't collapse. You know, the other thing is that if you look in a bacterial setting, for example, or in a dry setting, and you have a rhizo sheath, that is this layer around the root that you cannot shake off. When you pull up the plant gently off the soil and you have a high salt setting, the plant has really troubled to maintain that if it is a low salt setting, it's easy to put out some gel and to keep the water close to them to the root and to extract the nutrients from the material adjacent to the root.

There's so many dots to connect when we think about water use efficiency and carbon cycling. I know that in the course you also describe the influence that biophotonics has or can have. And you also describe dark endophytes, which was something that was completely new for me. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

Yeah, I love them. It is a group of fungi that do not make fruiting bodies, as we scientists say. So what you see around like a toadstool or whatever, a small version of it is the sexual reproduction stage of the fungus. So these dark septide endophytes, they do not do that. They can make spore stages, but they're asexual. So it's pretty hard to know who these guys are. And usually they're ascomycetes and they have pretty tough cell walls. So I have seen them around in rototyl soils a bit where I could not detect any mycorrhizal fungi. The thing is that these dark septide endophytes, they modulate the redox stages of the plant metabolism. And I found that really interesting. And this was the moment where I began to dig in that story a bit. And then I remembered a podcast I had heard years, years, years before where Cryptococcus is growing in Chernobyl eating gamma rays. And when I heard that, I thought, maybe, but maybe not. And so I had a look into this melanin business, which is coloring the cell walls of these endophytes, making them dark. And melanin is indeed an antenna for the whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation from very long wavelength until. Or through the visible, visible wavelength right until gamma rays, very high energy load of that electrons. And the interesting thing is that melanin can use that energy and generate reduction power from that. And I think this is fascinating because it allows you to have soils that are not so dependent on green plants. If you have, for example, empty fallow periods and you have these dark septide endophytes around that can feed on either light or metabolic warmth, or even if you have, if you happen to have radioactive elements around, not on the element, but on the radiation, you can maintain an input of reduction power into the soil and recycle carbon into organic forms. It can be refixed in the soil. Totally fascinating.

So let's make this really simple. What I think you're describing is that when you have these dark septate endophytes that have melanin in them, they can intercept a broad array of wavelengths and they can continue to get energy from these different wavelengths rather than getting energy from plants, and continue to be metabolically active and. And continue to fix carbon even in the absence of growing plants on the soil. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. Because you have. In soils, you have, I think it was 4/5 of the carbon. And the turnover in the soil is recycled. So the plant injects it and then it gets recycled and recycled and recycled between the microbes. So it needs to be refixed, regenerated into organic forms like sugar or whatsoever. Yeah. And then again Breathed out as carbon dioxide and refixed again. So these dark septide endophytes, they seem to be not recognized part of this puzzle. And for example, I was very often pondering about that biodynamic farm is here in Germany. They have had best yields with barefellows over winter. And this does not fit at all with the view that's currently propagated that you have to have living roots all the time. Every moment I thought, how is that possible? I think that these fungi are a part of this explanation.

Something else that you and I have spoken about is the observation or the capacity to build stable humic substances during the winter months. How do these endophytes and how do these specific fungi tie in with that, if at all? What's happening there?

They do, I mean, melanized necromass, you remember, that is dead microbes in the soil cycles, it's eaten again by other microbes that fuel their metabolism from that or recycle it right into producing their cell walls. And melanized cell walls cycle slower. So that's one part. There is many things we do not know yet. Melanin seems to transfer also electric currents. And this is a big issue in soils. We have charges, currents, loads everywhere. Humus is really a battery. It can charge up, literally. And melanin, they have used it as an electron donor. And it's like a synthetic material of the best quality, just right as it is in nature, you know, wow. Yeah, it's a stable, free radical and it is amazing stuff, you know, and it is applied in technical environments. And this is what, you know, I'm always throughout this whole preparation of the carbon cause. Very often I found data in technical settings that I had to reintroduce into the soil setting. And biologists, they do not like to work a lot with forces. They love chemicals, but not forces. So you find the data, if you want to work about forces in engineered.

Papers, you've just mentioned that there are all kinds of forces and fields and currents. And when you look at these different forces on different levels, like the charge on the clay colloids and the charge held within humus, and now the charge is held on melanin. There are so many different levels. And I think what is not appreciated is that the forces are much greater and much bigger than we might anticipate. I think the piece that we've missed is that plants don't grow from nutrients. They don't grow from calcium and magnesium potassium ions. Instead, they grow from the charge that is carried by those Elements. I dislike using the word energy because it's so ambiguous and can mean so many different things. But plants don't grow from nutrients, they grow from charge, they grow from energy. And what you're describing fits into that or is a part of that.

Of course, I think it's both. You know, you have always the structural aspect, you know, where you see a certain element taking place as a part in a molecule, you know, for example.

Right.

And then you have the other bit, you know, where it resonates, where it is shifting electrons around in redox reaction, where it is attracted here or pushed away there. But I was really surprised about the order of magnitude of all these electric or charge phenomena in soil a while ago. I have had a look into water electroprecipitation because I was interested if the plant achieves high enough charges or electrostatic charges that water precipitates inside it again, then you see the technical papers and you think, never, we're never going to reach the order of magnitude of that that needs to be applied to precipitate water vapor. And then you look in soil and you see clay has these charges. Everything is there, you know, and we're just. I think we have really missed out thinking about the plant as an active organism influencing, for example, water condensation around roots. I think it probably does, but no literature about it. And also that's again this topic with Arabidopsis in the lab. With this type of nutrition, it will not accumulate that charges. We need a plant with perfect mineral nutrition that has a wax coating. And then you will see other phenomena happening.

One of the topics that Kerry Reams used to talk about, I also haven't seen this in the literature to support this, although we've had some interesting observations. But he said that when plants are really healthy and they achieve high brix levels and high state of health, they can absorb 80% of their nutrition from the air rather than from the soil. And this at first glance seems rather far fetched. But when you recognize what it means for a plant to have a waxy coating and what that means for plant charge, and how plants will attract any charged particles in the air to their leaf surface, it seems perhaps less implausible than it did at first.

This is something where I know too little about. But what I can say, what I found data about, is that pathogens, pores, for example, they will fly away from a plant that has this electrostatic charge up when it's really healthy. They have created nettings because of course, again, we are there. We find A technical solution with nettings and they charge the nettings and then the spore words fly away. But the plant, a healthy plant with this waxy coating, it can achieve the same charges that are necessary. The other thing is the pollination. You have once mentioned strawberries, possibly self pollinating. And what I think now is pollen has been shown to be attracted electrostatically to the pollinators, to the bumblebees. You know, they fly and they have this fur and we know from Callahan that these, this fur charges up and the pollen just jumps over to the insect.

Wow.

So what I think, or what I have observed in my heirloom reproduction, is that exceptionally healthy individuals tend to self polish pollinate. And if they are miserable and unhealthy, they cannot do that. So what I expect to be true is that the tip, you know, the female reproductive organ is the very tip where most of the charge accumulates. And I expect that under certain conditions the pollen will jump right over. But as I said, I have seen this phenomenon only in exceptionally healthy individuals.

Another phenomena that I'd love to get your perspective on is the phenomena of soils being warm in the winter. So we have any number of photos of farmers who have used our soil primer applications late in the fall. And their fields have all the snow melted off when the rest of the landscape is covered in 6 inches or a foot of snow. How does that happen?

Well, I do not know exactly, because you would really need to investigate that. But what I think is, number one is just if you have a very active microbial life in that, of course they have a metabolic warmth, they just radiate warmth just as we do. And the second is if you have different groups in there, especially in the winter, archaea are favored over eubacteria. So these guys, they seem to have their time of their life in winter, no concurrence. And then these bacteria are not bacteria. These archaea, they're not bacteria. They will lose a higher portion of warmth to the environment when they live. When they have the ordinary processes, they're not as effective.

So they generate more heat.

They generate more heat. And one thing that I have also seen myself is if you have more carbon in the soil, stable carbon, the structure changes and the carbon charges up in there, you have more vapor and the soil breathes. So heat conduction in the soil happens through water vapor. I have done a whole segment in the course because this is so under appreciated that the soil really breathes air. Pressure helps the soil breathe out in the morning and presses air back into the soil. And also wind exchanges the air in the soil. There is really dramatic air flows to great depth in the soil if the soil has a structure. And so I can imagine that the whole package, you have more carbon in the soil, less compaction, just less, you know, bulk water or water saturation, more air exchange in the soil, more heat generated. And I can imagine that this is enough to melt the snow on top.

Yeah. Harriet, you have included so much information in the course, we could continue this conversation for some time to talk about all of the different facets and all the different pieces. Are there any other highlights pieces of the course that you would like to touch on briefly?

Yes, one. And this is a very general guideline. You need two things in balance to make your soil work out. And this is the presence of stable carbon so that it can charge up with mineral nutrition. If you have either of one, it will not work. You need soil organic matter with minerals. And this enables the plant to feed on demand, whatever it needs, at what time it needs it, and then the thing flies. But usually you have either the promotion of carbon in the soil and this will not help you if it's an empty pantry, or the mineral nutrition, which is fantastic, but it's a lot of work. You have to do the monitoring. You have to run and fold your feed or put it in the soil all the time. So if you have these two things together and the minerals can bind to the soil and they are delivered or bioweathered by the microbiology, stored in humic substances and then discharged to the plant on demand, and the plant can do that, then you get performance and health and you can, and you can sleep in the hammock meanwhile and soil does your work.

Thank you very much, Harriet. I want to, for all of our listeners who've listened to this point, I just want to say simply that there is no way we can do justice in a podcast interview to the scope of research and work that Harriet has put into her course. It's 12 hours long. For those of you who've listened to Olivier Husson's six hour course that is available for free on the Academy on Redox the Common. We've received well over a thousand testimonials from people who've taken that course who have said that it was completely, completely changed their perspective on how they grow plants, this course that Harriet has put together supersedes even that in two. Very interesting. Oh yes, Harriet, yes, it does, in that it is very broad, encompassing information from many different fields. And Harriet connects all those dots and explaining them in a very simple, understandable way. Harriet, I'm very honored that you have been able and willing to share this course with us at Kind Harvest. And for any of you who want to follow up from this conversation or who want to participate in that course or learn more, you can also connect with Harriet at Kind Harvest, where she is very active as well and contributes a lot to that community. So, Harriet, thank you for being here. Thank you for all that you bring to the world, and I look forward to having more conversations with you in the future.

Thank you, John. Thanks a lot.

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