 Mother nature is going to send all kinds of different disturbances to your doorstep, and you're going to test your ability to offset those bad conditions that nature sends your way. And you can't do that if you're just kind of guessing. Why is my plant getting brown leaves or, you know, that it's got purple veins over here or it looks like somebody kind of put this leaf on a grill and all the edges are curled and brown. What does that mean? Exactly what do I have to do? Why is the biology in the soil not doing its job in fixing this problem? And sometimes it takes taking a sample, let's look at what's going on in the soil and you go, all the fungi are gone. Dr. Elaine R. Ingham is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media Innovators Magazine and sponsored by the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. Elaine has uncovered the soil food web nearly four decades ago and has been pioneering research about soil food web ever since, widely recognized as the world's foremost soil biologist. She's passionate about empowering people to bring the soil in their communities back to life. Elaine's soil food web approach has been used to successfully restore the ecological functions of soils on more than 5 million acres of farmland all over the world. The courses that she offers are through the soil food web school have been designed specifically for people or for people with or without a science background, making them accessible to individuals who wish to learn to begin a meaningful and impactful career in the area that will help to secure the survival of humans and other species. She has many degrees and titles and has written thousands of different papers and publications, a BA in biology and chemistry from St. Olaf's College and MS and Microbiology at Texas A&M University, a PhD in microbiology at Colorado State University, founder and president of the Soil Food Web Incorporated, obviously director and director of the Soil Food Web School. Elaine, thank you so much for being here. I could go on days with all your accolades because you've been doing this a few decades for to be exact or more. Yeah, I think it's actually the 46th year this year. So yeah, time keeps marching on. It sure does and I'm so glad in your busy schedule because even after 46 years you're still going strong. I mean you're, I don't know if you look at it like a, I've still got another half of life to go and you're really not given up. And that is my attitude. I have decided that I'm going to live to 150. So if that's the case, I haven't even passed a halfway mark. Lots left to do, lots more things to investigate and figure out. Although I do notice kind of a little slow down in the speed at which I want to, you know, world hop because it's a, it gets a little harder the older you get. Yeah, it's interesting. Let the young ones go out and explore the planet. Exactly. And I think that's probably a blessing that has come about because of the pandemic that it's more things going virtual. We don't have to travel as much and it's not about quantity. It's really about quality and the work that you provide. I really see that time and time again. There was a fabulous documentary, The Symphony of Soil, about 130, 140 minutes long, fabulous. And a testament, yes, you've been doing this a long time, but also interesting to watch because it's, I don't know exactly the date on that, but it's just it's about that quality and about really getting people aware of what's going on. Yeah, I really enjoy that one. The Symphony of the Soil. Deborah, I think it's Coons. She was the director. She put it all together and it was a lot of fun when she was here to film me, to have conversations about where's this all going and what direction is it going to take to get there. And boy, we were wrong. The world took this sharp right turn when the virus came along and really pushed everything to the virtual setting where we couldn't leave our homes. So how do you talk to everybody? Yeah, so internet, just I'm sure the number of people using the internet just blossomed incredibly. Yeah, Zoom overtook most of the big companies in the world. It was a billion dollar company, which we're on now for the recording. I want to kind of get into that a little bit deeper, not just the Symphony of Soil. Most of your public publications or writings, they're academic, they're primers, they're handbooks, they're practical manuals as kind of what I see. And I'm asking you to prove me wrong. So you wrote for the United States Department of Agriculture, USDA, the Soil Biology Primer, which is the gold standard, triple gold standard, in my opinion, out there for farmers, USDA, they still promote it heavily on their website. And is that kind of the general attitude or general approach you've taken? Let's not get too academic, too scientific, let's give people hands on connective material. It's still science, it's still research, it's still important, but it's like, how can this be applied to your life as a gardener, as a farmer, as somebody who's producing food? Is that the general approach you've taken in most of your publications and writing? I'd say that it's more like a 50-50 split, where when you write a paper for the scientific community, it's going to go into a scientific journal. And you have to follow that format, you've got to have a section on methodology and get down to the nitty and the gritty of what you use. So it's got to be, it's a whole different language, almost. Yes, it's English, but it's this set of verbs, this set of nouns that you're going to use that would, if your average general person in the public picked up one of those journals, they'd be going, oh my god, what, this is English, but I don't understand this, this, this, this, this, you know, and they just throw it, you know, throw it down. And so we have to have a whole different set of publications that use simpler language. You don't have to use how many micro-leaders or, you know, megagrams or whatever that you used, you don't have to, you know, say that it was Pyrex glass that you used. So for the general public, it's go get a container and add this much of your question material with this much of the compost that you've made and look at how rapidly that decomposes. You know, whereas in the science, we, you know, it would take me a page and a half to explain exactly what we did and what tests we did, whereas with the general public, it's more, you have to use your nose, you have to use your eyes, you've got to stick your hands into it, you've got to get a feeling for the structure in that material. And we're not necessarily going to be quantifying to the third decimal place the way we have to in the scientific literature. So it's a, it's the same information. It's just presented in a much easier to understand and using tools that the general public generally tends to have. Eyes, nose, mouth, you know, I always find it interesting when you go back in time that people will talk about, you know, take a handful of your soil and take a bite out of it and chew it around a little bit. What do you taste? What are the flavors? As a microbiologist, I kind of go, what could be in that? So we're going to instead do the scientific studies on it. We're going to look at CO2. We're going to look at what the biology is that we see using the microscope. Are you seeing the good guy bacteria or fungi or protozoa or nematodes, microarthropods, earthworms? The presence of any one of those groups in a certain concentration tells you a lot about the history of what's been happening in that soil. Can we call it soil or we better ought to call it dirt because the only thing that's left there are the disease causing bacteria. That's dirt. Hans Yanny defined soil as being something that has to contain the textural material, sand, soil, clay, rocks, pebbles. It's got to have organic matter in it in order to feed the microorganisms. So you have to have the microorganisms. All the work in soil is done by the microorganisms. And if you go around killing them, then it's not soil. It's dirt. And that's what we've done to all of our agricultural lands. I remember when people, the first kind of go around with, where do we take all of this elevated CO2 in the atmosphere and where do we put it? And all of the soil scientists said, you can't put it into agricultural soils. Agricultural soils will not be part of the climate change carbon sequestration because you can't sequester carbon in agricultural soils. And I read that and went, what? Are you nuts or something? Well, yes. And certainly, we've had a whole new generation of soil scientists that have succeeded that way. That group of soil scientists that just were so blinded to the fact that it's not that that can't become good soil once again. But right now it's dirt because you're tilling too much. You're slicing and dicing and crushing all of those organisms except for the bacteria. And so what are you growing when you just basically have bacteria in the soil? Well, you're setting the stage to grow weeds. That's what Mother Nature does at that stage of succession. When you have just bacteria, it's going to be growing weeds. Well, that's not something we're going to eat. Because it's even before the dandelion stage of the soil. Things you're not putting in your mouth because they're probably toxic to you. So how do we get off of that stage? Well, okay, if you're out there and the biology in the soil says you're going to grow weeds because the only form of nitrogen is nitrate. That also means that we're going to be going out there with herbicides. What do herbicides do to the whatever biology might be left in that soil? What do those herbicides do? They kill any organism that's still present in the soil. Even say goodbye to your bacteria. There's nothing in that dirt to start fixing the problem. And we went down that pathway and it's like go back to why we started going down that pathway. It's because the motorized tractor came into existence in Australia in the late-ish 1800s, 1870, somewhere right around in there. And it got imported to the United States sometime in the early 1900s, 1905, 1902, depends on whose tractor you follow. And okay, so you can go from only being able to till half an acre of your property on a daily basis to being able to kill 100 acres on a daily basis. So farmers were just over the moon on this one, except they didn't understand what they were doing to their soil. They were destroying soil. And so if that's your attitude to the soil effect really as well. Yep, because it just spread across the large acreage farms. You go to a farm in Vermont and it's like, yeah, okay, 40 acres is big. So it doesn't really apply to those places because they're still tilling with little, small versions of the tillage equipment or they're still tilling by basically hand. Even in the southeast, it's still mostly small holdings until you get to the giant cotton plantations and things like that. So that's what started this whole downward situation with our soils. Because as soon as you start tilling what you're going to be growing our weeds, well, how do you get rid of weeds? Well, you're going to be applying these toxic chemicals that destroys everything in the soil. And so all the benefits that your plants used to get from these organisms isn't going to happen anymore. You aren't going to be cycling nutrients in natural way. And most soil scientists, they just say, you can't possibly grow this much food without putting on this inorganic fertilizer or using these pesticides because your crops get sick. They're being attacked by a whole bunch of different things you've got to keep applying these toxic chemicals. And you start going even further and faster down that hill to, yeah, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So it actually is. You're already taking us down some rabbit holes pretty early. So before we get too deep, because you brought it up, is there a way once we've hit the certification, once those clay sheets have dropped upon each other, and there's no more water there, and it's just thick hard clay, to bring that back to life, to bring that dirt, basically that hardened clay back to something that is living and a good soil? Is that like a pretty big task, bringing concrete back into something that's useful for agriculture? Yeah, we always go out and do a site assessment first to be able to kind of give the grower an idea of how long this is going to take in reality. And especially where there maybe can't, they just can't let go of that last little bit of fertilizer. You know, I want to, well, at least drop your fertilizer used by 50% in that first year, but you're not going to get it all the way. Okay, so how about people who say full on, we can in the course of about three months, completely turn that dirt back into soil. But you have to be doing some very specific things. You have to get hold of what's basically decomposed organic material, a compost, but it has to be made properly. It has to stay aerobic at all times. If you walk up to your compost pile or your big huge windrow, and you get a little downwind, and it's like, well, where did that ammonia smell come from? Or whoa, stinky, smelly rotten eggs, how mix ammonia with a little stinky rotten egg smell. And what do you call that? It's just, it's just bad with the anaerobic, organic acids that are produced only under anaerobic conditions. And you get those combinations of organic acids, you know, butyric acid, spoiled milk, or butter, that's that smell. Really high levels of lactic acid or, well, any number. And there's a list of about 150 different smells you want to be aware of so that if you smell them, you do the necessary work to get oxygen back into that whole compost pile. So it's, it's not the waste reduction that has been pushed by the waste industry. When you collect everybody's garbage, what do you do with this stuff? Oh, we're going to compost it. That's not composting. You can smell those waste piles for, you know, five miles downwind. And people who live near one of those landfills, their nasal passageways just get used to that smell. It's normal. The rest of us would not be able to spend the night there usually because the anaerobic conditions are releasing such nauseous materials. So you have to learn a whole new way of composting. And so we go through that process with people. It only takes, you know, probably a two week period of time for people to really start to figure out and start to be able to make their own small compost piles or do their windrows and make large scale compost. People who can't obey instructions usually can never make good compost. And we have a minimum value that you have to be able to have 135 micrograms of fungal biomass, 135 micrograms of bacterial biomass. You have to have over 10,000 protozoa and you've got to have at least 100 beneficial nematodes, no root feeders. Thank you. Not allowed. So we've even gotten so far as to put, here's the level that you have to have or don't bother or don't expect the outcome to be what you want it to be. If you can't, right here in the springtime, if you can't get it right, then you're not going to achieve what we're talking about. And so getting people to do that, it can be very difficult. So we basically have decided that we have to go out and we've got to make that compost for the world so that they're getting the real deal. They will be getting something where they can actually have normal nutrient cycling going on where you will not lose any nutrient from erosion or leaching because it will all be held by the microorganisms and the structure that they're building in that, in your soil. As you put the biology back in using the compost, we got to make sure that things are working all okay. That's where the microscope comes in, where you've got to be monitoring. If you don't want to monitor well, then it could well take you four or five years before you get to the point where you at least have a decent food web. So we really want people to be capable of using a microscope. It's not that hard. We can teach third graders how to use the microscope that we need to be able to see all these organisms in the soil. We had a booth at a meeting that was for citizen scientists and people would come by our booth and look through the microscope and start playing with it and we'd work with them and they would get it figured out in the course of 20 minutes. They were using the microscope all by themselves and then it becomes, look, look, look at this. What is this? And we're on a TV camera and we'd be able to talk through, well, this is a nematode. How do you tell if it's a good guy or a bad guy? Well, look at these big lips up here. That's a bacterial feeder. Good, you know, that's, yay, you've got those bacteria. Someone's going to be in control of those bacteria and then going along and finding a micro arthropod or finding a protozoan or a flagellate or a ciliate and being able to tell them, oh, ciliates, those, you really, that's not a good sign. That is, uh-oh, what was this sample? Because we need to tell those folks that their soil is anaerobic. It has too many anaerobic sites in it and we're seeing that effect. So, ciliates consume, you know, I've heard you say before about 10,000 bacteria a day, you know, so there, you've already taken us way deep right at the beginning. So, I want to get into that definitely and I want to let my listeners know that you, and I don't know if you still are, but you were with the Rodell Institute for a while as their chief soil scientist. Is that basically correct? Yeah, they're chief scientists and of course, I'm a soils person. It really interprets it into that. Yeah, I was at the Rodell Institute for about three years. Yeah, and that's amazing. So, I'm doing a book with a bunch of other collaborators called Menubi and Maria Rodell. Her grandfather and her father, you know, started the Rodell Institute and she wrote a real nice section and I'm hoping there's still a section from you as well for the book on soils. But not only have you been doing this, but there's science at regenerative farming, at organic farming, at places like the Rodell Institute. It's probably one of the pinnacle places, institutes related to agriculture and farming and no-till methods and soil health, they were in Kiss the Ground and that. And so, that leads me kind of to what I've tickled about in the past, but I want to ask you, so you already brought in the aspect of the microscope, but is farming and gardening a science? Is it kind of mixed in there with that as well? Because I say it's not, you know, when you hear people say farming, gardening, it's just natural. It's back to the roots. Well, I actually tend to think it's a science. And so, my question is, is gardening and farming a science? Especially if you want to always have good results because Mother Nature is going to send all kinds of different disturbances to your doorstep and going to test your ability to offset those bad conditions that nature sends your way. And you can't do that if you're just kind of guessing. Why is my plant getting brown leaves or, you know, that's got purple veins over here or it looks like somebody kind of put this leaf on a grill and all the edges are curled and brown? What does that mean? Exactly what do I have to do? Why is the biology in the soil not doing its job and fixing this problem? And sometimes it takes taking a sample, let's look at what's going on in the soil and you go, oh, the fungi are gone. Absolutely, they're just gone. Most of the protozoa, most of the nemo, you know, and so now what do we do? We go get our compost that contains all of the diversity of those organisms in that vicinity. And you want it to be local indigenous organisms. You don't want to be buying your compost from California if you live in Illinois because when you take those California microorganisms that are used to dry, arid, desert-like conditions and you put them into Illinois where does it ever stop raining in Illinois? You've got, you know, thunderstorms throughout the summer and here are these poor little desert-adapted microorganisms that are going, I'm drowning and they just go to sleep or they die. You've got to get the local guys because Mother Nature has been working for the last four billion years to adapt those bacteria. She's been working on the fungi for the last three, only five billion years to make certain all that diversity is there and all the predators, everything you need is present in that soil. So it's a science, absolutely. If you want to have good crops all the time, you've got to take that scientific approach. If you really don't care, you know, it's like my garden outside, I put things industriously, put in all kinds of things and I'm going to have a bumper crop of this that or the other and then I'm called off to Australia for three weeks and I come back and my garden, the deer have come in and eaten everything and if it wasn't the deer then it was the bunnies, if it wasn't the bunnies it was the turkeys and if it wasn't, so you have to be there to understand what's going on in your garden and fix it. Love it, I absolutely love it and so you've already kind of answered this question as well when you mentioned the microscope, so it is a recommendation. Go out there and get a microscope, not only is it fun if you have kids or grandkids but it's also fun if you want to do it right to see the living organisms, the living soil, what's in there, what's going on to get a test and when you spoke earlier about composting, it's not just about compost, it's also about this active tea compost, so it's your liquid compost, yeah liquid compost tea and that and you really, you also have a nice kind of a field guide or a book on the tea composting and do a bunch of things there. One of them is interesting is and I don't know how strong the affiliation is on this sim soil and things which is related to me is this symbiotic relationship which we see in the soils and so definitely if I understand you correctly we should get a little bit of wisdom, have some fun, get a microscope and look and see what we're doing but we should also not just go out and buy a microscope without kind of knowing what we're looking for and what we're doing and that's with what the courses you teach and how you're educating people. Yep the foundation classes, the foundation courses, there's four of them and the first one we go through an explanation of all the seven overarching principles of how the biology in the soil benefits plant growth and so we go through nutrient cycling, retention of nutrients in the soil, getting rid of diseases and pests because of course if your plant is getting all the nutrition it needs every second of every day it's getting the balance of all the nutrients it requires then that plant's immune system is going to work and here's where you know it's like soil chemists they were out there doing all these terrible things the biology in the soil killing them all and then they would plant their plants and they'd go plants don't have immune systems well they would if you put the system back the way it's supposed to be of course if you don't have any of the support cast present that plant can't possibly invoke its immune system it doesn't have the nutrients it needs to have that immune system you start getting the nutrients into the plant every second of every day it's got an immune system there ain't no way root-fid nematodes are going to be messing with that plant no way disease causing organisms um wilts and blights and all those fungal and bacterial diseases and insect pests that are attracted to your plant when it doesn't have the right balance of nutrients so get that biology back in the soil get all these benefits let's build some soil structure so the root systems of your plants can grow as deep as they possibly need to grow so how far down you know take one of your you know your fate like corn um how far down do the root systems of corn go go out to any chemical agricultural field and here's the top of the soil and you look about three inches down and that's all the further your plants roots go down because it's so compacted here that the roots can't push their way into that well it ain't it's not it's not soil it's dirt and so the roots go sideways which means this plant this corn plant is fighting with that corn plant and that corn plant and that one over there and this one over there they're all fighting for the same limited set of nutrients so none of them can be healthy i don't care if you've got mycorrhizal fungi on there or not they can't possibly be healthy because they're not getting all the nutrients that they need from that little itty bitty bit of well and what's the percent organic matter in that that's than half a percent there's no nutrients in there for the plants to find as soon as we can get the biology back in rebuild the structure of that compacted soil and it takes some about now four to five days to get through an inch maybe two of that compacted soil so it's going to take a time so let's get going on this in the fall so all through the winter time these microorganisms are happily chewing away and building structure structure for you so long as there's a layer snow or you've got a layer of leaves on top of them they're gonna there's gonna be free water and they're gonna be doing their job all winter long come spring time they just speed up so how far down tan the root system of a corn plant go 15 to 25 feet wow amazing you don't have to worry about nutrition because when you have that much you know and the corn plant doesn't put its roots out sideways it puts its roots downwards because that's where the summer water is going to be as that snow melts and percolates down infiltrates it's going to be held in small pores so you better have 10 feet of soil for that root system to get to enough water and people always say well but I've got a layer of rocks at eight feet yeah so who cares right down to that eight feet and hope that the micro riser takes care of that rock for you yep or you'll find that yeah you've got a layer of rock where you know geologically speaking some event happened and it laid down sand and now it's sandstone or whatever but you go through the cracks and the crevices in that rock and you get to the other side and there's another layer of soil and then there's another layer of soil and another you know going down much much deeper so your root system can get down to 25 feet if it needs to if it doesn't need to if the soil is really good and that top 10 feet will supply all of the nutrients all of the water that your plant requires then it doesn't put its roots down any deeper so how healthy is your soil how much nutrient cycling is going on and getting incorporated well measure the depth of your root system if it's only going four feet and that's a healthy plant you've got excellent nutrient concentrations excellent organic matter you know you you have to have a soil that has an organic matter concentration of at least three percent and you're going to have to work on it if you don't have that level right now you take the rest of this growing season and get it up to above three percent I'm always just astonished at chemicals so chemical labs where you send a sample in they send it back and it's here's the organic matter layer and it says that your organic matter layer should be between three percent and five percent like as if you get higher than five percent it's something bad something's wrong and they'll actually say that if you know if it comes back with your organic matter levels say like eight percent they'll tell you that your organic matter level is too high and you have to do something to get rid of it you're destroying water holding capacity if you don't have that organic matter if you're doing something to destroy it you're destroying the fertility of the soil oh but who are the businesses that that soil chemistry lab is directly related to that they get their money from? Bingo you got it yeah and so whose health are they taking care of not yours so we got to get that message across to people is there is absolutely no reason to put in organic fertilizer on their soil and it's actually detrimental they're going to go backwards instead of forwards. I've seen some of your images but also many others who've actually been down in the trenches they've been out on the farm and they've dug the trenches and they've gone down 6, 10, 12 more feet to look at the soil from that level. Nicole Masters, Gabe Brown, Richard Perkins, many others as well and before I go because I want to go deeper exactly on what you said there as well I want to just touch that you do have this soil summit and it is just it just completed here not too long ago Dr. Vandana Shiva, Dr. David Montgomery was there and a speaker you know geologist co-founder of Dig to Grow, Nicole Masters was there Darren Doherty, John Kempf you know I can't I can't remember if he's a Mennonite or Amish but he's just the most educated well young man and super guy ever on on knowledge and make sure that he speaks to the right people Christina Young, John D Lu who basically was there filming the restoration in China and the plateaus of China and that it is possible to take dead and dying dissertified soils and and bring it around Peter McCoy and I could go on and on you had tons and tons of fabulous people just it was a plethora one after the other at this summit and of course you were speaking as well given your soil food web course but there was something that you just said I want to dive in deeper but first I need to ask you if you can give me a story so a lot of the novices or those who don't know a lot about composting or it's only what we've seen in films and things I won't usually they know enough that your compost pile needs to be done and structured in a certain way and then it needs to get the temperature up but most people don't know why the temperature gets so high and you have a beautiful way of explaining that and telling that that when you do it I think light bulb goes on for a lot of people I don't I if you could just tell us that why it does that and how it does that I would so appreciate it because I think people would just really love to hear that. One of the first things you have to realize when you're dealing with organic matter is that it's probably going to have some diseases on it it's going to have disease causing organisms maybe they're not actually causing the disease right now they're hanging out but we can't let them go through to somebody who's going to put that on their garden or in on the pastures or in the fields we can't let those disease causing organisms get promulgated so here we're dealing with this organic matter we know there's some diseases on it and the way to get rid of them is to heat your compost up it's almost like autoclaving except that it's you know so we're not going to go under the deep pressure that you do in an autoclave because most people don't want to deal with something like that and you would kill the good guys along with the bad guys so how do you get the product that you want of all the good guys pretty much make it through and all of the bad guys are wiped out well you got to bring the temperature up you have to get the temperature above 131 degrees Fahrenheit for a full 72 hours three days you can't turn until that hot center has killed all of the disease causing organisms all the E. coli all the salmonella all the chigella all the pasturella all of those disease nasties the fungal diseases verticillium and on and on and on so we know that that center of the pile is now in a good place we don't have to worry about the disease causing organisms so we're going to turn the pile and we turn the pile such that what was in the middle is now going to be on the bottom and the top goes the yeah so you've you got to go through the diagrams to understand all of that but why is it that as the temperature of the compost pile it started at ambient temperature and started to climb almost right away because we put party food into that compost pile to get all of the comoras bringing in all these microorganisms and you have enough party food for them to get going and having a wild dance and having a perfectly wonderful time in there and of course when you're at a party what happens you end up in bed with somebody else and so as these microorganisms go through the process of reproduction think about yourself as you're going through reproductive practices does your temperature get higher and higher and higher yeah you you know pretty soon you're sweating nice hot you know so great same thing happens in the compost pile with the microorganisms as they reproduce they are releasing heat and that's what starts to elevate the temperature in your pile well you wanted to get above 131 but you don't want it to be anywhere close to 180 so there's the range of temperatures we can work with if you're only in the 130 to 145 range you're gonna have to keep the compost together not turn it for three full days well if the temperature went above 145 to maybe 160 you would only have to have the temperature above that level those levels for two days if you get above 160 165 you only have to have that temperature for two days or excuse me 24 hours so it you know how fast do you want to get your compost finished if you don't really want to worry about it too much you just maintain things between 131 and 145 if you want to zoom zoom zoom get along but then see how close should be you're getting to that 180 mark and if you go anaerobic at all if that if those organisms reproducing and having a good time at the party are getting the temperature up too high as it gets too too much activity in there they use up all the oxygen and now you go anaerobic and anaerobic organisms take all of the oxygen away there's not enough oxygen for the good guys so they go to sleep the bad guys start making alcohol and when that alcohol hits a temperature of 180 degrees it will burst into flames combustion will happen which is why a lot of people don't like to make compost if they don't know what they're doing because they don't realize that it goes anaerobic at a certain point there's too much activity and kaboom everything bursts into flames I I remember a project in in Utah where they called me up like two weeks after everything had happened and they said you know we were making a compost pile and we thought it was coming along just fine you know and all of a sudden it burst into flames and it burst into flames so dramatically that it broke windows in everybody's houses and barns and cars and all of that for like a two-mile radius so you do not want to you want to know what you're doing you've got to have an idea of where the danger zones are so we're going to turn the pile when you get have been hot enough long enough get all that oxygen back in slough everything up get it all turned so the next contingent of your pile that hasn't gotten up to um temperature is now in the middle and it will increase and hang out for a couple of days now it's been hot enough long enough you're going to turn it so the last section of your compost pile is going to come into that middle area and it doesn't matter if you're using uh you know cage wire cage to make your compost in or if you're doing windrows the pattern is the same you take the hot middle and move it to the top what was on the top is moved to the sides what's was in the sides is now in the middle so you just you know every time you turn you do that and what we find is that we only have to turn two times because we're being so careful about where the organisms have been and that they all get up to that temperature that we're going to kill the bad guys and the good guys will prevail so now you let that compost pile come down to ambient and there you are you've got a massive diversity of all of the bacteria the fungi the protozoa the nematodes and you can use that as an inoculum for any part of your farm what we've actually seen is that if you take that compost and you turn you extract the organisms off the surface of that compost and all the soluble nutrients come with as well all those humic acids fulvic acids olic acids that are in that compost all of those are soluble and they move into the liquid well you can take the bag with your compost solids in it let it drip dry a little bit just put those solids back onto your windrow or your your compost pile and now you can apply the liquid that has all of the organisms and a whole bunch of food in it as well and so you spray that out on your property and that is just as good as the solid compost the only difference being that you're not putting organic matter out if your soil is still down at you know point five or one or two or three you really want to put the compost out as well so you know you can see where you have a change in management you've got to know what your organic matter level is in that soil and and a real good way of doing that is to stick your hand in the soil if you stick your hand in your soil and you bash your fingers into compacted part of the soil yeah you know there's you don't have any organic matter in your soil yeah go get the biology and get it out but if you put your hand in and you can actually pick up a handful you can shake it a little bit see if you've got any airways and passageways to allow oxygen water roots to go into that soil um so there's one piece of information you really want to know and the other thing you want to know is what does it smell like and it should smell like a good rich forest soil if you have a high enough concentration of organic matter that's exactly what it will smell like and that's the goal that you're trying to get to i want my soils to be at least 50 percent organic matter and then i don't ever have to worry about compaction i don't have to worry about the disease causing organisms that's been solved and i don't have to worry about weeds either yeah exactly there's i mean i've even seen people take their compost tea and and put it into the ground so not just spray it that actually like almost inoculate push it down and then inject you know inject little shots along the way um i don't know how effective that is but i've seen a lot of different processes one thing that was interesting as well is in this reproductive party where they're generating heat just like we do uh when when we're excited in the bedroom um the question is is that because the cells are dividing and splitting as well along along the way and that's releasing energy it's this exponential growth basically inside your compost pile yep because that's what we really mean when we're talking about reproduction with bacteria we had one bacterium now you've got two two become four four become 16 16 becomes 80 whatever and so within and and reproduction occurs or it can occur every 20 minutes when you're working with bacteria so there's another elevation and temperature another one another one every 20 minutes and you can imagine that as you go from one bacterium to a million bacteria in 24 hours that's a lot of heat that's going to be released and i know we've got the data that says here's how much heat that is re is produced with every reproduction event that goes on and by the time you go from one bacterium to a million and you've got that many you've got 10 to the sixth power bacteria in that um in your in your organic matter and and uh yeah in your organic matter uh in the compost pile um you can multiply that and yeah your your temperature is going to be going we maybe don't want it to be that fast so you might take some of the more i might put in more of the of the greens in the woody's less party food so you control the temperature is it going to kind of slowly approach turning time or is it going to go who and and i've had compost piles that we over um we put too much party food in we underestimated how much nitrogen was really in that manure or in those legume materials or whatever you know spent um beer waste or something real good source of of party food uh and so we've had temperatures that we started the pile at like nine o'clock in the morning and by noon it was already at 150 degrees and you know you're going to have kaboom time happen about nine o'clock in the evening if you don't slow things down and so you got to come in with the um a bunch of newspaper that's shredded or cardboard or other wood chips something that will take away that the concentration of the high level nitrogen and then and you see the the the pile levels off quite nicely we like to when we when we teach people how to do make compost that's the foundation course number two um we give them all of this kind of information we have them make three compost piles and it has to be sequentially because you're going to learn a whole bunch of information from your first compost pile so now you apply it to your second compost pile and everything comes out real close to perfect and you've still learned a whole bunch more and now you make your third pile and usually people get you know grade A compost this was wonderful stuff it only takes that long and we when we compost the compost when when you really follow everything like we do and we turn right on time and we make certain that you've got the right mixes um it only takes 21 days to go from starting compost to finished where the temperatures started ambient taken off and it's done its turns and you've done turning so the pile comes right back to ambient within 21 days um so you know it takes something a little bit more than half a month to make uh um compost from finish to end when you know what you're doing microscope we could we could go I mean you've down 10 different rabbit holes but thank you so much for elaborating and giving us that glimpse on not only what your courses offer how in depth but also the the wood wide web the soil web the that that is right below us all around us there there is this saying that human health our health your health my health is a microcosmos of the the area or that around us the area where we live and um there's this this uh microbiome that the microbiome of our bodies is very close to the microbiome of our soils and our health of that microcosmos around us and um is that absolutely true that the those two microbiomes us having crawled out of that primordial soup how many millions of years ago um is very similarly tied to the way our health goes in our soils and our food we're very dependent on the sets of microorganisms in your digestive system all the way through and you know people always seem to talk about it like it was one single thing no there's a food web that goes on in your duodenum um in in your stomach that's different from what happens at the top of your small intestine um as you go through parts of your small intestine there are different communities that are very dependent on all the rest of these communities doing their thing properly and then you get into the large intestine a whole bunch of different communities as you go along most people think of our waste material as it develops going through the intestines is completely anaerobic no way the stuff coming in the front end is aerobic and much of that escapes the acid in your dot in your stomach and moves into the small intestine while it's still fully aerobic and that's why you want to have very small aggregates you want to chew your food really well so it's all these micro aggregates where a lot of these aerobic organisms are going to make it through into the rest of your digestive system as you go closer and closer to the exit of the the large intestine you get more and more oxygen seeping back in through your anus wonderful thought um so we have only begun to understand well it's a lot like soil we have only begun to understand this system and how it works together every place you go you're inoculating organisms anything you touch you've just picked some of those microorganisms up from that surface the you know we always used to think of door handles as being one of the most dangerous things that you encounter in your daily work because that's just chock full of all these other disease causing organisms that other people have spread and put there no it's aerobic and that means the disease causing organisms are not going to be winning in any competition well but what if you go and you take your antibiotic laced cleaning material and wash your door handle there's nobody there there's nobody left to protect you the next person that touches that door is going to leave behind you know maybe they just you know and now they're going to open that door so the only thing you're getting at that point are the disease causing organisms and there's nothing there to compete with them I want a well used doorknob because then the beneficial organisms are winning in that competition I think a lot of people don't really grasp the notion we've been on this antibacterial war for a while but they're in this soil food web and in the way our soils work the pests the bacteria the those things they're all part of the success of of a healthy biome of healthy soils and things and it's probably been now 15 minutes since you since you mentioned it but it's really triggered and it ties into the that the question that you answered on the biome which I really want to connect people to the earth to the soil I want them to know that the the distance from our own biome in our bodies and our guts is not that far and it's close related to the health of our soils and how we eat and what we eat and that we and we weren't dropped off on some planet Germany or spaceship Germany or spaceship America we we crawled out of this this primordial soup out of Mother Earth and we're the basic elements of life are tied to that as well the the thing that you mentioned before though and this is where I want to bring it up now as you you said don't get your soils or your compost or those inputs for your farm or your garden from thousands of miles away from some desert area or from from because that IMO which stands for indigenous microorganism is not going to be compatible to that nature environment that tropical was subtropical tropical or whatever the the area where you're inputting that is and so there's this thing that natural Korean farming and and IMOs which stands for indigenous microorganisms how do we ensure that that compost that mixture those organisms that we're putting into our soils that they're that they're native that they're ready for that that environment is there some tricks and tips that you can give us to to help with that understanding and to to thrive really you're looking at your what do they call them it's it's the biological contingent that is dependent on the typical kind of plant community present there the normal spread in degree days at you know zero degrees or 35 or 100 or 110 it's the extremes that are probably the most important those organisms survive that bio region that's the word I was looking for you want to be pulling everything out of the same bio region and of course as you get to the extremes are you really still in your bio region are you in the next one over well close enough you probably want those edge critters as long as you've got things that are being pulled getting pulled out of the center of that climate zone so you know like the Great Plains of the United States all of that is the same bio because the temperatures are pretty much the same the winter winds are the snow amounts when you get into the mountains where it starts to change a little bit well you know we could probably still get by with a handful or two of of soil from the middle of that from the arches national park or go into moab the thing you want to be careful about is when you're collecting your inoculum for a compost pile that will be from that bio region is that you want to take just pinches you know a quarter of a teaspoon you don't need anymore I run into people out you know collecting to start their compost pile with and they they're digging up a 55 gallon drum of material and it's just like put that back in the soil now or I'm going to go call the park rangers on you because you don't need that much you just need a teaspoon quarter teaspoon will do so you know put put those mixes together and shake those up and inoculate your compost pile with it but then once your compost pile has been inoculated with those organisms you've got those organisms you don't have to go out collecting anymore or maybe you just go out and collect in in more interesting places harder to get to the top of the mountain and underneath the waterfalls or whatever isn't that similar to like some making sourdough bread people keep that that the yeast or that organism continually thriving and alive as long as that then that lasts you forever right yep yep it's just that you know like compost is easier to take care of because you know so you get a few nasty things that get into the middle of your pile well you're going to make compost with most of that and now you've got the conditions where you can delete the bad and only end up with the good so we want all of the different groups of the organ of the food web present in there so you know making the liquid forms of the compost we we talked about that briefly with compost extract where you just massage and you get the organisms off the surface if you want to grow those organisms so that you can apply that compost tea to the above ground foliage those organisms have to be active they have to be growing in order to make the glue that the instant they fall on that leaf surface they're going to stick otherwise you know they just go next time it rains it it's all down there in the soil that's not where we need it we need it up on the on the plant surfaces so get those organisms growing in the tea and you're only going to be able to get a certain percentage growing because of the temperature and the moisture etc that you're at what kinds foods in the that compost tea but spray all of your foliage all of the above ground parts of your plants and that helps with the immune system it works right in to that immune system that the plants are producing and then the foundation course number four is the microscope that's where we train you to do the qualitative assessments if you want to get all quantitative and get all get all the way to the third decimal place you know really finally tuned that's the clp course where we teach people how to become a laboratory technician open your own lab everybody in your town should bring you their samples and think of the fun you can have talking with all your other the people in town about what they what's in their soil and what does that we what does that mean so we'd like people to come back also and take the consultant training because we get into very specific case studies and go through what does it mean when you see that what does it mean when it's you see this what what does it mean when both your bacteria and your fungi are sky high or you know this or this or yeah you got problem with weeds we can deal with that because weeds true weeds require nitrate and only nitrate as their force source of nitrogen if we can get the fungi grind at all and start getting some NH4 ammonium into that soil solution most weeds will not germinate and they will not grow so that's what that's the easy way to deal with weeds instead of you know most organic growers have been told the only way that they can get rid of weeds eventually is to till them out enough times and then they finally won't come back there's some farms that you know I've been working with them for the last 35 years and their neighbors following that approach still haven't gotten rid of their weeds whereas the farm we're working on the weeds are gone not a factor so getting that switch from strictly bacterial into getting more and more and more fungal to what your plant what your crop requires yep and we want to make certain that people understand the role and function of mycorrhizal fungi because you know plants like the brassicas the coal the kale the mustards should not be mycorrhizal it is detrimental as far as anybody can tell it's detrimental to have those colonized by the arbustular mycorrhizal fungi so you'll kind of when you're when you have crops that you're growing you want to separate those areas where you have the brassicas because they don't do well if there's a lot of mycorrhizal colonization and then you want the all of the you know the onions and the garlic and the shallots and their tomatoes and potatoes and herbs and spices and and then into the shrubs the vines the deciduous trees those all require the arbustular mycorrhizal fungi and then the conifers are the things that require the ecto mycorrhizal fungi and you really want to keep those beds the same thing year after year after year after year you don't have to rotate crops if you have the biology working because the biology is what should be taking care of the diseases and pests in the problem organism so yeah I had um Mary Gillam on on the show she wrote a book on the Monsanto papers and like I said Marie Rodel has also been on the podcast but she also wrote a contribution for the book that there's also discussion on some of these industrial farms where they use seeds and chemicals heavy chemical industrial that there's almost and I'm sorry to to be rude or to to hurt anyone's feelings but it's a form of raping almost when the the winds blow and those seeds blow over into other people's farms that it actually is ruining you know a good organic farm or others because because of that mixture of of things that don't really function and work well together and what you were just talking about was just not only those um those fungal kingdoms you know the different the different versions as well but on on the micro risa that you know spinach and broccoli don't use micro risa that's you know so that's not something that's important but there are so many different types enormous different types of micro risa that are the the really a big help and source for our plants for for for all different kinds that are needed to have that healthy fungal growth in our and in our soils and in our farming practices the way I first learned about micro risa and and this is a question for you that I've had for a lot of years is the way I first learned about it was from Lynn Margolis and I don't know how how much you know about her but I love I've got microcosmos symbiotic earth what is life and I mean I'm big huge fan of Lynn Margolis and her symbiotic earth documentary and I'm so sad that she left us soon but she disrupted the scientific community which I think you have done as well with your work and I love to see it because that is that female empowerment and that true knowledge that we need but this whole symbiosis and Gaia with James Lovelock in symbiotic relationships that you talk and practice and preach in your soil health every day what influence did she have if any what did you learn about her in this four decades 46 years now you've been doing this did any of that kind of jive or come together that you say oh our microbiome and we have symbiotes in us and it's related to my horizon that was that an aha moment or was it some different way that you came to this entire process oh gosh yeah um Lynn Margolis the first time I um learned about her and I started reading the books um I was just overwhelmed because this made so much more sense to me that things worked in community and it wasn't a doggie dog world it's you know it's kind of you know the the paternal sort of view of the world doggie dog and the and the best one rises to the top because they have I don't know they bite harder than anybody else the misunderstanding of Darwin you know survival of the fittest natural selection and everything that you talk about it is just told us now but on all your writings and your work it's that everything works in cooperation and harmony and and the symbiosis the symbiotes not only in our body but in our soils that we need each other in this cooperative collaborative manner and it's not survival of the fittest only the strong survive severe competition I think that's a big misunderstanding and that's what you know I I love about what I hear exactly and it's just I feel like I've grown because of her she was a stepping stone to for me to be able to go okay I'm gonna explain all of this on this whole different basis and it makes so much more sense all of these creatures are working with each other maybe if some alien invader comes along yeah some horrible disease blows in from you know Thailand or something okay now we've got a you know we got to rally the forces and we've got to get rid of this problem organism but a lot of it is its conditions too so there's so many more examples of collaboration and working with and joining forces to get rid of one problem that that's the normal way you know and and here we are as human beings still stuck in you know what you know creozoic or something era that when are we gonna step out into the light please let's get going on working together instead of fighting with each other and trying to have to prove who's the best who's the top who's winning the Nobel Peace Prize this year I don't care what have they done to better the you know the plight of human beings so yeah we all science is done by standing on the shoulders of the people who came before you to do this work and other people other students of mine will stand on my shoulders and they'll continue on there's so much left to learn we've barely scratched the surface and it's like five if you had talked to me five years ago we would only have had five overarching principles in the last five years we'd have added two more so the weed situation where the guys in the University of Tokyo in Japan have been showing they have a whole herd of papers where they've been putting that information out and and then the carbon sequestration when you are really trying to sequester carbon in the soil you have to get the fungi growing because that's what's putting the most carbon back into the soil and it just horrifies me when people talk about the soil doesn't do anything to sequester no that's where the carbon dioxide came from we've got to put that carbon dioxide back in to the place that it came from now how are you going to do that you're going to grow fungi because David Johnson for example at New Mexico State University has been showing that is as fungi increase so does the amount of carbon sequestered and it's it's incredible you go from you know like 0.5 tons of carbon equivalents per 12 inch depth of soil per year that's the low spot where you have almost no fungi left in your soil now you start getting some decent levels of fungi and now you're looking at 11 tons sequestered every year my units are not always exactly right I'm too many too many mila nation is fine yeah great I'm approximating so if you get a little bit later in in succession where you get even more fungal dominance in that that soil you may be able to sequester 43 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in the top 12 inches of the soil in a year well now most of the time the soil is going to go deeper than 12 inches so now how about how much carbon can be sequestered in two feet well double 43 what if you're you've got three feet of soil or what if you've got 10 feet of soil well now we're sequestering 430 tons how deep does your soil go if you go to people who drill down into the surface of the planet soils exist to the farthest extent that you can go where the innards of the earth they're starting to get to be so hot that they're liquid so 16 miles of or 12 miles you know this this geologist bandy those things about and I'm not it's not my science so uh I just listen to them and go uh huh okay 12 miles is that it will all agree 12 miles no um okay how about 10 no none yes scientists like to argue that well the roots don't go all the way down but there are organisms there are active living bacteria fungi protozoan nematodes down at that depth and so if they can be sequestering carbon even that deep well you know okay do we need to look at the rates but if you've got root systems like a Douglas fir easily can put its root systems down 250 feet so we are way off in terms of understanding where we should be putting that carbon and it should be put back into the soil because that's where it came from the great plains of the united states when you read journals of the pioneers and they describe that soil rich dark chocolate colored soil and so we're looking at something that is probably at least 50 percent organic matter if not more like 75 or 85 percent organic matter and today when you go back to those same places less than 1.1 percent organic matter so where did all that elevated co2 in the atmosphere come from yeah us turn around and take a look at yourself because that can explain most of the elevated carbon in the atmosphere well canadiens can have a little bit of of that finger shaking going on but really the point is to get the biology working for you start building that carbon sequester that carbon sequestration of that carbon as rapidly as possible if everybody started making compost from their waste materials and they followed the directions of making really good compost that they can then put on their soils put on their beds and grow the food from that old waste happily much different sizes and shapes and toxicity it would only take something like six to ten years to take all of that elevated co2 in the atmosphere and put it back into the soil amazing there is i mean we we could really literally talk for days i i only have three more questions for you because we we don't have days you're so busy with your schedule i would love to i think we might need to have part two or part three eventually because it is so amazing i have a stack of books that i i've set right here that you've contributed to or you've been part of the people who've been in your summit or in your courses you you you mentioned wendell berry you also you know unsettling of america and some of the great things that you know he says the soil is the great connector of lives the source and destination of all it is the healer the restorer the resurrector by which disease passes into health age into youth death into life without proper care for it we can have no community because without proper care for it we have no life and that's everything that you talk about and i just love the way you teach your courses the way you write the way you tell us about so i'm not only do i feel your passion but you are reconnecting me with our soil with our earth and i know that we're very this biome that i'm carrying around is very similar to that biome and if my biome and my micro cosmos my soil around me is healthy that most likely i'm going to be healthy and the food i'm going to eat is healthy and and the way the way i eat is going to be healthy um there there there are two things that i still wanted to talk about one is how important it is to kind of transition to this no tillage i really think that's a big help in restoring and healing our soils and a lot of respect kind of and that the the harvest and the things that we're seeing on no tillage are are keeping up to speed with with tillage with those who are tilling the ground and using other harvesting methods just as well and it's also doing a lot of benefits so i'd like to touch on that if you don't mind a little bit just kind of what your recommendations and why why we're moving more and more in that direction mostly because when you till you slice and dice and crush and destroy at least 50 percent of those organisms that are in that soil we wipe out species when in that soil in that place at least we wipe out species when we till and we really have to stop disturbing things so often you know back in the days before we had motorized anything you used to get behind your your donkey and uh you know you'd hit them hitch them up to the um the the tillage equipment you had one blade and you walked behind pushing that blade down into the ground trying to keep it even try to keep the animal walking in a straight line so your your rows would be straight um and it was there was a lot of work very hard work and in order to do that and you know so as all of those soils got trashed if you will um elevated salt um is often the problem that though their waters i'll get um elevated um salts in them and the civilization would have to move on they'd have to go elsewhere well when we uh invented the motorized tillage back in the late 1800s we started destroying that soil every every time you were going to plant your seeds well today if you go out to an agricultural large agricultural farm you will notice that they're out there tilling their soil in order to get something mixed into the soil once a week so we are tilling and destroying any beneficial organisms in that soil once a week how could we possibly expect that to recover and so what is it that's left in that soil the diseases in the past because they do just fine at avoiding the um the tillage equipment so we really let ourselves down this pathway to hell if you will um not not very well planned we didn't pay any attention to the organisms at all um I remember when I started graduate school at Colorado State University one of the big agricultural universities in the United States and um my major professor Dr. Donald Klein and I got together and decided that I would do a PhD work on fungi specifically how do we determine whether fungi are active or not when they're in soil and it's it's simple to do that it just takes a stain but I really wanted to find out what fungi do for plants if anything and so my major professor had me go around to all of the people in the uh school that worked with soil so horticulturalists landscape people the ag department the science department all of those places and I went in and talked to the professors and to a man they looked at me like I was crazy as I was discussing what I wanted to do for my PhD and their first remark to me was invariably you can't possibly expect that you're going to get a job after you finish that degree and then I well well why not because bacteria and fungi don't do anything in the soil they're just there they don't do anything they don't affect your plant in any way shape or form and I my god are these people these are the world acclaimed people in soil science or horticulture or whatever and they're telling me that these microorganisms that have survived that have lived for four billion years in the soil for three and a half billion years if you're a fungus that they do nothing why would mother nature keep them around why would they still be here you know and when dinosaurs got to be too much she just gone five fifteen thousand years gone but she's never done that with bacteria and fungi I think they're doing something give me the chance to figure that one out and that's basically what I've been doing with the rest of my career is figuring out what these organisms do to help plants grow and it's a very communal they work together there are ways to deal with any part of that group that starts getting out of control because everything's got a predator you know so I remember with one person that was like the bacteria and fungi the bacteria were getting so high what are we supposed to do we're going to have to go in there and autoclave the soil and it's like no what do you think predators of the bacteria would do to the bacteria well okay they would start eating the bacteria and we are they going to eat just a few bacteria or are they going to multiply are the are the predators going to multiply and now instead of one predator you've got 10 predators or 100 or a thousand oh yeah so after a while the bacterial population is going to drop back down to what it's supposed to be bingo you got it and what are the conditions are a little bit different they're not supporting the protozoa now what do we do we better have another predator another bacterial feeding nematode that will get out there and eat those bacteria well how about earthworms do they eat bacteria oh yeah how about incatriads do they eat bacteria oh yeah there are multiple predators for every group in the food web which is why we call it a food web because there's no it's not a straight chain that that was a pretty ridiculous way to view linkages between you know the plants are eaten by herbivores are eaten by carnivores and that's the food chain no it does not work like that so in the below ground there is arrows going every which way but eventually you get to us who are the at least we'd like to believe were the top of the food web which means we're so we're responsible for everything else on this that goes into making food for us amazing because you you you're talking about this you're talking about being kind of you know how can it seems like there's so much of an expert and those scientists and men who who you had these discussions with that they were so specialized in their areas they weren't seeing the world in a symbiotic way but they were seeing it not in a systemic way either it's very siloed and they didn't see all these multiple facets and there's another there's a slide that I use in my presentations once in a while and this touches right towards that and that's why I want to bring it up it's in 2015 we discovered on the Bacteria Tree of Life this whole new section you know the candidate and phyla radiation and parked a bacteria I can't even say some of the names you know the euclid laureates and stuff that we didn't even know existed until 2015 or hadn't really been discovered or talked about too much and then we're realizing most of those live within our body as well or in you know the geysers of Yellowstone or whatever so it's unbelievable how it's interesting for me for you to be bringing up all of these things because you know like with the for the gosh I love it when I can't remember names the woman who did we were talking about her books Lynn Lynn Margulis then Margulis gosh how could I forget she faced that same Lynn Margulis faced something very similar that the work that she did was just not believed that would that we know is just thrown aside you're crazy woman you don't know what you're talking about now here we are again bringing up another example of where somebody went flying in the face of what was believed to be the truth and we've got it all worked out no one ever has to learn anything more about this because we got it all figured out and then the chinks start breaking apart same with me when I first finished when I finished my phd work and wrote up my papers for the scientific community there was a lot of you know throwback at me that you know you're crazy you don't know what you're talking about I still run into that with certainly the oldest generation I do have to say the load's gotten lighter in the last 10 years because most of the people my age or older are retired and they go away as a problem as a you know you're not going to get over this wall because it's built too high and I'd want to retire too if I had such a boring narrow minded siloed approach or specific area well you've discovered everything everything's fine but you're just as you said you're tickling the surface this is the the prime time why retire why give up this beautiful thing because that's what that's how life really is it's it just it continues on and I love that yeah this discovery opens up the light on the whole next set of discoveries and it's way more than one person can do so now I keep welcoming more students and new student come on in help us we need your help you know there's a project there's a project there's a project which one do you want to do and their research is going to open up more places that we've got to know more about so see if we want to be feeding everybody on this planet so people always you know talk about well you know there's only so much carbon well there's only so much carbon in that pool but if we change these other pools this can fluctuate this is going to fly this is going to fluctuate that you know and we got to figure out how you time everything so there's no backup here so there's no way too fast going through here if we get it figured out we could how many people could we have on this planet well you know there is a obvious physical you know we can't go any further than a certain level but you'd think that we would be able to colonize Mars by that time I live in Hamburg Germany right now but I'm from America and but I've been to China and Philippines and many other places in Europe and especially in Asia people are living on top of each other you'd be surprised how many people we can fit into rather small space but having family in the U.S. I know how it is to to live you know to drive you have to drive to the mailbox some people would drive to the TV to change the channel you know if if they could so to say I tease it's over exaggerated but there are some wide open spaces and it's amazing what we can do because the and what can be achieved but I do think we have room for a lot more from from studies and history I actually think we're going to be going into decline I think it's going to level out and if we can figure out the food soil food web and and figure out how to fix some of these these problems the better people are educated the better they do the basic rights are covered and they have this then there's going to be better quality of life and so I think there's going to be a nice balancing out and equality around the world is just some of my personal thoughts and what I've seen out there in red and what the where I see we're going and and everybody could work on these really interesting questions that we need to have answered there's that's where we need to put our time and effort not to you know chase down criminals or you know have people so depressed and not you know homeless and all of those kinds of questions I agree we got the last the hardest question I have for you is when I ask all my guests and I can ask it in two ways one is really what does a world that works for everyone look like for you Elaine oh man we could have some of the greatest gardens in the world although I just go right back to the soil you know and the plants and the foods and everything you eat should have all of these beneficial organisms on them in whatever part of the country you're in so that you're capable of decomposing in your digestive system that food um that you need to have but we don't have the enzymes in our own bodies to break those things down we have to rely on these microorganisms that are on the surfaces of everything so now when you eat a blueberry you want to cover with these really beneficial organisms when you snack down on a banana right now you have to worry about how many toxic chemicals were sprayed on the outside of the banana so how am I going to open up my banana without getting my fingers covered with all these horrible toxic chemicals in order to eat the inside without touching the inside because that's all covered with bad you know it's just insanity what we're doing so yep I think we could all work together and have an absolutely wonderful time making sure that this planet becomes the Garden of Eden thank you so much that's so wonderful Elaine Dr. Elaine R. Ingham it was so wonderful that you let us inside of your ideas and we could talk for hours and hours but you have given us a glimpse into your passion and to your studies and life's work and I want to attend all your courses because I know I really do and I really hope that you'll consider a contribution in menu B it's been a sheer pleasure I tell everybody I know about you and and I really thank you for the time and that's all I have for you I just appreciate your time thank you well I thank you so much for inviting me to come talk and if you've got any good suggestions for next year's soil summit please let me know and I hope you come and attend as well certainly if you had some ideas for some topics that we need to cover that we haven't covered before really appreciate that and I'm sure you could probably put together a pretty interesting talk at the soil summit so I would I would love that consider yourself have some ideas already so thank you very much please yes that would be great I would love that and and well thank you mark and hope you have a good rest of the day I will and you as well and thank you very much