How does your soil food web compare?

We often talk about the soil food web as a static factor that is either there and healthy or damaged and absent but it is a lot more complex than that.  It is an everchanging ecosystem that shifts as it interacts with the greater ecosystem and environmental changes.  When working with farms and orchards, it is often important to have ways to measure the soil food web and assess the efficacy of efforts to influence it.

One of the best ways we have found to do this is to send soil samples to a microbiologist to assess and quantify the microorganisms present.  A list of labs that specialize in this work is found here.  Our go-to for this work is Andie Marsh at Rhizos. If you send multiple samples over the course of a season or more, you can track changes in microbial biomass, fungal-to-bacterial ratio, nematode community balance, soil respiration, aggregate stability and visible soil life.  A good lab will also consult and help you interpret the results relative to your goals.

A recent example of this kind of work being done to evaluate the efficacy of Fish Brew was at one of our client’s cranberry bogs.  The client was testing Fish Brew Bold FLO, against two other commercial, lab grown microbial inoculants and a control plot.  Samples were taken in May before application of inoculants and then in October during the harvest season.  The bogs all saw changes in microbiology due to the change in season and biological activity of the growing season; however, the bog treated with Fish Brew showed the most aggressive changes in fungal biomass, fungal to bacteria ratio, and total protozoa.  The graph below shows the percent change in each metric from May to October for each treatment type.  This data is helping our client choose which products are best for their needs.