 So we're going to talk a little bit about the diversity of organisms that you have in the soil and what some of these organisms can do for you. So we've got, you know, a large scale of different types of organisms from the macroscopic organisms to the microscopic organisms that we have in our soil. And again, there's a huge diverse array. I can't put up pictures of all of these different organisms that are in the soil, but the big rules to think about, just like for us, for these organisms, they are all starving and homeless. And so what we need to do to get these organisms in our soil and to build the diversity of those organisms, when there's a diversity of these organisms, that's a really important thing to be able to build that resilience. That diversity is going to build the resilience that you have in the system. Oftentimes, if you have, people will ask me as a microbiologist, they'll say, well, you know, how do I get rid of all of the bad organisms and enhance all of the good? And I'm like, there is no such thing as bad and good. Everything, again, is eating and reproducing. Doesn't care about being bad or good. This is the way that we think. This is not the way that the systems are performing. This is not the way that the organisms are performing. Every organism has the potential to do things that can have negative ramifications on us. Oftentimes, the pest and disease issues that we see, especially when they're pest and disease issues that are caused by bacteria or fungi, are pest and disease issues caused by organisms that actually aren't disease-causing organisms. Initially, most of the organisms that cause, there are some that are strict pathogens, but most of the organisms have a saprophytic phase. They'll eat dead stuff before they'll eat living stuff. And think about it. If you are programmed to eat and reproduce, are you gonna wanna go out there and eat something that's dead and just gonna let you eat it? Cause it's dead. Or are you gonna wanna go out there and attack something that's living and gonna attack you back? What ends up happening is that we design systems in which the way that we are growing our crops, when we have too little diversity in our production, we have monoculture or biculture types of systems, we are only getting certain organisms to grow. We're only feeding them. When we only feed them, their population gets higher and higher, their population starts to build up to a level that all of the sudden they cause a disease issue because they now run out of food, all of the dead food, and they have to go out and attack living food. You want to have soybean cyst nematode is not a bad organism by itself. It plays a very important role in the system as a whole. But it causes an issue when it's one of the only nematode populations that's actually able to grow and reproduce. We are the masters of our own disasters. Let's quit making a disaster out of the system. You don't want to have a PhD in disaster creation. Not even a bachelor's degree. Let's not go there anymore. So we need to have this diverse array of organisms. We need to be feeding them and we need to make sure that their homes that they actually build, those aggregates that Lee showed us, those are their homes. That's the habitat for bacteria and fungi. Creating an environment in which those habitats are going to be built, stabilized, and stay there and not be destroyed. So what I want you to do, and we'll talk about as we look at the different organisms, we'll talk about their food and their habitats and how they're being built and those types of things. But what I want you to do as we're talking about this is I want you to think about how you can design your system to be able to be feeding them or maintaining their habitat as much as possible. Now, you're in the process of growing food, hopefully, we'll get there right now like I said, most of us are growing in the United States and Canada, but primarily in the United States, most of us are growing low quality feed and industrial products, but hopefully we'll get to the point where we're really growing food. And in the process of doing that, we are growing food for humans, organisms, that have outlived, have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment. Most organisms grow at a log mythic rate, according to food and habitat, and then when the food is depleted or the habitat is no longer good for them to grow in, their populations decline. We have outlived, we have outgrown that. We have outgrown our carrying capacity for this environment. But what we can do is, again, we can modify our environment in what it is that we're growing. So that's that intensification again. We're not looking at doing things like a natural environment would with the natural carrying capacity. We're looking at putting energy and resources, putting our own resources as far as growing more plants that aren't always gonna be harvested for food as far as putting and intensifying the system, managing grazing, managing the resources in a way in which we can intensify things to outperform the natural carrying capacity. That's what it is that we wanna do is outperform the natural carrying capacity. That's that doing more rather than less, getting more out of the system rather than less. So when you look at designing your system in this way, the reason I bring that up is there are some times in which you may be negatively impacting the food or the habitat of the microorganisms because you're not doing things in designing a system that's always going to be positive for just those organisms. What you wanna do then is figure out ways in which you can, if you make a choice, it's like moving, we always wanna have forward momentum. So you're gonna take steps backward. There may be times in which you're gonna do some things that may be destructive to the habitats. Tillage is a practice that's destructive to the habitats. Soil disturbance destroys their habitats. That may happen. There are gonna be times in which, again, not all of the, and not just times, but all of the time when you're growing a crop, you're not putting all of that plant biomass that's being produced back onto that soil, that carbon back into that soil. So that may be a little bit of a step backwards. But what we want is forward momentum, keep moving forward as much as possible. And that's where, again, part of making up for the fact that we are gonna harvest a crop is that we need to plant cover crops or other plants that aren't always gonna be harvested. We need to be looking at how we're gonna make up for what it is that we're taking out of the system. So we have a huge diversity of organisms in the soil. This is a diagram of the tree of life. We are branched up here off of animals. So we're not even on the tree as individuals. We're in a huge grouping that's there. In the soil environment, there are representatives from almost every branch that's there. And the reason that that's important is, again, this builds the resilience. No matter what conditions exist in the environment, there's going to be somebody that's going to be able to perform. Today, I know that there are soil organisms out in the soil that's probably even under the concrete that's in the parking lot. And today are growing. I know for sure that there are organisms that are in any grass strip that's out there. Or around any tree that's out there in the parking lot area. In your crop fields, today, there are organisms that are growing that are taking and consuming carbon today. Which is why, again, the amount of carbon that's needed is astronomical. And we know that this is true because we've done studies at a colleague who did research in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in crop fields and went out there in January, in Grand Forks, in subzero temperatures, to make sure that we knew that there were organisms that were growing. Took samples from those fields and were able to measure the gases that would come off by the functioning of microorganisms. So we know that even though you say your soils are dead right now, they're not. How is it that we can guarantee the continuation of functioning for soil health? That's part of the definition, is continuation of functioning. The continued capacity to function. This is how we do it. This diversity. You have halo files that can grow in very salty conditions. You have thermo files that can grow at higher temperatures. You have psychrophiles that can grow at very low temperatures. All of these different organisms, they're gonna be functioning. And again, when you think about them from a size component, they're very, very small, but the largest organism in the world is a microscopic fungus. The largest organism in the world is microscopic. Yes, I didn't just take drugs over lunch. It is true. The individual threads of its body are microscopic, but those threads have been growing for almost 3,000 years. This organism is in the Pacific Northwest, working its way into Northern California. It's a mushroom producing fungus. The way they found it was through aerial photography. The impact that it had on the trees in the forest, they could see, if anybody's ever heard about the fairy ring mushrooms, and they'll have sort of an impact that you can sometimes see that's these rings that will start from a center. What they did was they saw that impact on the trees going out in these concentric circles, away from a center. And then they took samples and they found out that it was the same organism that had been growing. So again, these very tiny things can affect things on a very large scale. And it's important for us to make sure that they are fed and that we maintain their habitats as much as possible. Because what they do, even though we don't understand everything about how they work, they work in these very complex consortia. Multiple organisms working together, trading off resources. It's a very interactive carbon economy. This is how every, again, every organism, including us, performs. We used to work for food. On some level, we still do, we just decided to put paper and ink on the stuff that we traded for food. But we still work for food. Every organism works for food. Food is carbon. It's this interactive carbon economy. This is how the entire world works is a carbon-based economy. Organisms trading resources for food. Work for food. You have bacteria and fungi that will go out there in the soil, produce enzymes to break down minerals so that they can release micronutrients and phosphorus and sulfur, things that normally are not readily available to the plant. You have organisms that are able to, as I said before, to fix nitrogen. They will take atmospheric nitrogen and to gas and convert it into nitrogen that the plant can use. And they do that and give that to the plant not because they're good or bad. They do that because the plant then gives them carbon, feeds them. Everybody's got a job. Things that they're doing in the system. You have nematodes. Most nematodes are not harmful. Most nematodes do not have pathogenic capability. But we will go out there when we have an issue with soybean cyst nematode and kill them all. You have organisms like protozoa and nematodes that will eat bacteria and fungi. They get signals from the plant that says, I need nitrogen. Those signals will go out into the soil environment and then you'll get organisms that will respond to that. Some of them are fixing nitrogen. Some of them, like the protozoa and nematodes, actually eat bacteria and fungi. And when they eat, they poop or they throw up and they expel waste. And that waste, just like all waste, just like we was talking about manure, all waste is planned available nutrients. Bacteria and fungi in this case are kind of like time-release fertilizer pellets. They got eaten and pelletized and expelled. The plant, again, gives off a signal to the soil that says, I need this. It's the same as if I were to, as I'm walking around, stub my toe or trip, like I just did. There's a biochemical signal, a carbon-based signal that gets released that says, you did this, catch yourself before you fall flat on your face. Says, you know, move what you need to move. If you're hurt, say, ouch. Your body responds to that. You'll get signals that will release blood to flow to that region to provide the micronutrients and the enzymes that are needed to help to withstand whatever wound that happens. All of this happens without me thinking about it. All of this happens without me doing anything, but it's all biochemical carbon-based signals. The plant does the same thing. It releases food in a particular form. It's a particular way of carbon-based signal that says to particular organisms, give me copper today, give me iron, give me boron, give me molybdenum, whatever it is the plant needs, it can tell, it has this language. It's a carbon-based language. You'll have then those organisms that will respond to that because they got fed. That carbon-based language is food to those organisms. That's how they know to respond. You have other organisms, the microarthropods, that are important, they're the shredders. They are, we are the microarthropods, you just ate lunch, so you are now a microarthropod of the macroscopic world. You shredded, you chewed your food. If you chewed your food well, your gut microbiome, you don't ever eat food, you chew food. If you chew your food well, your gut microbiome will be happy because you chewed it into little, beady pieces that the bacteria and fungi and protozoa in your guts will be able to now attach themselves to and produce enzymes and break down. And then, like everything else, they poop or throw up, and that food is what goes into your bloodstream. So, you know, thank you for the lunch, but really, what's in you is poop. You just ate poop. You chewed food and ate poop. That's how we all function. I love to talk to kids, they love that. It's like the best thing, you know? You ate poop today and they're like, yeah! I can tell mom! Doctor told me today that I ate poop, and it was good for me. Again, this is what it is that we're doing. We need to have these organisms. If you don't have them, the web, the system collapses. If you didn't chew your food, if you were not a good microarthropod of the macroscopic world, your gut microbiome is not happy. It will tell you it's not happy, and you will probably be visiting one of the restrooms. Because that's what they do when they're not happy. That's how they respond to those conditions. We apply, because we have a particular pest issue, we apply an insecticide to kill the pest insect that kills all of the insects, including the microarthropods. Arthropods is the name for insects. That's their family name, is Arthropod. We kill them all. Now, the bacteria that are in there don't have good access to food, so they can't grow to a high enough level. So when the plant gives off a chemical signal that says, I need nitrogen today, protozoa and nematodes, go eat some bacteria so that you can poop so that I can have the nitrogen, protozoa and the nematodes go, huh? There aren't any of them around here. We are the masters of our own disasters. Let's quit having a PhD in it. These are soil aggregates. Lee showed us some of the soil aggregates that you have. You have soil aggregates. This, Lee was talking about soil aggregates that can be made from sandy soils. The microorganisms will and can engineer soil aggregates from pure sand. They will actually even do it from glass beads. You do this in research. We're really mean to the microorganisms. We have them engineer things from glass beads. There's nothing they can get from them, but we want to see if they can engineer. So this is a sandy loam soil mixed one to one with sand, with coarse sand. It's not a soil that would be found in nature. It's too sandy. That aggregate was made in less than three months. This is a millet root that is part of a cover crop mixture that was planted in North Dakota on a sandy loam soil after the harvest of a forage pea crop that was harvested on July 1st. The cover crop mixture was planted on July 7th. I collected that root on August 30th. Less than 60 days. And look at all of those aggregates. Look at what they can engineer. The habitats that they'll create if the system is designed right for them to do so. Now this picture up here in the green, this is where in the lab we used a stain to be able to see, we put it under blue light and the stain causes a molecule that is produced by fungi to glow green. So this shows a molecule that is produced by the fungi to help to stabilize the aggregates. So it's not just enough to use carbon to build the house. This is like the Three Little Pigs. You know the story in The Three Little Pigs? So you got the first pig, it built the house of straw. And the wolf came along and it hopped and it popped and it blew the house down. You had the second little pig, it built the house of sticks. You had the wolf that came along and it hopped and it hopped and it hopped and it blew the house down. And you had the third little pig that built the house of bricks. big, that built the house of bricks. That biomolecule is the bricks on the outside of the house. It is stabilizing the aggregate. So it isn't just enough to use carbon to build the house, to provide the frame and the structure to create the aggregates, but they also have to use carbon to create the molecules that are going to be the bricks on the outside of the house. The bricks are really important to have on the outside of the house, because when you have stabilized aggregates that are formed, those aggregates can stay together when water gets into the soil. And we better hope that water gets into the soil, right? Because otherwise you wouldn't have water for your plants. You need water to get into the soil, but you want the aggregates to stay together. Now these were aggregates that were collected. All I did to collect those aggregates was I passed the soil through a series of screens. One screen was sort of a two millimeter screen. If you wanna do this, basically you can go to the hardware store, get regular window screening, and then get a small insect window screening. Be two sizes, you can see the openings in the screen. You want them to be two different sizes, one smaller than the other. Pass the soil through the screen that has the larger openings. Collect the soil that went through that screen, and then pass that through the screen that has the smaller opening. Collect the soil that stayed on the screen for the smaller opening. So it went through the large opening and got collected on the small opening. Basically what I did, those were the aggregates that were there. I put them in glass dishes, and I added water. Now I didn't add the water right on top of the aggregates. I added it on the edge so that the water would flow in like it does in the soil. So this is kind of simulating aggregates that would be just below the surface of the soil, so they're not gonna get the full impact of raindrops. But they're gonna get the water moving in by capillary action. It's moving in to the soil through the openings, through the pore space. Now these are soils from North Dakota. The soils are separated by about a half mile, a little less. Two of these soils, these first two soils are actually in plots that were side by side. This was a half mile away. This soil was from a conventionally tilled spring wheat fallow system. So there's a crop growing once every other year, and it was spring wheat. This was a no-till spring wheat winter wheat sunflower system. And then you had a moderately grazed pasture. Now this number here is basically just a percentage of the aggregates that stay together. But you can visually see what happens. Take those aggregates that you got from passing them through those screens, put them in water, and see what happens. It's like the cloud test, the big clouds that you have. But this is on a small habitat level. So this really shows the cloud is containing a whole bunch of aggregates. And clouds are sometimes also made not just by aggregates and not just by engineering, but also by mechanical and physical processes. So on this, it's really the organisms. So this gives you an idea of the organism impact that you have there. So what we've got here is in this moderately grazed pasture, the aggregates stay together. So in the middle one, we reduce the amount of soil disturbance, which can be an important element to this. Again, the destruction of the aggregates. But we didn't allow for enough photosynthetic time. We didn't allow for something to be growing 280 days. It was only during the crop season. So in the moderately grazed pasture, it's a huge difference between what happens because we have carbon going in. Enough carbon resources to lay the bricks on the outside of the house. That's what the bricks do. That's what it is that we need to have happen. Not just enough for the organisms themselves to live and reproduce, but also to make these biomolecules. What happens in the conventionally tilled system, the reason that that number is so low, are two things here. One is it only had a crop, spring wheat, that was growing, and I talked about vegetative growth time. Vegetative growth time in spring wheat is roughly about four to five weeks. Maximum. That's it. In a spring wheat phallus system, that's 104 weeks in which there's only about four to five weeks of growth. How much carbon does that put into the system? Think about what you're growing in the same way. I know that that's extreme. 104 weeks, four weeks of carbon, 100 weeks off, isn't going to be enough carbon to do much anything. But think about what you're growing. How many weeks of carbon does that put in a 52-week year? 280 days, and you're wondering why people are like, well, that's only 85 days off. I'm like, seriously, we've got to figure out how to break that 85 days down even smaller. This is not what it is that we're looking for. This is how we could be able to do that. That moderately grazed pasture is getting that to happen. So the tillage system here, the difference with the tillage, is that the engineers, part of the big engineers in making aggregates are mycorrhizal fungi. When you do tillage, you can tear apart their hyphae, their bodies, their threads, their bodies or threads. So you basically rip their arms and legs off when you do tillage. And they can live without their arms and legs. Part of their body will still live. The main part of their body will still be alive without their arms and legs. It won't function very well. And every year, it has to regrow its arms and legs. Every time you till, it has to regrow its arms and legs. The carbon, instead of being utilized to make the bricks, the carbon then is utilized to regrow arms and legs. How many aggregates and how many stable aggregates do you think you're going to build? If all the time, you're just putting energy into regrowing arms and legs. And you're supposed to take your arms and legs, use them as the frame for the house, and then make another biomolecule that you make bricks out of. There's no way that you can do that. Think about what you're doing with the system. And if you do tillage, how do you make up for that? How do you intensify and add more carbon into it? How do you get them to faster, to more quickly put on new arms and legs, and then have the resources to get bricks? How do you get this to function? If you do this, this is some of the potential that you can get. So some of you have probably seen this. This is from Gay Brown's farm. Many of you probably know Gay Brown. We all want to be Gay Brown, right? How many people want to be Gay Brown? All want to have this type of a system. And this really is, whether you want to be Gay Brown for his economics or what he does or how much work he does, or traveling or speaking or whatever, I don't care. What you want to be Gay Brown for is this. Because what he has here is a system in which, in 2009, we had a rainfall event. When he was talking about some of the rainfall events you can get in North Dakota, and I know there's some of those rainfall events you can get in South Dakota and Minnesota, because I've been in them before. We had a rainfall event. This was one I had never been in before, though, until this happened. It was six inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period. At one point in time, it was falling down at about eight inches an hour. Skies opened up. It was like a tropical rainstorm, just... and dumped. You could hear it in your basement. It was just tremendous. This is his field the next day. How many of us could say that? That you could take in 13.6 inches of rainfall and not only take it in, but take it in so fast, there's hardly any residue movement in that field. There's hardly any wash. It's not completely flat. There's a slope to it. There's no wash, or very little wash. Gabe will tell you there's a lot of wash there, but it's all relative in how we view things. He's taken his infiltration rate from a half an inch an hour to eight inches an hour. Infiltration rate is defined by porosity. You increase the porosity in your soil by 45%. You can increase the infiltration rate of the first inch of water by 167%, and the second inch of water by 650%. How fast you could get it in? It's not just that you can take it in, but how fast you can take it in. Porosity defines this. What you have between the aggregates and aggregates create porosity. What you have between the aggregates is the aggregates, these little balls, can't fit tightly together in the soil. So there's space between the balls. That space, when you have well-aggregated soil, there's so many of those balls that there's a lot of space in there, but that space actually curves and bends and moves around the balls. It's not a straight column of space. It's bending and curving and moving. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If you have a curvy road, it takes you longer to get home than if you had a straight road home, right? The more distance that is there, just like on a road that curves, the more water you could hold. The faster it could get in because there's more space. Things are moving out of the way and you have more space there for them to move in in a column of soil. The other advantage of this was this was the rainfall for that growing season. That was it. It didn't rain again in 2009. He still had a harvested crop because he was able to hold that water. As the water bends and curves and moves around the aggregates, what happens is it's harder for the sun. The sun is constantly using evaporative forces, solar radiation, the heat to pull the water out, to evaporate water out of the soil. Constantly pulling water out of the soil. Gravity is constantly pulling the water down away from the soil profile, which is the reason that we're always cursing the fact that not only does it rain, not rain enough, but it doesn't rain at the right times. This is time neutral because if you can keep, as it bends and curves, it will stay in the soil profile. This is similar to if you had a straw that had a kink in it. Have you ever tried and drink from a straw that somebody bent a little bit? And you sit there and you go, and then you go, and then you take the straw out and throw it to the side and you just pick up the glass and drink. Because it's harder, that sucking is energy, your energy trying to pull that liquid out. It's the same as the evaporative forces trying to pull the water out and gravity trying to pull the water down. If you can neutralize or make it so that it takes more energy or a longer period of time of those forces pulling for the water to be able to be moved out of the profile, you're able to keep the water. Resilience. It doesn't matter when it rains or how much it rains. That's the system that you want. And it only is created if you have the organisms in there to make the aggregates and stabilize those aggregates. We cannot design anything to work as well. Yes. Yes. You could get that down a lot less. There was a lot of learning time. That was Gabe when he started on his farm. He had the first about probably five years he would tell you was failure. He had several failures in the first four years with his crop and it was a lot of learning time in that because he had prop failures and he was doing things in a traditional manner. He had two major hailstorms that took out his crops and then he was trying to figure out there was monoculture system. It was a regular system. It was a monoculture. It was or a biculture I should say. According to soybean rotation high input type of a system all of those things were in place for about the first ten years they were having an effect. The first five years he didn't know to do anything different and then figured out to do some things differently but didn't know all of the steps that he could put into place. In the principles that exist looking at things reducing soil disturbance keeping a living plant growing all of those things that you're doing are going to have an effect. The more that you can layer those effects and the faster that you can implement those things the faster that this can happen. There are systems in which depending on how you look at implementing it you could do this I think probably get close to something like that in maybe five to seven years. To get that big of a change in infiltration rate but along the way you're going to see some pretty big changes. So what we want to do in these systems is really figure out how we can implement some of the tools that the organisms have to be able to improve our water use efficiency. Now the other thing that I want to point out here is that part of water use efficiency is also fertility. There is no scientist on earth who knows exactly how much water a plant needs to grow. There are papers out there there's research and there's data that says that this is what they say that is not the amount of water that the plant needs it's the amount of water that the system needs in a degraded soil because our soils are all degraded. If we were to change the system and change the soil that would change the amount of water that the plant needed. And part of this is based on this Albrecht study it was republished in 2000 in Acres Magazine the article was but the study was conducted in the 1950s at the University of Missouri by Dr. William Albrecht and what he found and this is the basis because this was done in the 1950s this is the major basis for the fertilizer industry saying you need to add this much fertility because what he found was that in a fertilized field it took far less water and you got a higher yield than in an unfertilized field. The point with this is why does that fertility have to exclusively come from synthetic fertilizers? We know that the nutrient use efficiency of synthetic nutrients the amount of nutrients that you add that ends up in that crop plant that you're growing in the year in which you apply those nutrients is 50% or less it's always been the way it's been but the rest of that 50% ends up polluting the environment some of it ends up in the bodies of organisms there's a lot of places in which that 50% is utilized but only 50% or less ends up in that same year in that crop plant that you're growing we've always known that what this curve tells us here is that the fertilizer use efficiency this is a nitrogen use efficiency curve tells us that since 1960 we've had an increase in global cereal yield not going to dispute that we've had an increase in yield technology, breeding, all of those types of things the bottom curve is a nitrogen use efficiency curve this is the amount of nitrogen that is needed so it's the yield per the amount of nitrogen applied that curve is going down it takes more nitrogen fertilizer today to produce a bushel of grain than it took in 1960 more fertilizer today synthetic fertilizer to produce a bushel of grain than it took in 1960 regardless of our mechanical breeding or chemical tools and the reason is is because what the plant needs is the nutrients at the right time and the nutrients that are applied synthetically aren't available at the right time so it has to get those nutrients from the soil the more that we have added those synthetic nutrients and the more that we have added the pesticides that have killed various types of organisms not all of them completely didn't wipe their populations completely off the map but the more that you do these repeated practices their population declines the more that you add synthetic nutrients then organisms don't have a job if they don't have a job they don't get fed, if they don't get fed they don't reproduce their populations decline in 1960 there were more organisms in the soil that provided more nutrients to the growing plant than there are today in most of our crop fields we can turn this around and I'm running out of time so I'm going to skip to this because this is the big one the mycorrhizal fungi so we're going to end here with the mycorrhizal fungi these organisms are basically a pipeline connecting the soil to the plant they grow inside the plant roots their bodies are threads so they grow inside the plant roots basically it's like somebody dropping off the nutrients from the front door knock on the door plant just has to open up its cell membrane and the nutrients can come flowing in so they deliver right to the door they go out into the soil and they pick up the nutrients that are released by the activities of other bacteria and fungi they work with these phosphate-cellulizing bacteria these phosphate-cellulizing bacteria live on their hyphae they live their attached to their bodies so that they can release phosphorus in the soil right next to the door for the fungi to open up the door let the phosphorus come flowing in that was released by the bacteria that phosphorus will come flowing in and you'll get those nutrients coming into the system so what you've got is you've got the ability to have nitrogen and phosphorus be exchanged not just from the soil matrix to the plant but also between plants different plants will actually stimulate different communities to go out there and get different nutrients so in this case we're going to just talk about this from a nitrogen and phosphorus standpoint we know that there are ways in which plants can work with plants like flax and get various types of micronutrients flax is really good at releasing some micronutrients they can transfer those between the flax plant and other plants so if you're doing things like excuse me, Lee brought up apologize if you're doing things like Lee brought up of growing flax and peas together you could have this exchange of different types of micronutrients but what we're going to talk about here is just looking at nitrogen and phosphorus we're going to talk about five organisms we're going to do this really fast five organisms you've got a nitrogen fixing organism and you've got a non you've got nitrogen fixing bacteria you've got phosphate-cellulizing bacteria you have mycorrhizal fungi you have a legume plant that's associated with nitrogen fixing bacteria and you have a non-legume plant now the non-legume plant tells the mycorrhizal fungus you've got to go out there and get me nitrogen phosphorus mycorrhizal fungus says okay I can do that because I'm associated with the phosphate-cellulizing bacteria that are colonizing my hyphae that will release phosphorus from the soil I can open up my door and I can be able to take that phosphorus in and that phosphorus then can go to you then some of that phosphorus I will then utilize some of that phosphorus to go over to the legume plant the legume plant will take some of that phosphorus it will give me some carbon but it also will give me some nitrogen because it seems to have excess nitrogen I can take some of that nitrogen and I can give that to you so everything will be fine mycorrhizal fungus then goes over to the legume plant and it says alright here you go here's some phosphorus give me some carbon and give me some nitrogen so that I can give some of that nitrogen to the non-legume plant now the legume plant then goes to the nitrogen fixing bacteria in its roots and it says you have to do more nitrogen fixation because I need to give some of that nitrogen to the mycorrhizal fungus for the mycorrhizal fungus to give some of that nitrogen to the non-legume plant so the rhizobium bacteria, the nitrogen fixing bacteria says alright I can do that for you But nitrogen fixation is a very energy intensive process. On a cellular level, what happens in order to be able to have the energy to do nitrogen fixation is you have to have the cycle called the Krebs cycle. It's basically where you have a molecule called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Three phosphate groups are bound to a molecule called adenosine, amino acid that essentially has got a carbon backbone. So it takes roughly about 32 cycles in order to fix one molecule of nitrogen. So the rhizobium bacteria says, you have to get me more phosphate, because I can't take the phosphate that got ripped off. When the phosphate gets ripped off, electrons are released. Electrons, as they pass through a membrane, fire the cell, and it provides energy in order to be able to do the nitrogen fixation. So the rhizobium then says, you have to get me more phosphorous, because I can't take the phosphate group that got ripped off and put it back on, because it lost its electrons. So I need more power. You've got to give me more power. It comes from phosphorus. So the legium then says, all right, I can do that. I will go to the microisophagus, and I will tell it that it needs to give me more phosphorous, so that I can give phosphorous to you. What ends up happening is that, all of a sudden, you have the carbon that's taken from the legium plant, the carbon that's taken from the non-legium plant. They go and they feed the microisophagus, and they feed the phosphate-sogabilizing bacteria. The phosphate-sogabilizing bacteria solubilizes a whole lot of phosphate. There's a whole lot of phosphate that's flowing into the microisophagus. There's a whole lot of nitrogen that's moving between the legium plant and the non-legging plant, and phosphorus that's moving between both of those plants. And all of a sudden, there's a huge traffic jam, because there's too many nutrients that are moving all over the place, and everybody's crazy. So what ends up happening is that, now you can't get enough phosphorus in order to be able to feed the legium plant and the non-legging plant, as well as the rhizomium bacteria, to do enough nitrogen fixation, to be able to give enough nitrogen to the non-legging plant. So the microisophagus then goes to the non-legging plant and says, I can't do this. The legium plant and the non-legging plant then says to the microisophagus, well, I have a secret code. The secret code will tell you how to absorb phosphorus against your gradients so that you can put more phosphorus in your hyphae, and then when you want to have a traffic jam. So the microisophagus says, cool, I'll take the secret code off your hands. I will use that secret code to absorb more phosphorus. So it takes some of the carbon from the non-legging plant and gives some of that carbon to the phosphates-olubilizing bacteria. The phosphates-olubilizing bacteria leaves a lot of phosphate. The phosphate then goes into the microisophungi. The microisophungi will take some of that phosphate. It gives it to the non-legging plant. It will take some of that phosphate and then it will give some of that phosphate to the legium plant. The legium plant will give some of that phosphate to the rhizomium bacteria. So the rhizomium bacteria can fix more nitrogen. Nitrogen will go into the legium plant. Some of that nitrogen will go into the microisophagus. Microisophungus will take some of that nitrogen. give it to the non-legging plant. Everybody's happy. Everybody gets their nutrient needs taken care of. It happens without a thought. All of that stuff we know occurs. We've known that this system has happened since the 1980s. We know, I mean it's happened longer than that obviously, but we know about, we've been able to follow and see that this occurs. This is how we can satisfy the nutrient demands that Dr. Albrecht talked about without having to utilize synthetic fertilizers. The efficiencies that exist here are possible for us to be able to tap into. All we need to do is design the systems that are feeding and keeping the habitats alive. And that's it. You can do it, right? She all the go out there, you know? It's February. You can think about how you're going to design the system now, right? All right. My time is up. I will be around for the rest of the day, so you know, feel free to ask questions.