Farming With Your Gut

What I Learned in Conversation with Greg Patterson, Founder of A and L Labs and A and L Biologicals ...

If you listen to Greg Patterson's educational presentation on soil health and seed endophytes, you begin to get a feel for the scope of where we are in the history of food production.

From the turn of the 20th century when the world's population growth was propelled by Peruvian bird guano, to the advent of the Haber-Bosch process and Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, we now find ourselves turning to knowledge that was forgotten in time, in order for the next revolution to take place ...

 "Today we're into what we call the Evergreen Revolution, where we've gone back a step into something that's a little more holistic. We're looking at balanced fertility and how it impacts the microbiome and the soil microbes. In the work that we're doing at A and L Biologicals, we're looking at that whole piece of how the plants and humans interact with these microbes in the rhizosphere. A lot of soil health interest is happening. This is not new. It was back in 1908 or 09 when we first understood that microbes in the rhizosphere change as the plant has the ability to change these populations. It's only been recently in the late 1990s, and the early 2000's that we really started asking ... why and how is this happening?

The genesis of Greg's professional participation in the advent of the Evergreen Revolution lies in the driver behind his inherent curiosity and desire to provide solutions to producers in the real world.

"When I started this company in 1984, I met a now partner of mine, Dr. George Lazarovits, who worked for the federal research station working with one of my partner's farms. He was looking at scab in potatoes and how we could amend the soil with other things to enhance or reduce scab, and enhance the organisms that actually fought scab in potatoes. I had a real interest in this whole microbiome thing. I would go to George and say, 'This is going on in this field ... I think we've upset some balance with the microbes ...', and he'd take me into one of his growth rooms and say, 'This is what's going on. This is what you've applied, and this is how it's impacting the microbes. You've applied this particular product and it's basically given the plants AIDS, so they're fighting disease no matter what you do.'"

Growing up on the farm in Saskatchewan, I never knew the soil was anything other than a place holder for seed and fertilizer.

Now we know it's a whole world unto itself, similar everywhere you go.

"George and another colleague took soils from all around the world and their idea was to take new sequencing technology, sequence all the microbes in the soil, and see if they could get a fingerprint of soils so that they could tell where the soil came from based on the microbes that are in that soil. What they found out was that it didn't exist. What existed was all soils, no matter where they come from on the planet, have the same group of microbes. The only differentiation is there'd be different concentrations of microbes in these soils, but they all had the same bugs. They found microbes they never even knew existed and they couldn't even classify. That begged the question, 'Well, why are soils different? Why do some soils suppress disease? And why do some soils have more disease, more or less productivity?' George was looking for that holy grail ... 'What does disease suppressive soil look like and how can we reproduce that?' It's a cultural practice using balancing fertility rather than using any kind of a pesticide to do that. And it works very well."

The extraordinary thing Greg has done consistently throughout his career is find a way to apply research to practical outcomes on the farm.

"I said to George, 'When are we gonna be able to take sequencing technology and understanding these microbes to the farmer?' We started A and L Biologicals back in 2008 and we focused on looking at soil health over that whole period of time. We are not looking at counting earthworms. We are not looking at aggregate stability, although we understand that they all are part of it, but the earthworms are there because the soil is healthy. They didn't make the soil healthy. You have to understand what came first. The idea was to understand how the plant is actually changing it's environment. We'd look at the relationship between humans and plants very similarly. This whole cultivation of microbes either in the human gut or in the rhizosphere is very similar. Through nutrition we develop a better gut biome. Through nutrition, the plant produces its own gut biome. Now the gut of the plant is the rhizosphere. So if we have balanced nutrition going to a plant, that plant then exudes the right compounds to actually reach out and sequester the amount of the particular bugs that it wants in the rhizosphere to help it accomplish its life cycle and then do the things it wants to do. And just like we can't be healthy if we don't eat the right diet, a plant can't do that unless it has the right diet. So this holistic approach to understanding plant nutrition is starting to become a little more apparent in production now agriculture. It's not just about sunshine, rain, and nitrogen anymore.

"We've done research where we can see how the plant is changing its rhizosphere, how the plant actually manipulates those bugs in the rhizosphere. We can see how the plant gets a certain nutrient base and then it brings in the army. It brings in a set of bugs that actually destroys a lot of the population in the rhizosphere that are just the free loaders; the guys in the neighbourhood that are just robbing from the good guys. It kicks them out of the neighbourhood, and allows for the more beneficial organisms to occupy the rhizosphere. The plant can then continue to cultivate them."

"The plant actually cultivates these organisms and we have to understand how we can help the plant do that. And doing that, we're seeing some pretty amazing things happen in our production work that we're working with. We're seeing endophytes taken up by the plant. Nitrogen is being fixed by corn. I'm not talking about nodulating rhizobium, I'm talking about nitrogen fixers; endophytes that are actually in the plant and we can:

-measure them

-and can count them

-and we can see them,

-and we know what stimulates them now.

What does this mean in a practical sense?

"You can reduce your nitrogen application by 50% in producing a crop. I want to clarify that a little bit. I'm not saying if I'm using 150 pounds of nitrogen now, I'm gonna end up using 75 pounds. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that when I talk about nitrogen needs per unit of production, I'm gonna use half of what I'm using today compared to what I would normally use because these endophytes are fixing so much nitrogen."

You can hear how Greg actually achieved this in farming production, and all of our extensive and wide ranging conversation on many such topics at growingthefuturepodcast.ca, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

One final word from Greg:

"We're at the very edge of the tip of the iceberg. The more we learn, the less we know. Every time we think we've got a solution, something else shows up. We've gotta take the blinders off and keep our eyes wide open because like my dad told me one time, 'If you don't learn something in farming this year, you better quit cuz you're not paying attention. Mother Nature is a great teacher.'"