Soil Microbes Get Their Food First

 

It was less than three generations ago that Pasteur’s work in France suggested the bacterial causation of disease. Even though we are coming to see that the bacterial entry into the body may be encouraged by weakness induced by deficiencies of many kinds, yet the fear of microbes, germs and bacteria is almost universal. Everybody is afraid of getting germs. Pasteur told us that heat is the best weapon for fighting these microscopic life forms and we have been heating, boiling, steaming and sterilizing in the fight against microbes.

Now that the science of microbiology has brought us penicillin, streptomycin and other similar microbial products as protection for our bodies against the microbes, particularly since we are learning to live with them more for our benefit than for our harm. We are coming to see that microbes are a foundational part of the pyramid of life forms, of which we are the topmost. If we are to live complacently with them, we must remember that they are next to the soil in that pyramidal structure. They are between the soil and the plants. They either cooperate with, or compete with, the plants for the creative power in the form of nutrients in the soil. Hence, they are a part of the biotic foundation on which animal and human life depend. Microbes are now recognized as important because they eat more simply than all other life. They also eat first of the fertility of the soil.

1.      struggle for calories

Microbes are less complex in their anatomy and in many respects are less highly developed than plants. Unlike plants, the microbes cannot make their own energy-food compounds by the help of sunlight. On the contrary, sunlight kills microbes. By the process of photosynthesis, plants build their own carbohydrates for body energy from carbon dioxide in the air and from hydrogen and oxygen in water from the soil. Plants make many carbonaceous complexes from these three simple elements which they build into intricate energy-giving compounds of high fuel value and as deposits above the soil or as additions within its surface layer. Plants work in the light. Microbes work in the dark. Unable to derive energy directly from the sun, they must get it from these chemical compounds passed on to them by the death of the plants.

As a means of getting energy for heat and work, the microbes burn or oxidize organic compounds, just as we do in our bodies. Microbial life depends on just such compounds as make up dead plant and animal bodies. It simplifies them. It tears them apart. It is the wrecking crew taking over dead plant and animal tissues or return the separate elemental parts back to the air, water, soil or other points of origin. It is working in the dark and sending back to simplicity all that the plants built up to complexity.

This microbial struggle is what we call decay. The process of rotting organic matter is the result of microbial processes of digestion and metabolism of the organic matter, by which the energy initially put into chemical combination through plant photosynthesis, is released again for microbial life service.

As humans, we too use organic compounds such as sugars, starches, proteins, fat and other food components to provide our energy. This occurs as part of the process by which we break down these compounds into carbon dioxide, water, urea and other simple substances eventually thrown off as body excretions. Humans, like the microbes, are struggling for calories. In humans we call it digestion and metabolism. For the microbes, it means decay, or the simplification process which the different substances are undergoing when we commonly say “They are rotting.”

2.      competition with crops

Plowing under some organic matter in the garden or field is a good way of disposing of crop residues because the microbes “burn” or oxidize them. They do it slowly, however. Yet the process of microbial combustion of such materials may have disastrous effects on a crop planted soon after plowing, when we say we “burned out” the crop.

Microbes need more than energy “go” foods. They need the “grow” foods, too, just as we do. They do not demand that their nitrogen be given them in the complete proteins or the more complex compounds of this element as we do. Nevertheless, they are just as exacting in their needs for nitrogen, at least in its simpler forms. This is a “grow” food necessary to balance their energy foods in the proper ratio just as we demand the balance in speaking of our own nutritive ratio, or the balance of carbohydrates against proteins in our own diets or in the ration of feeds for our domestic animals.

So when we plow under any woody residue of stalks, leaves or other parts of plants that have given up their protein contents for seed making, these residues are an unbalanced microbial diet. They do not permit the microbes to grow rapidly on them. They are too much carbohydrate. As a diet they are deficient in “grow” foods. They are short in proteins, or nitrogen, and in minerals, hence decay very slowly.

Woody crop residues, like straws, have long been used for roof covers in the Old World. They last well but need to be replaced more often at the ridge top than over the entire roof. It is at the ridge tops that birds sit more often to leave their droppings, which are rich in urea nitrogen. When this soluble nitrogen – along with the mineral salts of the bird droppings – is added to the straw, the first rain hastens its decay. This decay, however, is limited to the ridge of the roof, or to the area in which these supplements of nitrogen balance the microbial diet originally consisting of straw. Until this balance was brought about the straw was too carbonaceous to decay, and was good thatch. Microbes require little of the “grow” foods but without it they do not carry out their decay processes.

When strawy crop residues or sawdust, for example, are plowed into the soil, the soil microbes are offered a diet that is high in carbon, or energy, and low in bodybuilding foods. Since the microbes are well distributed throughout this plowed soil, they are in such intimate contact with the clay that they make colloidal exchanges with it for its available nutrients. They can take ammonia nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, calcium and other nutrients for their own growth from the clay to balance the sawdust as a more adequate diet.

It is unfortunate for the plants when woody residues are plowed under. When the microbes are more intimately in contact with the soil than are the plant roots, the microbes eat first of the available fertility elements. While the microbes are balancing their sawdust diet by taking the fertility of the soil into their own body compounds, we do not appreciate the production of the microbial crop, nor the proportion of the available fertility which they appropriate for their own needs. Instead we see how poorly the corn crop or other plants grow when planted soon after straw, heavy weeds or sawdust are plowed under. We say “The crop is burned out,” when it is extra fertility and not water that is needed. Yes, the microbes eat first. This disaster follows inevitably when the soil is too low in fertility to feed both the microbial crop within and the farm crop above the soil.

But unfortunately the disaster is only temporary. While the energy compounds are being consumed, the excessive carbon is escaping to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The nitrogen and inorganic nutrient elements are kept within the soil. Thus while the carbon supply in the soil is being lessened by volatilization, the ratios of the carbon to the nitrogen and to the inorganic elements are made more narrow. These ratios approach that of the microbial body composition – more nearly that of protein.

Thus by decay the straw with a carbon-nitrogen ration of 80 to 1 leaves microbially manipulated residues going toward what we call “humus” and toward a carbon-nitrogen ratio of nearly 12 to 1. This resulting substance is then more nearly like the chemical composition of the microbes themselves. So when no large, new supplies of carbonaceous organic matter are added to the soil, new microbes can grow only by consuming their predecessors or the humus residues of their creation.

Humus residues, used as food by the microbes, comprise a diet low in energy values, but high in body-building values. Humus is also unbalanced, but unlike straw, it is unbalanced in the opposite respect. It is not badly unbalanced, because “grow” foods, like proteins, can be “burned” for energy. Man can live by meat (protein) alone, as Steffanson and other Arctic explorers have demonstrated. It is a bit costly, however, so we use carbohydrates to balance the protein. In that case the proteins are going for tissue building rather than to provide energy. The microbes also can use protein-like compounds for energy and very effectively. We encourage them to do this when we plow under legumes. Here again they balance their own diets but with benefit to the crop above the soil, rather than with disaster which follows the plowing under of straw.

When we plow under proteinaceous organic matter, such as legumes, with not only a high content of nitrogen but also a high content of calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium and all the other inorganic nutrient elements, the microbes are placed on a diet of narrow carbon-nitrogen ratio. The ratio of carbon to the inorganic nutrients is also narrow. It is like an exclusively meat diet would be for us, or like a tankage diet would be for a pig. The energy foods in such a ration are low in supply. Conversely, the nitrogen and minerals are a surplus. This surplus is not built into microbial bodies. Instead, it is liberated in simpler forms which are left in the soil as fertilizers for farm crops.

What we plow under determines what we have as left-overs for the crops. The microbes always eat first. The crops we grow “eat at the second table.” In wise management of the soil we must consider whether the composition of the organic matter we plow under is a good or poor diet for the microbes. If the soil is so low in fertility that it grows only a woody crop to be plowed under, then there can be little soil improvement for the following crop. It gives the microbes only energy foods. They must exhaust still further the last fertility supply in the soil to balance their diet and consequently the crops starve.

But if the soil is high in fertility so that it grows legumes, and if we then plow these protein-rich, mineral-rich forages under, the microbes receive more than energy foods. Given the nitrogenous, fertility-laden green manures plowed under, they pass this fertility back to the soil. Here their struggle is for energy, a struggle by which they are not in competition with the crop, the energy for which comes not from the soil but from the sunshine instead.

Microbes eat first. On poor soil with little humus and inorganic fertility, this spells disaster to the farm crop if we plow under only the poor vegetation which such soils produce. Growing merely any kind of organic matter to let it go back to the soil is not lifting the soil to higher fertility; any more than one lifts himself by pulling on his bootstraps. On soils that are more fertile in mineral nutrients, the idea in plowing cover crops to turn under is to help the farm crop. It helps them if we plow under the more proteinaceous and leguminous cover vegetation which fertile soils produce.

While we have been mining our soils to push them to a lower level of fertility, the microbes that originally were working for us are now working against us. They are eating first, not only so far as the plants are concerned, but indirectly so far as even we and our animals are concerned.

It is in this competition with the microbes that inorganic fertilizers and mineral additions to the soil can play their role by balancing the microbial diet. Such minerals are taken by both the plants and the microbes. But if the fertilizers are put deeper into the soil, they may be below the layer where they affect the microbes, either favorably or unfavorably. They will serve the plants, which send their roots down there, under the power coming from the sunshine. They will not affect the microbes unless they are mixed into the humus-bearing surface soil. Putting the fertilizers down deeper puts their nutrient contents where the plants, rather than the microbes, eat first. This is fertilizing, by means of inorganics, the fertilizing crop that combines them with organics to serve the microbes when this fertilizing crop is turned under for true soil improvement. This is a way of composting the inorganics within the body of the soil itself.

-          Excerpt from The Albrecht Papers Vol.1 - 1948

Microbes at Work

Examples of microbes at work could fill hundreds of pages: the miracle of bread and cheese and beer; the leather top for a pair of shoes; even the white cliffs of Dover. Without the microbes, starch rich grains would remain unappetizing and hard to digest. We can understand how yeast is a requirement for bread and beer, but we seem to forget that food crop harvests wouldn’t arrive in the first place without the intervention of microbes – microbes in the soil, microbes called chloroplasts in leaf cells, all harnessed to the work of trapping solar energy.

Oh yes, those white cliffs of Dover! These are the skeletal remains of microbes that flourished some 100 million years ago. The seas were just right for great proliferation of life, one million tons of these microbes dividing to become 16 million tons in just 240 minutes. As a matter of fact, most sedimentary rocks are what’s left of microbes.

When we think of microbes, we think of disease, and yet most microbes are beneficial in nature. Most of the fungi help, not hinder, the farmer. A good example – more typical than we pause to admit at times – is the predacious fungus.

In obeying the laws of life and death, it seeks to live and multiply. As a rotifer or eel-worm goes about its handy work in the soil, it might encounter the lasso of the predacious fungi. Like a microscopic snake, this fungus holds its death grip, in time absorbing the body contents of its victim.

The term mycorrhiza was first used about 90 years ago. It refers to the many fungi that are found in close contact with – and entering into – the plant roots growing in virgin soil, or in soil with plenty of organic matter. Organic gardeners have long considered the mycorrhiza a friend. Not a few scientists interested in farm technology have considered them a foe.

Just as there are more kinds of plants that grow underground than there are on the soil’s surface, so too are there more kinds and numbers of livestock hidden away in the shallows and depths of a soil system than ever walk the surface of the earth. These tiny underground plants and the little critters that live on them make possible the growth of higher plant life. This underground living complex decomposes dead organic materials, making soils fertile so that higher plants can grow. Reserve mineral elements are made available by life in the soil. Most important, these life systems enter into symbiotic relationships with roots of higher plants and supply them with critically needed compounds.

S.C. Hood of Hood Laboratory, Tampa, Florida once caused these lines to be printed in a company brochure, and so far we have found little in the scientific literature to equal them. “It is probable,” wrote Hood, “that this symbiotic relation began when the first primitive plant forms left the primordial sea and took to the land. There were primitive forms of fungi and algae, both of which had developed in water. When cast on dry land, as separates, both were helpless. The fungi could not make carbohydrates. The algae could not secure mineral nutrients from the rocks. But united in a partnership, both could survive. The algae made carbohydrates for both, and the fungi extracted from the rocks the mineral elements needed by both of them.”

There is nothing to suggest that this relationship does not persist to the present, especially in the lichens, the first builders of soil. In their development of complicated structures, higher plants kept a part of this early relationship. “They are still dependent on their associated fungi for development, especially chemically,” is the way Hood put it.

These filamentous, underground plants form a cobweb-like growth throughout the soil and over roots. They are so slender that should we twist together 500 of the larger ones, we would have a rope no longer than a human hair...This is the study of them which has been neglected and why their importance has only been recently recognized.

Further, once these are recognized, the fantastic quantities of mycelial fiber and surface area of the fungus in a limited amount of soil around even one plant, the importance of mycorrhiza in symbiosis with higher plants comes clear.

Some hint at this complexity can be found in the scientific literature…in A Quantitative Study of the Roots and Roots Hairs of Winter Rye Plants (American Journal of Botany in 1937 and 1938), H. Dittmer reported on a single rye plant. He found a root length of 377 miles. Fully 80% or 275 miles of these roots were feeders. The root hairs on that single plant numbered 14.5 billion, having a fibrous length of 6,214 miles. The surface area alone was calculated at more than a tenth of an acre. Combined, the roots and roots hairs had a length of 6,990 miles with a combined surface area of 63,784 square feet – close to 1.5 acres. And this was just one plant.

It is true, winter rye has a massive root system and very fine root hairs. And it may be that Dittmer had a very robust plant on his hands. But the point is that all plants have fantastic figures involved when these measurements are taken. In a single acre of winter rye or meadow grass, the area of roots and root hairs may exceed 30,000 acres. At least one-third of this is covered by a net of fungus mycelium, and this provides additional area for soil contact.

Mycorrhiza in association with root systems isn’t a one-way street. Let us refer to a scientific paper translated in 1961 from the Russian under the auspices of Israel. In Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants, N.A. Krasilnikov put together the findings of some 20 investigators and served up some breath-taking data on exudates from plant roots. The Russians found growing roots to exude inorganic elements, sugars, many amino acids, a host of organic ones, vitamins, biotics, antibiotics and a number of organic compounds. A man named Denidenko was cited as having found a single corn plant which – during the vegetative period – exuded 436 milligrams of organic substances when the nutrient solution remained unchanged. When it was changed seven times during the growth period, 2.3 times more – or 1,136 milligrams – of organic substances were exuded. Fantastic. Certainly. But this has been known and ignored for a long time.

What does this mean? Apparently the root surfaces of higher plants are used by fungi as feeding ground. Are these fungi friend or foe?

Apparently Fusarium, Trichoderma, Gliocladium and Basidiomycetes are the important fungi in this fungus-plant symbiosis, the mycorrhiza complex. Moving from richer virgin soil, where fungus is ever-present in both species and number, to soils with less organic matter, fungus growth is greatly reduced in both amount and kind. The Basidiomycetes are the first to disappear. As conditions worsen, one group after another vanishes. Finally, when the corpse of a soil is all that is left, only an occasional Fusarium remains in evidence.

When the soil has been reduced to a barren waste, plant species of a weed nature take over...

Without a full complement of mycorrhiza, lowered quality and yield result. Lowered quality is the chief reason salt fertilizers are not entirely satisfactory. Still, inferior quality – lowered protein, less vitamins, poor mineral content – finds acceptance in the market simply because the naked eye can’t see the difference as long as bins and bushels remain. It is only when yields falter that the farmer recognizes the problem.

...the Fusarium genus can provide us with the key for much needed understanding. Fusarium oxysparum, for instance, is very versatile. Whenever investigators look for fungi, they invariably find Fusarium oxysparum or other groups of that genus – F. salani, F. rodeum, and so on. Generally this genus is a peaceful homesteader in the soil and a beneficial symbiont on plant roots. Yet when this fungus finds a root that is poorly nourished, a plant with low resistance, it quickly becomes pathogenic. If the farmer permits plant malnutrition to continue, pathogenic potential really comes into its own, and the fungus rates attention as an active parasite.

This is why the biochemistry of immunity is seated in fertility management, and not in...more lethal molecules of poisons to combat fungus attack. This is what William A. Albrecht was talking about when he charged that “We are exhausting the quality of our soils. As we do so the quality of our plants goes down.”

- Excerpted from Eco-Farm - Lesson 7 - by Charles Walters 

 

The Health of Man and the Soil...

Man is as healthy as the soil he lives on. Plants must take from the soil those properties which, as herd feed, produce the kind of animals that give good milk and produce healthy calves. Man’s best proteins, as in milk, eggs, and lean meat, must be brought from the soil through this vital life line. To be well fed is to be healthy, but to be filled up does not mean to be well-fed.

Carbohydrates have been at the head of the foods list, with proteins second, but proteins and the mineral elements have not been commonly considered together in their close association. They have been classified as those compounds containing nitrogen in total to the extent of about 16%. It is this lack of complete understanding of the protein compounds, of their functions in our bodies, and of the services by the inorganic elements connected with them that much of the irregularity in being well-fed arises. Feeding for health calls for foods and feeds that are more than mere bulk for filling purposes. It demands the appreciation of some physiology, and some comprehension of body functions. Rather than rebuild the fertility of the soil to nourish the tired crop, we have researched the corners of the world for another crop to take its place. By this procedure we have introduced more crops that are making vegetative bulk, and are producing less of real nourishment for animals. They have been called “hay crops, but not seed crops”.

Carbohydrates, composed mainly of air, water, and sunshine, are amply produced for fattening services, but proteins are becoming scarcer in feeds, which means increasing troubles in the health and reproduction of the animals consuming them. While failing to see the declining fertility of the soil responsible for less milk, less meat, and poorer reproduction, we are calling for more artificial insemination and other procedures looking more toward improved breeding than improved feeding. Legume plants have long been the cow’s choice among forages, probably because of the higher concentrations of proteins and inorganic elements in these nitrogen-fixing feeds. Is it possible that the instinct of the animals is directing them to recognize these better proteins when they break from the fertility exhausted soils to graze the grass on the still fertile soil of the highway? It is only when our soils are better in terms of all the essential elements, that they can grow the complete proteins. They should be complete as regards all the eight or ten different amino acids recognized as required for survival.

Instead of turning to drugs and vitamins to meet our health problems it may be more advantageous to find out how best to feed the soil. Soils are the basic resource not only for feeding cows, but also for feeding humans as well. Perhaps there are still enough humans in close contact with the soil, and perhaps enough thinking folks, to carry the responsibility of leading us to undertake the conservation of it and to manage its food potential wisely. If so, then our population may be balanced against its chance for all to be well-fed – and thereby healthy.

-          Excerpt from Albrecht’s Hidden Lessons – The Albrecht Papers Vol. 3 – W.A. Albrecht p. 342-343