JEFF LOWENFELS | The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Wonderful World of Soil Microbes | Bacteria, Fungi, “Rhizophagy” & the Root Zone
HART HAGAN: My guest is Jeff Lowenfels, author of the four books series:
Teaming with Microbes,
Teaming with Bacteria,
Teaming with Fungi and
Teaming with Nutrients,
which is all about the soil food web, the living world beneath our feet, which could make all the difference in our gardening and our farming, our food production and our health, not to mention our water quality.
Jeff, how are you today?
JEFF LOWENFELS: I'm great. Couldn't be better and great to be here.
HART HAGAN: So you're in Alaska, right? What's it like in Alaska today?
JEFF LOWENFELS: Well, today we have a rare sunny day and it's going to be above freezing, which in the winter is a little bit rare. So we're kind of excited about it.
HART HAGAN: Jeff, what motivated you to write this series of books?
JEFF LOWENFELS: What motivated me to write the series of books? When I discovered what the real food web was about, it was because of teachings from Dr. Elaine Ingham. She's the guru of the soil food web. When I learned about the soil food web, I asked her why everybody in the world, particularly gardeners, don't understand the soil food web.
She said that it’s just too hard to get traction. So I said, “I can write your book.” So I wrote a book. And I've been pushing the soil food web ever since. It really is a beautiful system that people will adopt if they haven't already.
HART HAGAN: Jeff, what have been some of the big developments in soil science in recent years.
JEFF LOWENFELS: Well, I think you have to start with the soil food web itself. Before the year 2000 or so nobody talked about bacteria and fungi and things in the soil food web. I should give a quick definition of the soil food web. Everybody knows there are soil food chains where the little guy gets eaten by the bigger guy, which gets eaten by the bigger guy. There are lots of those chains in the soil and every now and then something on one of the chains looks up, sees something in another chain and says, I can eat that, and does so, and connects the two chains. And eventually you end up with a web of who eats whom in the soil.
The reason why this is important is because the way plants operate in nature is they use almost half--maybe even a little more--of their photosynthetic energy to produce things that are called exudates, which drip out of the root system and attract bacteria and fungi. The bacteria and fungi take the carbon out of these exudates, and they in turn attract protozoa.
Then nematodes eat the bacteria and fungi, and poop out the excess that they don't need. That turns out to have an electrical charge on it, and also plant nutrients in plant usable form.
That's how plants get their nutrients in nature. We need to be doing that same thing, or at least not disrupting that process, as we garden. And as we grow food in agriculture.
