Prologue

In a book the prologue gives some background to the story. Here is the background to the Gbiota story.

Wet and windy Melbourne

Some fifty years ago in the mid 1970’s I lived just outside wet and windy Melbourne in nice block with a creek running through the centre. In winter there was plenty or rain but in summer we would get those hot northerlies off the desert which would dry everything out.

I made a dam and fitted a pump to take the water to the top of the block were it would run down a series of channels I made based on the Key line principles. Worked fine but the channels were a right pain in moving the block so I put some pipe with holes into the channels and buried them to give me a flat surface.

This is remarkably similar to the modern Gbiota beds.

Crazy ideas

At that time I was running my own company Moldflow – a software company based on analysing the complex flow of a hot plastic into a cold mould, a complex piece of software involving the solution of coupled partial differential equation with non linear materials – quite a mouthful. But it earned good money and I wrote a book ‘Faster, better cheaper’ which made me ask myself if making plastic parts faster better cheaper was really the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

No – I wanted to work in the area of soil and water so I sold the company which gave me enough money to explore those totally crazy ideas that no sensible Government would finance.

I tried all sort of crazy idea – pipe buried in the ground that I could inflate to crack the surrounding soil, pipe with hole in them I could pump air through to get oxygen into the soil – which sent the farm dogs wild trying to work out where all the whistling sound was coming from, self learning software to work out the amount of water that plants were using so irrigation could be precisely scheduled. It is was a bit out of the box I was prepared to give it a go.

Birth of Wicking Beds

But then I was invited to go to Africa in one of their devastating droughts where people were starving to death to see if any of the crazy ideas I was playing with may be useful.

The solution I came up with was to simply dig a trench, line with plastic, fill with weeds and back fill. The idea of using weeds is that they are incredibly effective and extracting nutrients from the soil. I also added wings to the bed to increase the catchment area.

With benefit of hindsight this was not really a solution. The real cause of poverty is a political system which does not provide stability and a degree of equality and the provision of essential infra structure for water, soil, transport, information, education.

Move to Queensland

I then moved to Queensland with a totally different climate, just below the tropic there is no regular rainfall may be a heavy rain in winter when a winter storm penetrated from the South or more often a summer cyclone which bring really serious rain from the North.

Back in Australia I installed many different version of experimental Wicking beds. I soon learned that having a bed fully embedded in the soil without any mechanism for drainage results in the base of the beds becoming saturated for extended periods of time which totally kills the root zone and hence the plants.

Too much water is just as bad as not enough.

I changed the design so the beds were made at ground level so they could be easily drained. I also made shade houses to protect the plants from the sun but more particularly the insects which makes growing a real challenge in Queensland.

The birth of the Internet, diabetes and bugs

This worked very well and it was the time of the birth of the internet and Wicking beds just went viral but it show the great weakness of the internet – just how easy information can be corrupted.

At that time my wife, a qualified doctor and respected surgeon was diagnosed with diabetes. Much research showed that diabetes was closely linked to diet which needs to feed our gut biome.

Sad to say the Wicking bed movement became focused on self watering beds, which is good but misses the real benefit of being able to breed the beneficial microbes which make for a healthy gut.

The sump and pump system

This led to the development of the sump and pump system. The sump is set below the level of the base of the bed so water can drain out back to the sump where the pump can recycle the water.

The original pump and sump beds were made with the surface multiple beds just above the parent soil level but these multiple rows were joined together to form a flat singe flat growing relying on the subsurface pipe for drainage.

They worked well while the typical rainfall and evaporation but we were soon to experience a major change weather extremes which would cause major problems.

Weather extremes

The average rainfall in my part of Queensland works out at about one and a half mm of rain but averages can be misleading as the rain tens to fall in major events but evaporation can be 10mm per day every day.

Evaporation was just so much larger than rainfall, which fell in short burst which just lasted a few days anyway that rain was just not really an issue.

For the last three years we have been in a La Nina event where was get an ongoing series of really heavy rains which just keep on coming.

The subsurface drainage system was simply not able to cope with these ongoing floods.

Technically these have been resolved by changing the single flat bed into multiple ridges with channels which can handle the flow from these ongoing major rainfalls.

The challenges we face

For the last two hundred and fifty years, since the start of the industrial revolution we have benefited from a continuous increase in our living standards, even with the ever increasing population.

It must now be clear to anyone who thinks ahead that we, us humans, are facing an unprecedented challenge.

With the ever increasing climate change and flood and drought cycles, how to we grow enough food of the with the living microbes and minerals that keep us healthy.

This is partly a technical problem – and that is what the Gbiota technology aims to address but it is also a political and social problem. The technical part is the easy bit the social problem is the really difficult one particularly as the internet, which should be the key to making these changes has degenerated from being a source of the critical information to one which is used to manipulate attitudes for short term gains.

How do we use the internet to bring people together to cooperate to make the needed changes?