I had the idea that the REALLY complex interactions in mature, productive soils might be mostly needed to cope with changing situations from day to day, season to season, crop to crop and year to year.

Perhaps the simpler situation of a seedling tray with fairly sterile seedling mix doesn't need hundreds or thousands of species waiting to cope with a situation that might arise years from now.

Maybe all that needs for most of the benefit is 1-4 of the "right" species, or lets say 10-40 species containing many "popular" or widely-useful species. The right ones will attach and multiply - call it self-selection.

A seedling tray (or hydroponic table) won't need scavengers for water or phosphorus, or face very widely varied challenges. That might be the easiest scenario for commercial "soil helper microbe" products to help.

Then get a Berkeley phylochip card (or send a soil sample to them) and make an inventory of the microbiotic activity with a record of the results.

Way cool! I want one of those set up to distinguish flower and vegetable varieties. Then, when dogs eat the plant labels, or a cross-pollinated plant volunteers somewhere, all I would have to do would be to run an assay to find out the parentage!

http://esd.lbl.gov/research/te...

>> testing for over 8,000 bacterial species,

>> glass surface (called a microarray) divided into a grid of 356 rows × 712 columns, resulting in 253,472 separate tests, each capable of capturing a specific nucleic acid.

>> The Berkeley Lab PhyloChip can distinguish microbes based on how well their ribosomal DNA or RNA anneals, or “sticks,” to each of the many test sites

>> The PhyloChip has divided all known sequence variations from bacterial and archaeal ribosomal genes into over 8,000 distinctive groupings, each representing a specific microbial genus or species


http://www.thermopileproject.c...
>> identifying over 60,000 taxa of bacteria and archaea in a single test based on the 16S gene.


http://www.organic-gardening-f...

>> PhyloChip Helps Scientists Identify Communities of Microbes Suppressing Disease Pathogens in Soil.

Then hang up your shingle: Rick Corey, Rhizosphere Detective. I can't wait for the TV series!

"RBI: Raised Bed Investigator"

"NCI Fungus"

"Law and Flower"

I could imitate Sargent Joe Friday and say "Just the flax, Ma'am!"

Well I will try to use microbes for gardening.

Came across a Buzz Word for this:

Integrated Nutrient Management.

Some suggest that use of microbes can reduce need for fertilization in large commercial farms.

This guy calls it Biological Farming.

http://articles.mercola.com/si...

Quote:

The Cycle of Life Begins with the Biome

The soil system contains both predator and prey kinds of organisms. Bacteria, Brunetti explains, are the prey. These “grazers” get eaten by “predators” like protozoa and nematodes. The process of this predator-prey relationship is very similar to what occurs in the Serengeti when lions eat the ungulates.

“There’s a conservation of nutrients and a strengthening of the gene pool of not just the microbiome but of the plants themselves,” he explains.

This results in a massive increase in fungal, bacterial protozoa and nematode populations, which in turn increase the organic matter—the carbon—of the soil. It also increases the water-holding capacity of the soil, which provides natural drought resistance, and helps to reduce and control soil erosion. Last but not least, it boosts nutrient uptake in the plants growing in the soil.

A fascinating aspect of this soil system is that there’s a fantastic amount of communication going on in the root ball. Plants actually “talk” to one another through aerial emissions—the volatile gasses they emit—and also through the mycelial networks in the soil. This is a major insight that deepens our understanding of the importance of nurturing and maintaining healthy soil microbiome. It also explains why you don’t really need synthetic chemicals to grow large amounts of food. On the contrary, the chemicals used in modern agriculture are killing the very foundation of health—the microbiome in the soil. As explained by Brunetti:

“The plants can tell their neighbors, ‘By the way, there’s a pest in the neighborhood. Amp up by changing your chemistry so that you have more resistance.’ They can do that provided that the soils are well-nourished. If you don’t have well-nourished, mineralized soils, the compounds necessary to fight off these adversaries are not there. The plants then are still vulnerable.”

Unquote.

Great quote!I like the old cliche "feed the soil, and the soil will feed the plants".

Also, I say that I would rather cultivate the soil than cultivate the plants.

Caroline said:
>> Integrated Nutrient Management.

I like that! Like "Integrated Pest Management"

Farming wisely, not cleverly. Working in cooperation with nature, or sensitively, not blindly or at cross-purposes.

I think gardening sensitively was in the past very common, at least in an ethnological sense.

I am thinking of B. Malinowski's Coral Gardens and Their Magic about the Trobriand Islanders. In their gardens the yams would go out visiting at night.

Then we thought, "The primitive mind at work." Maybe not. Maybe it is only that the Trobrianders understood yams.

>> Then we thought, "The primitive mind at work."

Someone speculated that ethnologists from prior centuries thought their subjects were primitive because of poor or lazy translators (or prejudiced and lazy ethnologists).

Some shaman might be trying to say something rather subtle or vague and hard to express about how they imagined the forces of nature as being remote, abstract and hard to grasp concretely, "as if they lived on remote mountaintops, you know?".

The translators or ethnologists wrote that down as "these simpletons think their Gods live on top of the local mountain!"

Modern philosophers and theologians have trouble stating and communicating "precisely" what we believe to each other, even when they share a common language and almost identical religious beliefs. Other than reciting dogmas that literalize anything subtle down into short concrete words.

It makes a good story, anyway.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486235971/

RC:
Someone speculated that ethnologists from prior centuries thought their subjects were primitive because of poor or lazy translators (or prejudiced and lazy ethnologists).

I don't think many ethonographers come out of the field without a sense of the greatest respect and reverence for his subjects. His job, is to learn their culture to the extent that they treat him in the same way they would treat any one of themselves, that technique is called "participant observation". And the data is verified, if another person can follow the same methods and get the same results. So I don't think many ethonologists would be "prejudiced and lazy" having gone through that experience.

Good, and I suspect that has been progressively more true in recent decades, like more true in the late 1900s than in the early 1800s.

I'm trying to remember the name of a British scholar who discussed mythology and magical beliefs (and, perhaps, other cultures' religions. I had always thought that his is best-known work was 1-2 volumes, until I saw a many-volume version in a library.

The short form had all his offensive opinions edited out, where he showed quite a bit of contempt for commoners in his own country, let alone the natives of other countries.

The only bit that I remember was something contemptuous about the understanding of "Hod, the simple rural lout" or worse to that effect. He picked a fanciful name for an English peasant meaning a box for carrying bricks or mortar - something even simpler than a wheelbarrow.

My thought at the time was that he was calling his own countrymen with less education that he had "simpler than a wheelbarrow", or as we would now say "dumb as a box of bricks".

I may be too harsh on this author whose name I can remember. But I had huge respect for him while reading the bowdlerized versions of his main work.

Some anthropologists have written about the emotions they go through in learning another culture, and since at first you don't even speak the language the subjects can be pretty rough on you, since you know no more than a baby. And some of those emotions can be pretty negative. I remember a field school when we were transported from our graduate studies in California to Reno, Nevada. I admit there were times watching drunken gamblers that I didn't have much respect for them.

But once you get to the part where you are seeing the world from the gamblers point of view, whether you like or dislike them is no longer relevant.

This story is featured in the PRI newsletter today:

Zimbawe: 'we were told we were poor, we were told we were primitive . . ..

http://permaculturenews.org/20...

I'm going to have to come back to that and read it tomorrow.

I want to stress that my doubts about Western anthropologists or ethnologists is about the way those were practiced back when "The White man's Burden" was written and widely believed.

Not so much in t6he last 50 years, when anthropologists and ethnologists understand that Western arrogance is just our own primitive and stupid (or at least parochial and short-sighted) world view.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195003225/

I think if you reviewed early anthropology you would find that's what is about--a method for getting outside of our own cultural skin and it has been that since the beginning--before the 2nd world war. And about that same time Anthropological ethics became a major concern: Should anthropology be used as a subsidiary of the CIA? There was a resounding NOOOOO.

At least that is the anthropology that I was taught (UCSB, SJS, SDS in California and also the University of Kentucky), and that is the anthropology that I taught my students for about 25 years. The whole purpose of anthropology is and has always been to investigate and describe other cultures from the participants perspective. Otherwise, it is not anthropology.

Certainly you know a lot more about anthropology than I do.

Maybe what I read was more about early explorers or missionaries who had no desire to see things from anyone else's point of view.

Missionaries have created a lot of problems for indigenous people, as you can imagine. Today, Haiti is one very sad example.

I hope you get a chance to read the statement from Zimbawe linked above.

And I hope it is really true, that permaculture has the capability of returning horticultural practice to traditional cultures. If so it would be capable of giving them back control of their food supply.

Interesting conversation y'all were having and I wish that you would keep going...the topic of healthy (living) soil is vital...and it's best that I lurk rather than rant...however...

Missionaries certainly have created a lot of problems, but I see the 21st Century new religion of 'Science' as one of the most frightening problems today.
'They' did a study...
The doctor said...
Don't get me wrong, I am all for an appeal to the authority granted to both doctors and science, (and doctors backed by science) but the new religion of 'Science' has all but killed science.
Many of the best scientists of our generation are working as marketing mercenaries with closed datasets (proprietary). Here is but one example:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/RiceIs...
'Science' is agenda and profit driven. Predetermined conclusions are purchased; contrary conclusions are squelched. The Holy Wars are factions of 'Science' vs. 'Science' and today's evangelists are PR firms, marketing/sales personnel, lobbyists, activists, government officials, educators, journalists -in short, anyone with a political, economic and/or emotional dog in the fight.
In order to interpret anything one must identify the source of funding and then discern the economic and political outcomes or agendas of those providing the funding. Or, to predict what the 'Science' will say, just look who wrote the check.

The formerly common wisdom--
healthy soil > healthy plants > healthy herbivores and omnivores and carnivores aka you are what you eat
--is greatly suppressed by 'Science' funded to support the economies of scale currently controlling the vast majority of our food supply as well as the profitable treatments--not cures--for what ails us. Lots of scary stuff going on there, but that's fodder for another conversation. Likewise, the biofertility and probiotics industries will gladly tout the benefits of and profit from the sale of microorganisms to assist the intensive management of golf course turf, corn/soy rotations, or GI malfunctions, etc.

And it's like, duh,
Hazelnut said ...grow your own by setting up the right conditions ...Its not something you can buy in the store.
Rick said ...something like ten times as many microbial species living in soil than microbiologists can get to live in lab conditions... And they do it without scientific journals and planning meetings and budgets. I think soil is smarter than everybody!

On some level, this science is easy. Do your own experiment. (I wish everyone could and would) Cultivate and maintain some living soil, grow your own food, buy some from the store, blindfold yourself, and compare. Pay attention to everything--it's not just 'taste' nor can it be simply revealed in a chemical analysis (bioactive molecular isomers of significance don't show up there, for example). Grow more, keep eating it, you won't need the blindfold. How do you feel when you eat the food that you produced compared to many of the conventional Ag products...??? I'm fairly confident of the results...and I didn't even have to crack my checkbook.

Do we really need 'Science' to tell us what we already *know*, to prove and explain replicable results refuting equivalence before we can accept them?
Must we comprehend a treatise examining the forces of gravity and distortions in space-time to keep from jumping off cliffs?

Did anybody really think it was sound science or even a good idea to feed rendered ruminants back to ruminants...after all, we're only feeding the rumen microbes anyway... and is anyone really surprised this didn't work out very well? Currently, many of the scientifically formulated rations for rumen microbes still leave a lot to be desired--in terms of what the animals would eat given a choice (cutting edge technology or cutting corners in response to feed shortages and higher prices?).

In the big picture, our future is rife with many more opportunities for reckoning vis-à-vis Food 'Science'.
What is going to happen with so many genetic-genies let out of the bottle and the chemical war against superweeds and superbugs and the pharmacological manipulation of darn near everything else? I don't know.
But if ever there was a time to nurture that which sustains us, it might as well be now.

Please, don't report me to the thought police--
I am grateful for the grocery stores, the variety of food in them, as well as the sincere dedication of many of us to put it there and export it all over the world.

dirtdorphins

Most real scientists -those trained in the methods to investigate a certain domain of the earth's reality, know the difference between real science and dirty science.
In my own field, as I mentioned above, publications are required to be presented in the various journals ==forums of our peers and subjected to rigorous scrutiny. And one dimension of that scrutiny includes the ethical implications the research. Im not sure about the procedure in other fields, but I am fairly certain that real scientists are ethical people -- it is intrinsic to the scientific method.

That said, I can say from my own experience that doing real science is not something for which you are likely to get funding. The years I spent in research were funded by government grants administered through universities--there were no health benefits, no retirement benefits. When the job was done, there was no paycheck.
And when that happens you have to do whatever you can to make a living. Some scientists are fairly successful at getting grants. Others not.

So what I am saying is that we wont gain anything by throwing out the baby with the bath water. It is not science --i.e. practitioners of scientific method-- who are to blame. It is the fact that all of us have to make a living, and once you have a job, you have compromised your scientific objectivity.

To a certain extent that non-objective bias can be countered by competition. And it can be countered by presenting information in open forums and subjected to public scrutiny. In my opinion, making scientific information public and freely accessible would be one step in that direction. And the internet makes that possibility feasible, but it is not happening.