John Kempf. One of the things I’ve come to really appreciate is how much valuable historical knowledge has been lost or has been ignored. When we look back at the domain of understanding disease-suppressive soils and understanding soil microbiology, there’s research going back all the way to the early 1900s postulating plant absorption of nutrients through a process called endocytosis. There’s research describing all of the potential impacts that soil biology can have on plant development. But for many years, a lot of that research was ignored. We prioritized chemistry rather than biology.
And recently, with the work of Drs. James White and David Johnson and Christine Jones, and many other pioneers in this space, we’ve come to appreciate the critical importance of the role of biology in living systems. Fundamentally, regenerative agriculture is about understanding, facilitating and regenerating these relationships — between livestock on the landscape or between plants and soil microbes.
Mary, you’re another one of these pioneering scientists who first discovered some of these important relationships between microbes and plants. Why don’t you tell us a bit about your personal story and the research you started working on decades ago?
Mary Lucero. Thank you, John. Well, I’m a 16th-generation New Mexican. My family history goes back as far as there is recorded history in New Mexico, and probably further. And because of that, there’s this tie to the environment and to the land that is maybe less on the forefront of the minds of people who have not been in the same place as long.
My degree was in molecular biology. I was very much in a biotech environment, and my goal was to apply this to environmental restoration. For family reasons, I stayed in New Mexico to do that; there really wasn’t a degree program that focused on environmental applications of molecular biology, so I was interacting all the time with the plant molecular biologists who were doing genetic engineering for agricultural purposes. In fact, there was a big effort to develop and genetically engineer green chili at the time, because that’s one of the biggest crops in the state.
I went to graduate school thinking I was going to engineer microbes to break down chemical waste. But I’d only been there a few months before the consensus had been reached among the scientists that this really wasn’t a practical approach. Because when you take a microbe out of the environment and culture it long enough to engineer it, it has lost all the genes that give it the ability to function in the environment. When you put it back out there, it’s really not cleaning up much of anything. It’s getting eaten — it becomes food for other microbes.
So, the effort in microbial ecology at that point was to create the environment that allows native microbes to thrive. Do you change the nutrients in the soil? Do you change the aeration? What do you have to do to create that environment, because microbes are already there — they just need the right food to get them going.
Now, my undergraduate work was in agriculture, and I married into a family that was ranching at the time, so there was all this agricultural influence; it just wasn’t a good time to get into agriculture. That was probably what motivated my interest in environmental science.
My doctoral research focused on using what was the new horizon at the time — the plant-microbe interface. We were looking at using plant and microbe communities to break down environmental waste. We actually found a plant — common jimsonweed, Datura — that could chew up TNT faster than any microbe that had ever been tested. In New Mexico, during World War II, there was a lot of weapons testing, and as they were developing the atomic bomb, they manufactured a lot of TNT. Our research was working very well and going very quickly.
And the question came up, is it really the plant that’s breaking down the TNT, or is it microbes associated with the plant? At the time, the perception was that if you grew a plant in micropropagation — in tissue culture — you were dealing with an axenic system — one in which there were no microbes associated with it. So, we decided to grow the plants in tissue culture, feed them TNT, and see if they could break it down. And yes, it broke the TNT down very quickly.
About three weeks before I defended my dissertation, though, I was cleaning up my cell cultures in the lab, and I had done a final contamination check to make sure there were no microbes growing on the plant, and everything came out clean. I said something like, “Yay, now I can defend!” But one of the technicians who was working in the lab with me kind of chuckled. He said, “Before you decide that those plants are axenic, you might want to go talk to Jerry Barrow.”
I looked at him and said, “Who’s Jerry Barrow?” and he said, “He’s some old USDA guy who thinks that all plants are high-order lichens.” I’m the kind of personality who, when I hear something really out of the box, I need to go listen and get the whole story. And so about two days later, I’m knocking on the door of Jerry Barrow’s office. He invited me in to chat about microbes, and he started showing me micrographs he had taken of what he claimed were fungal structures inside micro-propagated plant tissues. He was working in a range ecology unit in Las Cruces, at a large USDA Ag Research Service facility. He was looking at how microbes were influencing the advancement of woody shrubs. He had hundreds of images of stained cells of fungal cell walls and fungal lipids inside the plant. He had thousands of these microbe graphs showing fungal structures in every single tissue of the plant.
And I remember looking at this picture, getting goosebumps, thinking, “If this man’s data are correct, pretty much everything I’ve learned in plant biotechnology is skewed.”
But the weakness to Jerry’s work at the time was that you need to look at things with many kinds of data, and all he really had was microscopy and many failed efforts to isolate these microbes from the plant in tissue culture. The problem was that he was looking at endophytes that, by nature, are optimized to live inside the plant. We know that 98 percent of the microbes in the environment can’t be cultured on plates. He was getting very inconsistent results trying to separate these microbes from the plant. And so, of course, I jumped in. I was finishing my dissertation and needed a job, so I said, “I can do the DNA sequencing, and let’s prove that they’re there.”
Well, it took us a few years to work in the funding and to create that position and to build on that opportunity. I actually spent about 10 years with USDA, working very closely with Jerry Barrow and others to isolate these endophytes from black grama grass and from fourwing saltbush — those were the two model systems we were looking at. We ended up characterizing many endophytes that lived in the plant while it was in so-called axenic environments — while it was in cultures that did appear to be axenic, by common standards. We published papers on these microbial communities that lived inside these plants.
Kempf. When I hear you describe the hypothesis that plants are simply high-order lichens, as proposed by Jerry Barrow, and when I hear you describe the abundance of fungal endophytes inside plants, there’s all kinds of questions that come to mind. What is their value to plants? How essential are they? What does this mean for us in thinking about plant propagation and selecting plant varieties? And from an agronomic management perspective, how do we need to begin thinking differently about managing agronomy given the presence of these organisms?
Lucero. Those are questions that also evolved in my mind as the research came forward. Early on, our idea was that these endophytes are certainly contributing to the tolerance in harsh environments. In fact, Jerry felt like one reason we were finding these endophytes so easily in native plants — that people in crop production had perhaps missed — was that we were working in these extreme environments. The annual precipitation on the Jornado experimental range was somewhere around 12 to 13 inches a year. It can get hot in summer and cold in the winter, and it’s dry most of the year. When the rain comes, it tends to come all at once. So, anything living on that environment has to be capable of tolerating extremes.
The hypotheses we were testing were that the endophytes were contributing to some of the drought tolerance and heat tolerance and stress tolerance of the plants. But because we could not really separate the endophytes from the plant, these were very difficult hypotheses to test. Jerry came up with the idea that maybe what we needed to do was transfer the endophytes. If we can’t grow them in isolated culture — if we can’t get them out of the plant — maybe we can transfer them into a plant that’s more scientifically defined. You don’t find a lot of scientific papers on black grama grass — we don’t know what the genome looks like. So, we decided to move it into tomato.
In fact, one of the big problems I was having, using the PCR primers developed by people like Jim White, was that I couldn’t amplify fungi out of our plant tissues because the PCR methods were heating too much plant DNA. We could see them under the microscope. We knew they were in there. But we couldn’t get that DNA out. And when we did DNA sequences that didn’t belong to the host plant, often they would map in the databases to other plant species. I concluded that whoever had sequenced that plant had captured a lot of endophytes. I was convinced that they were pulling the DNA out of that plant, thinking it was only a plant, and they were actually sequencing the fungal DNA that was associated with the plant.
Kempf. That’s fascinating.
Lucero. And that same fungus was probably in my fourwing saltbush, and that’s why I was getting the sequence. Now, I don’t know how much it’s changed with AI in recent years and what they’re able to do in terms of curating these national, global DNA databases. But at the time, there were a lot of erroneous sequences in the database.
I would share what I was finding at conferences, or with other researchers at New Mexico State University, and they would often tell me that I had to be pulling up contaminants. But I had a dedicated PCR hood, I had barrier tips on my pipettes, and I had UV sterilization of the area I was working with. Yes, you can get contamination in that environment — you can never rule out contamination — but I’d go into their labs and they had none of these controls, and they were getting good data. And I thought, why do we assume that these are contaminants, when these other assumptions — these other hypotheses — have not been tested? Nobody had disproven the idea that these sequences were actual sequences coming out of the plant.
The other factor I was running into is that when I did get fungal sequences, or when we did succeed in isolating a fungus from these micro-propagated plants, the species we were getting were very common molds. We’d isolate an Aspergillus, or an Alternaria species. And you’d take this over to the mycologists and ask them their opinion, and they’d say, “Oh, that’s just common mold. Those are everywhere. It’s a latent pathogen, maybe, in the plant, but it’s certainly not an endophyte.”
I’ve come to the conclusion that fungi are great shapeshifters. They can take on different forms. They can live indefinitely inside a plant, and then they can transform and come out of the plant. We actually got pretty successful at isolating these common molds by simply letting the healthy micro-propagated plant die. We’d leave it on the same nutrient medium without transferring — normally every four weeks or so you’d move your plants onto a fresh culture medium — and we’d just starve them to death. As the plant starves, the fungus would emerge and start looking for another home. And some of these fungi can break down the tissue culture media that can live on this agar-based media for quite some time.
Kempf. It’s known now that our human cells are exceeded in number by the cells that constitute our microbiome by an order of magnitude. In other words, we are more bacteria than we are “human.” Of what you were finding inside plants, what was the relative balance of microbial cells versus plant cells?
Lucero. Once again, these fungi are shapeshifters, and so it’s very hard to give it a good count. But it’s easily similar. You see reports of ten microbes to one human cell, and I think that mimics what we would see with electron microscopy or with the staining techniques when we looked at our plant cells.
There was a professor emeritus out of UC Irvine named Peter Atsatt whom I had several conversations with over the years. He developed what he called the “mycosome hypothesis” — that fungi could create these very small propagules that could exist inside other cells. And he would isolate these by filtering through a 0.2-micron filter. Now, that’s usually a filter size that you use to keep solutions sterile, because that’s pretty small even for a bacterium to pass through. But he would create these filtrates from plant tissues, and I know he did some with eggs, and he was interested in looking at meats and other tissues. And he could grow them in a low-nutrient, acidic medium, and pretty soon they’d start developing hyphae and evolving into fungi. In fact, I sequenced one for him — I think it was a Penicillium species. I don’t think he ever published that data. This kind of work was not well funded. No requests for proposal were available to look for this kind of fungal characterization. It was just a difficult area to advance the research in — especially when there was this perception that what you were looking at was simply contaminants.
In fact, one of the more amusing anecdotes from those days was that I had a technician sequence some isolettes that we had. And this sequence aligned with 90 species of whale. So I went back to some of the people at the university who kept telling me we had contaminants and acknowledged that they were correct — I really had to find a way to get the graduate students to stop dropping whales into my laboratory.
But at the same time, I went back and looked the research where a group had sequenced an entire phylogeny of whales, and they were collecting the DNA from whales by following the pods of whales in their boats and collecting the skin that sloughs off the surface of the whale. And that’s what they would sequence. I believe they sequenced a phylogeny of whale-associated fungi, and these fungi tolerate salt, and that’s why I was finding them in my fourwing saltbush.
Now, again, we never had enough data on this to publish it. It was something we didn’t want to go off on a complete new tangent with, because we had to stay focused on our land restoration mission. But you’re always left wondering, is this really what happened?
Kempf. You mentioned you had started thinking about transferring these endophyte populations — these fungal populations — from one plant species to another, and I find that concept intriguing because as we develop our understanding of epigenetics and genetic expression, we know that we have different varieties or different plant species that are much more stress tolerant than others. We now understand that that stress tolerance is not just due to genetics necessarily, but also to the associated microorganisms that are in that plant microbiome. The idea that you’re describing holds a lot of potential and a lot of promise for enhancing the epigenetic expression of other varieties of other species. It strikes me that this is a pathway that arguably holds more potential for developing stress-tolerant species than the going rage, which is CRISPR-Cas9 engineering.
Lucero. About 20 years ago I gave a presentation to a small southwest plant consortium, and we had just begun some of this transfer of endophytes. We chose a tomato plant because they grow quickly and because they already had a published genome, and we started taking some of these endophytes that we had isolated from fourwing saltbush and black grama grass and putting them in tomato. Sometimes I was kind of the big talker, and Jerry Barrow was really the one who had a lot of great ideas. But I kept having such a hard time sorting out what was fungal and what was plant in the DNA I was isolating from these plants. Today that would be a simple problem. But back then it was a lot easier talked about than done.
Jerry said, what if you could get the endophytes into another plant that we already know the genome of — then you can prove which are the tomato genes, and what’s not tomato must be fungal. I thought, that’d be great, but these endophytes have co-evolved with the plant — how are you going to get it to go into a different host plant? Three days later he shows me some culture plates where they had taken the callus culture from the fourwing saltbush and placed a bunch of tomato seeds on it. And about a week later, he shows me some little tomato plants. And he had the control plates that didn’t get those saltbush culture on them. And these things are growing way bigger.
And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. It could have been hormones from the culture media; it could have been a lot of things. But we started repeating this and adding more controls, and eventually we took these plants out and cultured them in the greenhouse and carried them out for a couple of generations. And over and over again, the plants that had been co-cultured with the endophyte-laden saltbush or black grama cultures were growing more robustly than the plants that had not.
What I presented at this southwest plant consortium 20 years ago was that we think we’re looking at a technology that can make genetic engineering obsolete.
Kempf. That’s the idea that occurred to me.
Lucero. Yeah. So, we got a little carried away with that. Pretty soon we were generating cultures of several of the major desert range plants. We had creosote bush and tar bush, and fourwing saltbush, and black grama cultures, and we were transferring these to different crop plants. We were writing up a patent on the technology. And what the patent attorney told us is that to submit a patent, you don’t need to have a lot of background data. It’s gonna sit in the patent office for five or six years before it actually gets reviewed, and you can be accumulating your data in the meantime.
I had a lot of questions. Part of my training was in toxicology and environmental health, and I wanted to make sure this was a safe technology. And they reassured me we’d have a lot of time to do this research, and to just put forward what we knew and to make the patent as broad as we could. One way big companies can get around a patent is to just find some other slightly different way to do it. You want to use language that’s very broad. We basically claimed in our patent any plant that contained endophytes from a non-host plant that were transferred by co-culturing with any part of that plant, because we were using callus cultures — these are undifferentiated cells. We were basically saying, if your plants touched my plants, and the endophytes got on it, it becomes my plant.
This sounded okay when we thought we were dealing with endophytes that were very plant-dependent symbionts. We thought it would be a rare event for the endophyte to transfer. But in the years that followed, while we were doing additional research and waiting for the patent to be reviewed, we really hit an explosion in genomic technology. That’s when we went from this tedious process of isolating and cloning individual gene fragments to — for the same cost, time and effort — sequencing whole genomes and metagenomes.
The first time we did a metagenomic analysis of the black grama cultures we had, we realized we were dealing with dozens of endophytes — dozens of species. While some of these are appeared to be classic endophytes that would only live in black grama, others were things like the Aspergillus or the Alternaria, that could be anywhere, but just happened to be cryptically residing inside our black grama grass. And that’s when we really started wondering, “Gosh, did we just patent life itself?”
By that time, Jerry was approaching retirement, and I was working more and more with a microbial ecologist named Adrian Funk, and he brought in a bunch of community profiling techniques. So, we started working with the metagenomics and also looking at the migration of these endophytes across plant communities. This turned into a study where we had sample sites in Jordan and sample sites in the U.S., up in the Four Corners region of New Mexico. And at each sample site, we would look at fourwing saltbush and collect tissues, we would look at the rhizosphere — the soil around the roots — the soil farther away from the plant, and also samples from all the plants that were growing near the canopy of the shrub. We compared the microorganisms in all of these. What we were looking for was how these microbes are moving across species and in and out of the soil — which ones are true endophytes and which ones can associate with anything.
Kempf. There are these conversations today about horizontal gene transfer between organisms, and that made me think, what about horizontal organism transfer? When we think about symbiotic crop species or cover crop cocktails, how much of the associated benefits that are happening there is really a horizontal organism transfer?
Lucero. Right. And what we saw is that, indeed, there’s a lot of this horizontal organism transfer. We had already been looking at the seedborne endophyte question — how many of these endophytes are vertically transmitted through the seed to the next generation, because many of these endophytes associate inside the seed. What we were able to do with these saltbush studies is look at which ones were in the seed, which were in the leaf, which were in the root, which were in the rhizosphere, and which were in the neighboring plants.
We concluded that there are many species that are kind of promiscuous, and they jump around between the different plants, and between the soil and the plant — but they’re still carried in the fourwing saltbush seed. And then you have other species that only stay in the fourwing saltbush. And these are what you might consider the true coevolved fourwing saltbush endophytes.
But we really need to think of the plant in terms of this whole dynamic community of epiphytes, which live on the surface of the plant; endophytes, which live inside the plant; and then of course the soil and rhizosphere microbes that might associate with the plant and also act endophytically. Because the word “endophyte” really just means “inside the plant.”
Kempf. James White certainly speaks a bit to the fungal component, but my understanding is that his research and his descriptions of the rhizophagy cycle tend to focus on bacterial endophytes. You’re largely focused on the fungal endophytes — what is the relationship, or perhaps what is the relative community presence, of bacterial versus fungal endophytes? And how might that be useful information?
Lucero. First, remember that under the microscope, a fungal cell is much bigger than a bacterial cell. It’s like comparing mice and elephants in a pasture. Which one’s gonna create the bigger impact? It depends — you could have millions of mice and get quite an impact. But I don’t know that there’s a logical way to really measure that question. There are bacteria that act endophytically, so to speak, within fungi — they colonize the fungi and live inside of them.
One of the questions I asked Peter Atsatt once when he was using these filtrates — these 0.2-micron filtrates — the only thing I could imagine that would pass through something that small would be an organelle, like a nucleus. And I asked him, “What are you transferring? Are these free-living nuclei?” And he just kind of chuckled because I know he was thinking the same thing, but he didn’t have the data to prove it.
Fungi are weird organisms. They can be multinuclear; a single fungal cell can have many nuclei inside it. But we were wondering if the nuclei could be pushed out and could survive independently. This creates a whole different question — how do you tell a fungal nucleus under the microscope from a bacterium? Bacteria might be bigger — you’d have a hard time seeing just the nuclei.
Kempf. This strikes me as so fascinating that this is such a multi-dimensional conversation — layers within layers. You could say it’s a fractal conversation — when you start thinking about bacterial endophytes colonizing fungi, and the fungi or fungal endophytes colonizing plants, it becomes a highly fractalized picture really quickly!
Lucero. I admit, some of these are hypotheses that are out in the twilight zone and that we really don’t have the hard data or the techniques to measure. I certainly haven’t proven any of this, but I think they are valid questions that in time will reveal themselves, as technology advances and our ability to examine things changes.
Kempf. When you start describing the ability to transfer endophytes between species —we have clearly established that there are exceptional, powerful symbioses that can occur when we grow certain plants in combination. It seems very reasonable to expect — I don’t know that there’s data to prove or disprove this — that a large proportion of those supportive or symbiotic effects are a result of the associated microbiomes between those species, and that the ways that these plants collaborate with each other, rather than compete with each other, is really mediated by their associated microbiomes.
When we transfer that thinking to the next step, which is where were you and I both went, how can this be used to think about plant breeding? We live in an environment on a planet today where, arguably, there are large parts of the planet that are very stressed. We have rapid desertification in the Southwest, where you are, for example. And when we think about the possibilities of adapting plant species to thrive in those environments, and to help us regenerate those environments, there are two very different worldviews. The one is the worldview of potential domination of genetic engineering — engineering plants to thrive in those stressful environments. And the other approach is an approach of collaboration and stewardship, associated with powerful science. The technology that you’re describing, or the approach that you’re describing, is being able to transfer stress tolerance through collaborative endophytes with other plant species.
It reminds me of a story that Jim White shared of a Native American ritual of soaking corn seeds in a plant pulp of seven different species — soaking them there for a few days before planting. That is a mechanism — a pathway — by which to transfer endophytes from some species to others.
This idea holds so much potential and so much promise that it seems the implications and the opportunity is far bigger and far richer than that of genetic engineering.
Lucero. As we looked at this saltbush dynamic, and the continuum of microbes extending from the seed through the rhizosphere and out to the soil, I had to expand my outlook beyond “how do we make this plant grow better.” I thought a lot about what I had learned early on in the microbial remediation world — that it’s really about creating the environment where the natural microorganisms can thrive.
I think that’s when I shifted from the focus on how to make better plants, or better plant endophyte combinations, to how to create this environment where the soil is so alive that the plants we put in it thrive. It took me out of the plant and into the soil, and into more of the soil health realm.
There were some studies that came out that were looking at what’s probably still today the best characterized endophyte system — the fescue Epichloë endophytes that we see in our cool-season grasses. It was a study by an ecology group that looked at how these endophytes persist across habitats. They took samples all the way from our North American fescue-populated grazing lands all the way down into South America. And they found that in some environments, the Epichloë is actually leaving the plant and populating the soil, and not acting as an endophyte. And I thought, well, that’s kind of what we were seeing in tissue culture with these plants — when we starved the cell, they left.
That was one of the first alarms I had thinking about the patent we had filed — the endophyte might not stay as an endophyte in the plant. When I was in graduate school, I actually studied under one of the gentlemen who had developed the first Bt construct. He taught my genetic engineering course, and I remember him talking a lot about the safety testing they had done to prove that this engineered gene would not get out into the environment. By this time in my career, I already had seen that those safety tests were inadequate to show that the gene was not entering the environment.
But I also saw that in our own patent, there was absolutely nothing to keep this endophyte that we had transferred from staying within the plant as it went into different environments. We really didn’t have a way to contain what we had claimed on the patent. An organism may behave as an endophyte under some environmental conditions, and then as the temperature changes, or the moisture changes, or the climate changes, or something different happens, other microbes move into the system. It could migrate out and possibly infect other plants, or possibly stay in the soil; we couldn’t really contain it.
Kempf. What I hear you saying is that while knowing and understanding this science is fascinating, in reality, if we take a more macro perspective, and we look at the foundational principles of improving soil health — of having a diverse species, and constantly maintaining living root systems — perhaps we look at some of these indigenous practices, as I described the Native American example of inoculating corn seed, and so forth. If we were really to incorporate those fundamental principles, then in reality, while we may not know and understand all the mechanisms, we’re already capturing much of what we need to capture to ensure that our ecosystem thrives.
Lucero. I think that’s a lot of what really drove me to change my career path. I was born in the Four Corners area, very much in what we refer to as “Indian country,” surrounded by Navajo and Zuni communities. I was the first child in my family not born in Zuni. We moved away when I was really young. My dad went to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and did this nationwide study on boarding schools; he was actually instrumental in bringing an end to the boarding schools. But it took us all over the country at a very early age and away from our own culture. It wasn’t until years later, as an adult, little by little, that I’d start to see that a lot of these things that my family had told me were actually indigenous ideas and concepts and principles. I just didn’t know where they had come from.
But somehow with the science, as I started seeing the connectivity of this, I started realizing that all these ancient teachings had a lot of wisdom in them, because they focused a lot more on the balance and maintaining community, and community health more than individual health. I think that putting some of those principles in place helps create the environment that lets these diverse soil communities thrive, and in turn the plant populations thrive. All these old things that my relatives had said when I was very young just started coming to mind as I kept trying to assemble all the new information, and to figure out how to turn this into something practical that people can use to reduce the problems we’re seeing in agriculture.
Kempf. You eventually left academia, and rather than looking at transferring endophytes between plant species, you started to look into how we can improve the soil microbiome and how we can produce really healthy soil. One of the topics I’m really interested in is how to produce a disease-suppressive soil and what defines a disease-suppressive soil. Once you started looking at soil health, where did that take you?
Lucero. One of the problems that grew as I progressed with my research was that I was starting to see how impossible it was to move forward and advance any finding from within USDA. It was kind of ironic because we had this phenomenal research budget. I had resources that ran circles around my colleagues at the universities. But you also have all these political forces. Every year when you hear on the news about budget disputes in Congress, remember that there are government agencies all over the country waiting for that budget so they can make decisions about what they’re going to do that year.
We were told that the role of an ARS scientist was to be somewhat like an endowed chair at a university — you were to have this continuous research budget that gave you the flexibility to explore in-depth, long-term, high-risk questions that were not being addressed by universities through the five-year grant cycle. That was what was said on paper and in discussions, but in reality, every time the administration changed, our focus would change. For example, I remember working with some growers to set up some field trials when we were working on endophyte transfer, and ARS came down on us bad because we were doing agronomic trials, and our mission was range science. We explained we were trying to find out what these range microbes are doing, and we hadn’t been able to explore that in the range plants.
It just got more and more frustrating. I ended up in a conversation with the National Program Officer about where I might be a better fit for the agency. We talked about the work I was doing and the research, and by that time, I was confident that understanding the microbial community could have major impacts on agriculture — it could transform the way we grow food. The microbes could not only replace pretty much every action we rely on chemicals to perform, but it could also revitalize local economies, because the better microbes for your farm are not going to be the same ones that are good in my community, to some extent. There’ll be a lot of local development of biofertilizers in this kind of thing.
As I explained all this with the national program leader, he finally just kind of shook his head and told me that he didn’t think there was a place for me in USDA. I was puzzled by the way he put it, and I said, “What exactly is the problem?” and he said, “This agency is never going to support an effort that does not benefit the agrochemical companies.”
Kempf. Wow, that’s quite a transparent statement.
Lucero. I had heard similar things at many levels from many people and washed them off as conspiracy theories. I think the poor guy I was talking to was actually just trying to be honest, and kind of regretted what he was saying. But it was such an eye opener to me in terms of why the story of microbes had not been advanced has always received low funding — because chemicals are much easier to own and patent.
We eventually abandoned our patent. It was awarded, but when it came time to renew, we told them not to renew it. We had realized by that time that the microbial community is so complex that what we were claiming was just too broad. It was like a patent on life itself. If you think there are headaches and legal issues and controversy over GMOs, what we had would have come to 10 times the controversy and ethical violations and other problems. It was a bad patent. I hope that by making it and letting it go, what we have accomplished is to leave this as public-prior art. And because it’s prior art, it cannot be patented by anybody. And so that makes microbial technologies a lot more accessible to the public.
Kempf. Well, yes and no — it makes them a lot more accessible to the public. But arguably, because of our IP protection structure, it also means that large corporations will not seek to develop this because they can’t patent and profit from it — which is kind of a double-edged sword. It’s a positive and a negative.
Lucero. I have scratched my head several times in the years since over this. Then, because I actually went through a major illness and a car accident within six months of each other, it really forced me to step back and get off the radar, and I lost a lot of my professional connections. I think I was also so disheartened by this whole discussion I’d had with USDA that I wanted to do something different.
I wanted to explore the entrepreneurial world; I wanted to work more with the public, because I felt that telling the story was probably a big part of this. There’s a lot of information that’s not getting into the public. And so I spent a few years doing a lot of speaking engagements. In the meantime, my husband actually started saying, “You know, if you’re going to tell people how they should be treating their soil, you need to be putting your money where your mouth is.”
So, we decided to buy a farm. We are now growing apples and raising cattle and trying to set up a regenerative system. We’re three years into this. And it has been an eye opener! You can make your mind up that you’re going to grow regeneratively — that you’re going to build this healthy soil microbial community — and we do; we invest a lot in testing, and I actually have a lab on site. We keep a pretty good pulse on what’s happening in our plants and in our soil. But you realize that you’re not a vacuum, and what neighbors are doing impacts your land in a big way.
We’ve been dealing with a lot of herbicide drift issues — and of course labor and policy issues, which I was well aware of before getting into all this — that make the whole process more challenging than it looks on paper. I had this idea you just get out there and you balance the nutrients, you plant a diverse plant community, and things are gonna happen. And they are — our soil health is improving, and it’s exciting. But the learning curve — getting out of books and onto the ground — has been a big one.
Kempf. Well, first of all, welcome! Welcome to the joy of co-creation. There’s just a lot of joy that happens when you start engaging with ecosystems and with living systems. I’m sure you’ve experienced that.
And then, when you think about the obstacles — you know, Ryan Holliday authored a wonderful little book titled The Obstacle Is the Way — that when you embrace the obstacles and work your way through them, then not only do you emerge stronger, but you learn things that can change the whole nature of reality for yourself and even for the world as a whole.
At the very beginning of your career, you were intrigued and you were working with microbe-plant symbiosis that had the capacity to degrade TNT. What if it’s the case that you have the unique skill set, and you’re the right person, in the right place, at the right time, to identify similar symbioses that can remediate pesticides and pesticide drift, or herbicide drift?
Lucero. That is exactly what I am working on. First of all, to look for the early signs of drift in the soil. I’m using the same community profiling techniques that we used on our fourwing saltbush studies — what we call substrate-induced respiration. You can look at how the respiration in the soil changes with different substrates. We are comparing them at a baseline level and then after exposure to different levels of pesticide. I like working at that level because I can keep the pesticides contained and in the lab, using microliters of it as opposed to ounces or gallons.
Working on a lab in the middle of a small farm is a whole lot different than my UV- and sterility-controlled environment at USDA — it’s slower work because you have a lot more to deal with. Just keeping dust out of the lab — I spend 10 minutes a day vacuuming and dust blowing, trying to keep my instruments free of dust. And, of course, as an independent scientist, there are very limited sources of funding.
But at the same time, I think you’re right — what I hope to do with these community profiles of the microbes is to start coming up with very early signals that growers can use to show, “this product is improving your soil health” or “this product is not.” That way you can start testing and measuring and demonstrating immediately, while you’re making the decision about what you want to buy, and what you want apply. And I think that in itself would be valuable.
Kempf. Most certainly.
