It has been a couple months since I last posted, but one of our recent articles on SpudSmart.com is garnering a lot of views. People are curious about soil and soil health. I’m a soil guy myself: I am fascinated by the life that exists below our feet, and how we can promote and support it. Read on to learn more.
The soil microbiome is an infinitely more beautiful, diverse, complex ecosystem than most realize.
One gram of soil can hold more than fifty thousand (50,000!) species of microbes, all living, breathing, interacting and impacting our soil, land, air and crops. Think life is busy above ground? There’s a lot more going on ‘down under’: a team of soil scientists led by Swiss researcher Mark Anthony recently calculated that soil is home to 59% of Earth’s total life, making it the most biodiverse habitat on Earth! What’s creeping and crawling below the Earth’s skin? I’m glad you asked: that same team of scientists say a whopping 88% of all of Earth’s bacteria, 85% of its plants, and 90% of its fungi live hidden in the dirt.
When it comes to growing crops, soil microbes aren’t just important, they’re what everything else hinges on. They do the huge work of decomposing organic material, recycling nutrients, fixing nitrogen, supporting nutrient uptake in plants, building soil structure, managing pests and disease and more. Without them, crop production as we know it literally couldn’t exist.
That’s the good news story, but not the whole story. Alongside the beneficial microbes are a host of not so beneficial players in the soil microbiome: the pathogens and pests that compromise crops and wreak havoc on yield. Just as we tackle in fields above ground, we need to ask: how do we support the healthy functioning of the beneficial contributors to the soil biome, while managing the problem players?
Where agriculture used to have a ‘kill it all’ attitude towards bugs crawling and flying in above-ground crop biomass, we now understand and act according to a much more nuanced, integrated, targeted pest management strategy. Fortunately, that’s possible below-ground too. Whereas soil fumigants in the past were thought to blast any kind of life out of the soil, we now have a modern understanding of what soil fumigants do to the microbiome. In the case of the fumigant ‘Strike’, we have learned that it acts selectively in the soil. Far from a ‘kill all’ approach, Strike’s active ingredient, chloropicrin, does a proven job of suppressing potatoes’ biggest marketable yield robbers (the pathogens that deliver common scab and the early die complex), but at the same time it actually builds and supports populations of beneficial microorganisms in the soil. Independent studies show beneficial fungi and bacteria increase notably following an application of Strike.
For more information visit www.strikefumigants.com or send me an email at: info@strikefumigants.com. To read this article on SpudSmart, visit: https://spudsmart.com/do-you-know-and-appreciate-the-hidden-heroes-beneath-our-feet/