Soil Rx

Human health is a helpful framework for the critical assessment and selection of bio-inputs

“I’m thinking of trying a biological. What do you think?”

This question was recently posed to a Midwestern lab rep contact of mine by one of his farmers. I would wager that the same question has been posed in roughly similar fashion to many trusted advisors.

How would you answer it? I reckon I would answer it with a question:

“I’m thinking about trying medicine. What do you think?”

Frame the question within that familiar domain and a whole heap of the obvious considerations present themselves.

Which medicine? What are your symptoms? Do you know the cause? Do you have any contraindications? What side effects would you be willing to risk? Are there any alternative treatments?

As it has become increasingly clear that the health of soil, the health of crops, and the health of eaters are inextricably linked through nutrition and the living critters that provide it, I have found human health an increasingly useful analogy for communicating about plant health. Human medicine is a helpful framework for communicating the power, the promise, the unknowns, and the limitations of inputs, bioactive or otherwise.

Diagnosis and Treatment

An effective cure requires (1) an accurate diagnosis and (2) a fitting treatment.

First, the diagnosis. Does the patient complain of coughing, sneezing, congestion, and lethargy? You need to examine the patient to discern a cold from allergies, COVID from the swine flu, bronchitis from pneumonia. Once you know the condition, treatment can involve addressing symptoms, attacking the disease itself, and/or strengthening the immune system to fight for itself.

Consider a cold. Pseudoephedrine is an effective decongestant, guaifenesin is a proven expectorant, and dextromethorphan is a known cough suppressant. These treat symptoms. They make a cold more bearable, but they do not cure it. Antibiotics and antivirals attack the invader head-on. If it’s a viral infection, an antibiotic will have no effect except to mess with the patient’s gut. Yet if the infection is bacterial, an antibiotic can on occasion be a lifesaver.

I can tell you for certain that a lot of input manufacturers, sales agronomists and farmers are using antibiotics for a viral infection, metaphorically speaking, and then calling the antibiotic snake oil. Or they’re applying eczema cream for a migraine and taking ear drops for arthritis. The medicine is often excellent … for treating some condition under which this patient does not suffer. The failure is often in the diagnosis and prescription, not in the medicine.

Some medical interventions have been more intensely investigated than others. Folks will argue about homeopathic remedies like ginger, zinc, elderberry and turmeric, some swearing by it and others calling it bunk. I’m here to explore an analogy, not write an opinion piece I’m not qualified to write. I’ll only say that the simpler a product is (simple ingredients or modes of action) and the more concentrated the profit motive, the more science papers will be published about it. That neither proves nor disproves echinacea, burdock or chlorella powder.

Like pharmaceuticals, there are hundreds of bio-inputs to pick from in today’s market.

Neither do a thousand studies provide perfect certainty about how you’ll respond to a treatment. One poor lady developed lupus induced by a common heart medication. I’m told Prozac can, in rare patients, imitate Viagra. Each patient is, in some respect or other, unavoidably unique. Your mileage may vary. Perfect certainly is vouchsafed to no one.

That aside, we can all agree that patients require less medicine the healthier they are — that is, the stronger their own, native, disease-fighting system. Let us agree that having a hearty chicken soup and getting plenty of sleep in a warm bed will lead to a cure quicker than powering through with a stressful job outdoors in the middle of winter. Healthier people fight disease more effectively. When I’m weakened, I catch the many illnesses my kids bring home from school. When I’m fit as a fiddle, the same germs have little to no effect on me.

What you eat, how you sleep, how you get and stay strong, how you manage excess stress, and the health and harmony of key relationships in your life are the biggest factors in how susceptible you are to illness and how well you heal. On the one hand, taking great medicine doesn’t let you get away with zero exercise, chain smoking and a nightly six pack of brewskis. On the other hand, with limited time and resources, what will benefit you most: 30 more minutes of sleep, 30 minutes of exercise, or 30 mins of time set aside to slow down and cook a quality meal with a loved one?

Agroecosystem Health

Likewise, the health of an agroecosystem is, in part, its capacity to take stressors and pathogens in stride.

One system has ample water. Another has little and suffers. A third has little, but manages swimmingly nonetheless because, from the moment of germination, a living rhizosheath of bio-glue-exuding, osmolyte-sharing, sodium-sequestering, antioxidant-donating, water-and-nutrient-scavenging, pathogen-suppressing microbes leaps into action, cranking out abscisic and salicylic acids and ACC deaminases to empower the crop to take whatever challenges life throws at it.

Soil structure, organic carbon, ground cover, living creatures, nutrient availability and dozens of other factors all contribute to plant immunity. Just as different medicines, supplements and treatments are aimed at different health factors like inflammation, insulin, cholesterol, dopamine, antioxidants, gut flora, etc., different inputs all uniquely influence different factors in the crop health equation. Some temporarily but effectively address a chronic deficiency of nutrients or metabolites, some inject a powerful bacterial or fungal ally, some stimulate the native crittersphere, some prime plant immune function directly, and so on.

Whither a Biological

How does all this help the aforementioned inquirer parse his interest in “trying a biological”? Here’s how I would advise him.

Get clarity on needs and goals. Is it to address a specific problem (disease, nutrient deficiency, pest, stunting)? If so, what is the root cause (pathogen, malnutrition, drought stress)?

Or is it to enhance overall health and resilience? If so, what needs to be addressed most urgently (microbiome, nutrient balance, soil structure, soil organic matter, brix)? This requires observation and testing. Tests like Haney, water infiltration, and slake tests can offer key insights into soil structure and organic nutrients. Microscopy can offer direct insights into the proper function of the soil food web. Microscopy and the Microbiometer offer excellent snapshots of fungal and bacterial biomass. And high-resolution insights into specific nutrient-cycling bottlenecks, stress-adaptation liabilities, and both disease-causing and -suppressing organisms are accessible through next-generation DNA analysis such as BeCrop analysis.

Understand what targeted, short-term treatments are available for this season. There are snipers and there are shotguns, but there are no silver bullets. Any manufacturer or retailer should be able to tell you where their product is likely to work AND where it is likely not to. If they are trying to sell you a panacea, move on.

Biome Makers, having provided high-resolution DNA analysis for over 400 biological product trials in the past decade, has built an AI engine to provide unbiased, third-party product recommendations based on that in-field performance data and your own field results.

At the very least, a large language model like perplexity.ai can quickly provide some guidance and sources to investigate ways of tackling the needs you have identified.

Multiple promising options will present themselves. Strip trial them and expand on your successes.

Assiduously follow manufacturer guidelines so you are not flushing your money down the toilet, especially if you are applying live microbes. Ensure the product will jive with your tank mix.

Plan ahead how you will assess performance. Think like a doctor. Tests of blood, urine, range-of-motion, brain activity, and so on all have a purpose. Likewise, if we only look at yield, we will miss the tissue, sap, or DNA test that indicate we could save on fertilizer or pest control thanks to our biological intervention.

Commit to the long-term lifestyle changes necessary to build systemic strength and eliminate the problem. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You can set your land up for self-reinforcing ecological improvement that ultimately makes many conventional and biological inputs obsolete on your operation.

If making compost extract inexpensively with on-farm ingredients and keeping living roots in the soil equips me with a population of siderophore-synthesizing allies ready to rock and roll at my crop’s beck and call, I may pass on chelated iron indefinitely. If an intact food web makes predatory and entomopathogenic nematodes at home on my land, I can spend progressively less on killing root-feeding nematodes and corn rootworm. If phosphorus-solubilizing, humic-acid-exuding fungi find my fields hospitable, the consequent nutrient-use efficiency will enable me to dial back the fertilizer without my crop noticing.

Life is complicated. A “biological product” is any product that is either (a) alive or (b) derived from living creatures. Any blanket condemnation of the whole lot as foo-foo juice is bunk. It would likewise be foolish for me to write an article promoting a particular product as a sure solution for you without knowing your farm.

While all metaphors can be stretched beyond reason, I hope the framework I have presented here offers an avenue to more critical thinking and more fruitful management of your unique soil life, farm function and crop performance.