The Vital Role of Soil Bacteria in the Garden, with Jeff Lowenfels

The discoveries that are being made about plant biochemistry (and soil and fungi and so on)and the implications for agriculture remind me a lot of the debates about diet and nutrition. It keeps on emerging that we have such limited understanding of these very complex dynamic systems, and that all the technologies that have been applied have been based on massive over-simplifications and have accidentally made things worse.

“Up to 40% of the nitrogen of a plant can come from this system,” Jeff says. “A bunch of the metals that the plant needs for nutrients come from these bacterial walls. This is a major, major new section of the soil food web. It is absolutely amazing.”