Five reasons to adopt microscopy to help make better agronomic decisions

When we use biologicals in farming or gardening, it’s critical to use a microscope to check on those microbes. You could easily just be spinning your wheels, thinking you are doing something of value, but meanwhile we are adding no value; or, worse, you’re doing harm. 

Consider a farmer using Korean Natural Farming (KNF) techniques. KNF has a great success record in many contexts, but it’s not infallible. It could be that a high water table is adding contamination to the system. It could be contamination in the well water. Eutrophication from runoff fertilizers combined with glyphosate residues and contaminated manure has created an ecosystemic catastrophe in many areas. There could be glyphosate and other contaminants in the animal feed that is turned into compost. And it could always be user error in the composting process.

The point is that if we don’t look, we don’t see. If we don’t test, we don’t know what, or if, anything is wrong. We need to look at our final product, but also the ingredients going into them. If we can only react when a macro-expression of the problem presents itself, we are just waiting for something bad to happen: a field speckled with blight, discoloration of leaves, chlorosis, insect damage, etc.