We depend on energy from the environment we live in. The soil community is not that different from us. Photo of David Johnson in a BEAM field, courtesy of the researcher. Crops shuttle the energy from photosynthesis down to the soil system, as sugars, proteins and amino acids, which allow these organisms to survive. That means you have to have crops growing continually, either a commodity crop or a cover crop. Soil is a living organism, and you have to feed this organism. When we bring the soil biological communities back, they have a phenomenal effect on productivity. We’ve hamstrung the soils we’re working on, to where they’re now living on life support.
From there, the herbicides we’ve adopted are damaging to the structure of the bacterial community as well. If you wanted to start a war, what would be the first two things you’d take out? Communication and logistics it would be crippling, and that’s what we’ve done in agriculture. The first thing they really wiped out was the fungal community, which does both logistics and communication in the soil system. The farming practices we’ve adopted over the past 150 years have been damaging to soil microbial communities. Can you explain what the BEAM system is?īEAM is looking at agriculture from a different perspective: instead of chemical, looking at it from a biological perspective, to enhance the microbiological soil profile. We’re in the process of updating Rodale Institute’s Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution white paper and we wanted to learn more about the very promising results achieved with your BEAM system (biologically enhanced agricultural management). Rodale Institute’s updated climate change white paper, “Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution,” will be published September 25th.
A conversation with microbiologist David Johnson, PhD about the role of soil health in carbon sequestration.
0 kommentar(er)
