Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Soilsecrets@aol.com]

Great email and very good points on one more reason why chemical agriculture needs to be reduced and natural agriculture implemented world wide. 

 

But I'd like to make an important improvement in the work of Rodale's work on this issue and the single most significant factor for banking carbon in the soil and producing a pipeline of humus.  I'm speaking of the production of a protein in the soil called Glomalin produced by the mycorrhizal relationship between plants and the genus of mycorrhizae called Glomus.  Research is showing that Glomalin protein in the soil is the single largest potential bank of carbon on Earth. 

 

In short there are two basic problems that most soils in the country have almost without exception:

 

1. There is not enough humus already in the soil, or there is not enough biomass production on hand to provide for a humus generating pipeline to replace the humus being naturally lost by way of erosion and oxidation.

 

2. There are either not enough mycorrhizae fungi infecting the roots of the plants or there is none at all.  Without the Glomus mycorrhizae making Glomalin protein, the single best slow release form of natural fertilizer is missing.  Protein is made from Amino Acids and Amino Acids are rich in Nitrogen.  Protein is also the best source of nutritional calories for feeding your soils microbes and nature has given us a gift of a sustainable way of keeping protein available with the mycorrhizal relationship in place. 

 

The research is clear that plants need this mutualism and when they lack it the plant cannot uptake water or nutrients at the proper levels and therefore cannot be at optimum health.  This results in plants unable to tolerate drought or lower water conservation efforts and plants that are more susceptible to disease and insect problems.  While the claims of these benefits are criticized by many government entities such as the State Department's of Agriculture the 50,000 or more published papers of independent research exemplifies the benefits.  When we get an effective inoculation of the mycorrhizal relationship in plants, the tolerable limits to drought hardiness improves dramatically!

 

Dr. Michael Martin Melendrez - Soil Secrets  LLC