Q. How do you accelerate the on-ramp to obtaining nutrition from microbes via endophytes while you are on the off-ramp for synthetics?
A. Great question, because doing this cold turkey is very difficult and often inadvisable.
Let’s say you’re in the middle of the growing season — you’re at the fruit-fill stage, and you don’t have enough phosphorus. My preference is to apply those nutrients in an ionic form, a water-soluble form, as a foliar — not to the soil. When we apply it as a foliar, it’s still possible that it will have a suppressing effect on the endophytes and the microbiome, but it’s very temporary. It’s flash in the pan. After a couple of days, if the plant truly had a need for those nutrients, the plant will have metabolized them, and the nutrients that suppress your biology will be gone.
This is very different from a soil application. In the soil, when there’s a flush of available nutrients, the plant realizes it no longer needs to supply carbon to the soil microbiome in exchange for those nutrients, and the microbes don’t get fed. But then, after good plant absorption of these spoon-fed, soluble nutrients for a period of three days to a week, the nutrients are depleted, and now you’re worse off than you were before, because your microbes have depleted as well.
This is why foliars have such a powerful benefit. Foliars have been shown to be many times more effective, pound for pound applied, than soil applications. And I think a part of this is because there’s less disruption to the soil microbiome — even in soils that are microbially challenged.
From John Kempf’s presentation at the 2024 Acres U.S.A. conference.
