North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Road's End Farm <organic87@frontiernet.net>]

On Mar 28, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Road's End Farm wrote:

> If you're trying to produce cold fusion, things may be clearer. However, in the area of human nutrition, there are huge numbers of variables, many of them almost impossible to control for. Different people digest things differently. Different people have different genetics, different activity levels, different exposure to other environmental factors, different other items in their diets. The item being tested is also highly variable: different strains of blueberries, blueberries grown under different conditions (climate, particular weather, farming techniques), blueberries harvested at different degrees of ripeness, different weather, even possibly at different times of day; blueberries treated differently after harvest according to huge numbers of other possible variables -- all of these factors can affect the balance of the nutritional compounds in the specific blueberries used in the study.

Just to add: most of the above does also apply to the mycchorizal fungi question, for similar reasons: while we don't have humans as the test subjects, we do have huge numbers of variables that we so far don't well understand: results might well vary depending on the strain of fungi; other factors varying the fungi themselves; the crop and particular variety of crop inoculated; the soils being inoculated (soil type, previous management factors affecting the soil); the overall climate; the specific weather during the study; the pre-existing microbial and macrobial life in the soil; the timing of inoculation versus the growth stage of the crop and the time of year; the particular improvement being desired by the farmer (better yield? better flavor? better nutritional value? long term survival of the crop? etc.) 

Until recently, as I understand it, very little work has been done in regards to the various organisms that can be found living in soil, and even less on the interrelations among this huge number of highly variable organisms and among them and likely crop plants. It's a huge and complicated field. The work needs to be done; but expecting fast and clear results, at least past the stage of "this is how you can kill everything in the top 6" of your field" or "inoculating your peas with rhizobia is probably useful", is unreasonable. People claiming that they have definite and clear answers should be regarded with caution, unless they're making it clear they're addressing a very limited area of the subject; and probably even then, as one of the things we don't know is to what extent what appears to be such limited area are actually affected by factors outside those limits.

Whether the work with mycchorizal fungi has approached the level of peas and rhizobia isn't entirely clear to me -- it may have done so with some species in some soils under some growing conditions. This wouldn't mean that such information would automatically transfer to all species in all soils.

Now I really need to go get something else done, sorry about the run-on sentences --


--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly