Underground isn't a mine. It's a market.
Plants pour sugar out of their roots. Microbes feed on it and pay back with plant nutrition. Root fungi reach soil the root can't, and carry phosphorus and zinc back to it.
The idea
Every product you grow, make or sell started with a workforce you've never seen.
There are billions of microbes in a teaspoon of healthy soil, and most have never been grown in a lab. Scientists call them dark matter. We're only starting to learn what they do.
We can break the deal.
Bare soil over winter means no living roots, so no sugar. Give a plant more soluble phosphorus than it needs and it feeds its fungi less, and wheat grown that way carries less zinc in the grain. Some sprays hit the helpers as well as the target.
It shows on the plate.
Swap grass for a diet mostly of grain and a cow's gut microbes change. The milk carries less omega-3, less CLA, and less vitamin E and beta-carotene. The cow didn't change. The farm did.
Knowing what is only the start.
Correlation is not causation. Carefully designed farm trials and nutrition analysis estimate the likely effect of a practice on the food, and say plainly when the evidence isn't there yet.
Not every difference favours the system you'd expect. Organic milk tends to be lower in iodine, for example. We grade the evidence; we don't pick sides.
Put it to work
Start with one product line
Measure its key nutrients across your own suppliers, and see what the differences are. We can help you do it.
The sources
What this is based on
The main studies behind each part of the talk. Search any of them, and thousands more, in Pulse Brain.
Under the soil
- Bais et al. 2006. How roots shape the microbes around them. Annual Review of Plant Biology. Read the study
- Lehmann et al. 2014. Root fungi and zinc in crops, a meta-analysis. Soil Biology and Biochemistry. Read the study
- Smith et al. 2011. Root fungi and plant phosphorus. Plant Physiology. Read the study
Breaking the deal
- Tsiafouli et al. 2015. Intensive farming and soil life across Europe. Global Change Biology. Read the study
- Banerjee et al. 2019. Intensive farming and the key microbes around roots. The ISME Journal. Read the study
- Grant et al. 2005. Fertiliser phosphorus and root fungi. Canadian Journal of Plant Science. Read the study
- Ryan et al. 2008. Phosphorus fertiliser, root fungi and zinc in wheat grain. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. Read the study
On the plate
- Russell & Rychlik 2001. What changes the microbes in the rumen. Science. Read the study
- Nagaraja & Titgemeyer 2007. Grain diets and the rumen in cattle. Journal of Dairy Science. Read the study
- Daley et al. 2010. Grass-fed and grain-fed beef compared. Nutrition Journal. Read the study
- Średnicka-Tober et al. 2016. Organic and conventional milk compared, a meta-analysis. British Journal of Nutrition. Read the study
The way back
- Muhammad et al. 2021. Cover crops and soil microbes, a meta-analysis. Geoderma. Read the study
- Montgomery et al. 2022. Paired regenerative and conventional farms. The authors call the findings preliminary. PeerJ. Read the study