Re: Beneficial Soil Microbes

From: Elaine Ingham (Soilfoodweb@AOL.COM)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 01:13:22 EST


Joel -

How many microarthropods, earthworms, ants, or termites in a conventional ag
field? Zero, most of the time. Why? How about insecticide use?

Diversity is by no means the strong link. Why do you think adding compost or
compost tea works as well as it does. Take a look at leaf surfaces in your
ag fields sometime, and compare them to the leaf surfaces in a healthy forest
system. It's night and day. The leaves in the ag fields are desert
wastelands compared to the huge numbers of individuals and diversity present
on healthy forest leaves.

Every time you use sulfur, every time you till, every time you use copper,
you kill organisms. Who comes back faster? The beneficials or the diseases?


All you have to look at is simple direct counts. Healthy soils have 600
million bacteria per gram, 150 micrograms of fungal biomass, 50,000 protozoa,
and 20 to 30 beneficial nematodes. How many species of bacteria? Fungi?
Protozoa? We see on the order of 20,000 to 25,000 species (DNA sequencing)
of bacteria, 5,000 to 8,000 species of fungi, 150 to 200 species of protozoa
per gram. 12 to 20 species of beneficial nematodes.

What's in the standard ag field? 1 million bacteria, 5 micrograms of fungal,
15,000 protozoa and very few beneficial nematodes, herds of root-feeding
pests. How many species? 5,000 species of bacteria, 100 species of fungi,
two or three species of protozoa, 3 to 6 species of beneficial nematodes.

Birds carrying inocula on their feet? Sure. All the time. But do the few
bacteria carried that way replenish what you need? How fast can the
bacteria, or fungi or protozoa or nematodes spread from that one inoculation
before some chemical is applied which will kill them?

Remember, we're killing the bacteria and fungi with each chemical
application. With each fertilizer application. Killing fungi, and
beneficial nematodes and microarthropods with each tillage event.

How far downwind can you detect a single pesticide spray? And one way to
detect the pesticide impact is to look at non-target organism death. It can
be as much as 15 miles, maybe further.

We keep killing the beneficials in our soils off, and we don't let them have
the time to grow back. Ag fields are not like the vents in the ocean. No
one is at the bottom of the ocean killing the vent dwellers with toxic
chemicals.

Inocula are necessary.

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com


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