Soil Management by Nature or Man? - Natural Food and Farming: 1965

In our studies of how Mother Nature was growing crops which were able to protect themselves against pests and disease to survive the ages, and to be available for domestication by man when he took over the soil and crop management, we find that two basic requirements had always been met or fulfilled.

In the first place, rock minerals were weathering in the soil to remind us of the poetic claim that "The Mills of God must grind.” In the second place, the organic matter grown on the soil was naturally put back in place on top or within the soil for its decay there. That served to put microbial life into the soil. It generated the carbonic acid there (and other acids of decay) to break some of the nutrient elements out of the rock more rapidly for them to be caught up and held, or adsorbed, by some of the more stable, weathered, non-nutrient elements like the silicon of the clay. That adsorption holds them for plants services when the plant uses the same kind of carbonic acid to take those nutrients off by trading the hydrogen, or acid, for them.
 

By means of grinding fresh rock regularly as natural mineral fertilizers in the soil, and by conserving the organic matter to go back to maintain the soil’s humus at higher levels, nature had protected her crops so they grew annually from their own seeds. By a unique self protection they were doing well when man came along to take over what we call “scientific” crop management and “scientific” soil management. Certainly we are not now duplicating those practices in which nature was more successful than we appreciate.

According to our knowledge to date, the soil’s total capacity to hold electrically positive nutrients in available form should have about 60-75% for calcium, 6-12% for magnesium, 3-5% for potassium, and not more than that much of sodium and also all the needed trace elements and non-nutrient hydrogen, or acidity.

Those figures represent the soil’s content of positively charged elements in what, to date, we may consider a balanced plant ration… In our preceding remarks, we have not spoken about the soil’s organic supplies of nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus in the required plant’s ration. We have not mentioned some of the trace elements also connected more actively with the supply of organic matter than with the reserve minerals.

We need to look to the organic matter of the soil to make these last three more essential major nutrient elements available to the crops. We need to remind ourselves that it is the organic matter that makes the surface layer the “living soil” and the “handful of dust” with its power for creating life.

We must not forget that microbes are what make a living soil “alive.” And far more important, we must remember that soil microbes, like all other microbes, eat at the first sitting, or first table. Plants eat at the second. Microbes go first for energy food, since they cannot use the sunshine’s energy directly. Plants go first for “grow” food, since they can use sunshine energy that way.

A sprouting seed “roots” for a living, or for “grow” food first. It puts up its advertising of growth by showing its leaves above the soil in the sunshine second.

 

Microbes are the decomposers of the organic matter and the conservers of the inorganic fertility, of the nitrogen, of the sulphur and of the phosphorus. Those three elements do not escape so much from a soil which has plenty of organic matter and growing crops to conserve those elements. We need to consider organic matter to conserve, to mobilize and to increase the nitrogen, the sulfur and the phosphorus of the soils, if those are to be fully productive.

Soil microbes oxidize carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus to get energy thereby. It is in their oxidized forms that those elements are taken into the plant. Carbon is taken into the leaves. The others are taken into the plant root and, thus, all are in cycles of re-use.

It was by that more complete recycling for conservation that nature built up the soil in organic matter which we are compelling our microbes to burn out so rapidly when we return primarily chemical salts and little carbon of organic matter by which in this combination for microbial service, these fertility elements must be held in the soil. Plants and microbes must be in symbiotic activity and not in competition for fertility if our productive soils are to be maintained.

Carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus are the negatively charged elements with which the positively charged hydrogen, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium combine to make the readily soluble inorganic salts. But in those combined forms they are not held by the soil as such. They are ionically injurious to plant roots. They are leached out by percolating rainwater. It is the clay-humus part of the soil which filters the positively charged ions, or elements, out of those salts; much like the household water softener takes the calcium, or lime, hardness out of the water supply. The clay-humus holds them as insoluble, yet available, to plant roots which are trading acid, or hydrogen, for them.

 

The negatively charged, soluble nitrates, sulfates, phosphates, so oxidized by the microbes, serve as nutrition for them and for the plants to be reduced into the organo-molecular states of living tissue where they are insoluble but functional in large organic molecules and not as salts. On death, they are oxidized again for microbial energy and repeat the cycle.

It is in this natural plan of soil management where we must recognize the real service by the fertility elements of soil, air and water playing their roles in creation before we can take over for wiser management of nature’s part in crop production. Her two phases of management stand out. Nature returned the organic matter as completely as possible, in that she held many of the fertility elements and kept them available. She grew crops where she also added unweathered mineral salts and dusts through winds with their storms of such and by overflowing waters with their inwash of deposited minerals.

By that simple, two-phase procedure of fertility management, nature had many different crops of healthy plants here for man when he arrived. But each crop was on its own particularly suitable soil in its specific climatic, geo-chemical and balanced fertility setting with man and warm-blooded animals on the high-calcium soils. We have not yet included calcium as the foremost fertility element when we list the contents of commercial fertilizers, for the inspector, even though we lime the soil to combat its acidity and, thereby, work against the very mechanism by which the plant roots feed our crops.

Feed the soil and it will feed you.

- Excerpts from: Natural Food and Farming: 1965—The Albrecht Papers Vol. 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Of Soils and Nutrients

Phosphate, among other things, is a catalyst, and as such it recycles. It has a function that is special, for it guides all elements into the plant except nitrogen. In other words, all elements go into the plant in phosphate form except nitrogen. Somewhere along the line there has to be a union of the phosphate atom with necessary nutrient elements for healthy plant growth. If there is a phosphate insufficiency, the plant can still uptake nutrients, but they will not be incorporated into the cell. The consequence is shrinkage. When the crop is hay, shrinkage can make the crop almost vanish. A third of the corn crop can disappear because of shrinkage. The alfalfa crop is literally annihilated when there is a phosphate shortfall. Stems will be hollow, and the difference between half a yield and a full yield.

The last cutting on a farm I worked with had 80% solid stemmed alfalfa when we foliar fed after each harvest. The yield was greatest on the fourth cutting even though it wasn't taller – but there was no shrink.

A thinner stem may permit a larger population, but if the soil has insufficient nutrients there will not be enough energy to support the plants. If corn is healthy, tubules will be packed together all the way to the center. The center or pith of the stalk should be pearly white, not the dirty gray called gummosis.

Excess nitrogen will reveal a black layer node when the stalk is cut and put under a microscope. Such tubules often are completely blocked, much like a water pipe that is completely clogged. This is always an indication that there is not enough phosphate and calcium in relation to nitrogen.

Peppermint and spearmint do not have hollow stems if correct mineralization has been part of the fertility program. Even oats have solid stems if phosphate levels are maintained correctly to permit cell nourishment and growth. Properly nourished and nurtured, such oat stems will be more like a sturdy willow than a fragile soda fountain straw.

The research station at Bethesda, Maryland fed phosphate through the leaf in order to measure the effect on rootlets. Workers found that phosphate will travel to the roots at the rate of three feet per second. When it reaches the rootlet it forms an organic acid and solubilizes fertility elements for plant uptake. But once phosphate reaches a basic level in the soil, its need is greatly reduced. 

Nitrogen can carry all essential nutrients into the plant, potassium included. That is why much of agriculture grows crops with a combination of nitrogen, potassium and lots of water. This approach paints the field deep green, but at harvest the shrink is fantastic. It reminds one of grocery store hamburger made to look superb by blending the meat with crushed ice. That same hamburger melts away in a hot skillet. 

The same thing applies to livestock. It is possible to simulate growth and weight by feeding more nitrogen and potassium and keeping the phosphate level down. The gain is simply water in the cells. In a skillet or roaster, such meat shrinks and at the table it tastes like cardboard because minerals and nutrients for really good quality meat simply weren't there. 

The environment around you will tell most of the story if you see what you look at. If you go through an area where all the trees have branches bushed out at the top but there are no branches down the tree, that is an indication of a phosphate deficiency or a lack of availability to the plant. If a tree is branched out all the way to the ground, that indicates a good phosphate level in the area, or perhaps that there was one… 

Photo credit: AgFax

…carbon in the molecular structure of the seed brings water into the soil…one part carbon will hold four parts water. There are two million pounds of soil in the top six inches of an acre. A 1% organic matter soil will thus contain 20,000 pounds of carbon, and 20,000 pounds of carbon will absorb 80,000 pounds of water – or 10,000 gallons. It takes 28,000 gallons of water to cover an acre one inch deep. The problem of a three inch rain on a 1% organic matter soil is at once apparent. Even a 5% organic matter soil – which is difficult to achieve under row crop conditions – would have only 100,000 pounds of carbon, and therefore a potential for holding 400,000 pounds of water, approximately 50,000 gallons, only enough capacity to absorb a two inch rain. Once a saturation point is reached, the rest of the water will run off. The soil management problem is further complicated by hardpan, which prevents water from moving down into a water dome or aquifer and forces it to run off. 

With good biologically active carbon in the soil, there will still be a complement of soil air…Carbon attracts moisture from the air, especially at night. If there is high humidity in the air and enough carbon in the soil, plants can get enough moisture from the air to fix a crop if there is at least 20 to 25% humidity. 

Southern California was essentially desert in the early 1900s. The hills had no grass or trees. The Soil Conservation Service presided over the seeding of mountain areas with a variety of grasses. When the water wash ran off in the spring, a green layer developed and worked its way into the valley. Now when they get rain in that area, there is a basic climate change. In fact, it is possible to so manage carbon that is will change the climate of an area. It is also possible to so mismanage carbon that droughts are created. In Iowa - where they plow every possible acre from border to border – they have created droughts in areas where this phenomenon has never been heard of before. 

It is difficult to get carbon in the soil to go down. Magnetism must first be created, meaning phosphate molecules must be utilized to create a condition supportive of bacteria. This means aeration – and incorporation of carbon dioxide into the soil. When air can no longer enter soil, carbon goes out as CO₂ gas. Bacteria that run into salt-rich plow pan areas die off, much as if they were cast into a salt brine tank. 

The chemical symbol "C" means pure elemental carbon, a product that is difficult to achieve. We use the term carbon, but this expression requires a modifier. Carbon does not go in the soil as pure carbon. Generally speaking carbon is bonded with water and nitrogen to form organic acids in the soil which contain carbon. To really make soil magnetic, carbons have to be in residence to provide food for bacteria in the form of sugars. 

A cornstalk has cellulose, a form of carbon. If you break it down, the breakdown products will include sugars. Bacteria can work on this cornstalk if they have a suitable environment. A mandatory component of that environment is oxygen. Another is moisture.

It is not uncommon to see cornbelt farmers put in soybeans after one corn season, then return the third year to plow up corn stalks that have been neatly embalmed. Dead soils form formaldehyde, the same stuff that's used to preserve cadavers until after the funeral. Formaldehydes are an anaerobic breakdown product. In some cases aerobes work from the top down and dilute and break out the preserved biomass. But aerobes cannot survive in formaldehyde. The remedy, again, is carbon.

Carbon, we have noted, keeps the soil from blowing, not because it is some foo-foo dust, but because it serves up amino acids and nitrogen – the key to stickiness, in that order, and in that order of importance. This is the soil's method of storing nitrogen from one year to the next. The conventional wisdom has farmers using a modified hydroponic system. In this view soil has little function except to prop up the crop, and maintenance of a microsystem is a luxury too costly to justify. Such a soil on injectable nitrogen is much like a drug addict. It becomes dependent on the needle arrangement. 

No-till is to a large extent needle-till, forever dependent on hard chemistry. There is also a negative aspect to no-till, an inability to get the carbon to go down without air. No-till works best if the crop residue is incorporated into at least the top two inches of soil – a sort of contradiction. There has to be soil contact for microbial breakdown. There is usually as much biomass under as above the soil. 

Minimum tillage, in the beginning, is better than most management systems in keeping topsoil from blowing. With residue incorporated in the top inch or two of soil, it permits enough contact for meaningful activity. Basically, organic matter is some form of plant or animal life. Mixed with the life and work of microorganisms, organic matter delivers a most valuable constituent, carbon. Carbon can also come into an active soil through the air via the agency of bacteria. 

Another source is photosynthesis. The leaf takes in CO2 from the atmosphere through its stomata. Organic matter in the soil decomposes under proper conditions, releasing carbon dioxide for plant use. Decomposing bacteria break down into humus – a point at which parent material can no longer be recognized – organic material such as corn stover. The efficiency of this process is governed by the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in the soil, which at its optimum level should be twelve parts of carbon to one part of nitrogen. 

…bottom line seems to be that poor soils with less than 1% organic matter are not uncommon. Midwest prairie soils were running 10 to 12% in organic matter before the arrival of the moldboard plow. Today most of them have organic matter in the 2 to 3% range. Only a few well managed soils have a 5 to 6% index. Only rarely will 8% become an entry on a soil audit. Once intensified farming is started, most excellent soils have a tendency to back down to 5 or 6%.

…When such soils have a high carbon content, the roots will travel through the soil rapidly.

 

- Excepted from Mainline Farming for Century 21 - Dr. Dan Skow and Charles Walters

 

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