One of the most important strategies for improving your health is to grow your own food. However, that may not be so easy if you’re unaware of the importance of soil microbes.

Wendy Taheri is a research microbiologist, to whom I was introduced via Gabe Brown, a farmer in North Dakota, who is a strong proponent of regenerative land management.

Taheri was formerly employed at the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), and she recently founded a new company, TerraNimbus, to help farmers enhance their yields, reduce inputs, and improve nutrient use efficiency (NUE).

“I got my PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at Indiana University,” Taheri says. ”I was doing restoration work at old coal mines to make the soil grow plants again. We were focusing on using microbes for restoration.

During an experiment, I saw that the microbes I used were able to increase plant biomass by 69 percent. I said to myself, ‘Wow, we’ve got to get this to the farmers.’ After I graduated, I took a job with the USDA to try and do that.”

In this interview, she discusses the importance of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). According to renowned mycologist Paul Stamets, 70 percent of the soil microbes are fungi, so they’re a really critical consideration when you’re trying to improve soil health.

What Are Mycorrhizal Fungi?

While few people have actually seen mycorrhizal fungi, as you need a microscope to see them, they are a very important foundation for healthy soils. Their spores are in the soil and their hyphae (long, branching filamentous structures) are not only in the soil; they also integrate with the plant via its roots.

The filaments penetrate the roots of the plant and get inside the cells where they grow an organ called an arbuscule. There are seven different kinds of mycorrhizal fungi, but arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are the most important to farmers, as they are associated with so many different plants.

While the arbuscular kind associates with 90 percent of plant families, the other six kinds are more specialized for specific plant groups.

The hyphae, which are integrated into the plant, branch out into the soil, acting like very fine roots, giving the plant access to a larger volume of soil and hence more nutrients. These filaments specialize in uptaking nutrients such as trace minerals, particularly phosphorous, which is a limited resource.

Mycorrhizal Fungi as an Ecological Solution to Pollution

When phosphorus is applied as fertilizer, only a portion of it is utilized by the plants. A lot of what is being applied ends up running off and spilling into waterways, as tilling promotes soil erosion and hinders water retention.

From various waterways, phosphorous and other agricultural nutrients and chemicals eventually end up in our oceans, where they can lead to oxygen depletion (eutrophication).

“We tend to put a lot of phosphorus in our soils and use it not as wisely as we could, or as conservatively as we should,’ Taheri says. This is really important because we’re going to run out eventually…

Our soil, our atmosphere, our water, our oceans, our streams, and our lakes are all interconnected through nutrient cycles…

It’s my opinion that everyone who eats food or breathes oxygen should be concerned with how we manage our agricultural complex because the soil and the organisms in it is the only system large enough to offset global warming, which affects us all.

AMF are drawing carbon through plants, via photosynthesis. The plant is taking carbon out [of the atmosphere]. It’s feeding carbon in the form of sugars to mycorrhizal fungi. In fact, they get 100 percent of their carbon from the plant.

And then they utilize that carbon to build soil structure, which increases the soil quality. It’s the best way to sequester carbon, and it’s the only system big enough to offset all the oil we burned over the last century. We could actually do that.

A group of scientists is working on demonstrating that how we manage our soil can affect how much carbon we can store in it. And mycorrhizal fungi use that carbon to form soil aggregates, which is how we build our soil structure. They are keystone species in the soil; they’re very important.”

Tilling the soil promotes runoff, allowing a lot of phosphorus to wind up in the ocean. But matters are made even worse by the fact that we also have so much carbon dioxide in the air. This carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid when it mixes with water, making the water acidified.

Few people realize that 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe actually comes from the algae in the ocean, and acidification may be affecting the microbes and algae responsible for the production of this oxygen…

“Balancing global warming, carbon dioxide through management of agricultural systems can solve a lot of problems for humanity,” Taheri says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjoKd6a-o1Q