Key Points

This is the Gbiota story in a nutshell

You can read my story here but essentially I had taken a life changing decision to move to focus on water, which I saw as a totally critical resource.

In 1995 I started to promote Wicking beds, I did not invent them they are natural phenomena and totally amazing. There is a clay pan which gets filled with stuff that just blows in. Any rain that falls is captured over a wide area, seeps down to the clay where it flows to form an underground water reservoir. Water wicks up to feed a green and verdant oasis in the middle of a dry and barren landscape. They are very water efficient with little loss from evaporation or leakage past the root zone.

They took off like wildfire – not as I intended to ensure our future food supply but to save work as a self watering pot. There are many articles in Wicking beds and a video on this site.

Much later, in 2015 I learned about the importance of gut biology and how it was possible to breed the beneficial gut biota in the soil in a modified Wicking bed I called a Gbiota bed. This was based on the partial flood and drain system using what I called a leaky dam which would partially flood the bed then allow the water to drain away.

At that time we were in the middle of a long dry period and there was not issue with water logging which breeds the wrong sort of biota so they worked very well.

Then the weather changed with La Nina and flooding and water logging of my beds. It hit me like a ten tonne truck that we have technology to deal with droughts, increasing the efficiency of water use (Wicking beds may use a third of the conventional usage) and amplifying rainfall by concentrating the rain over a large area into a much smaller area but where was the technology to deal with floods?

That’s when I developed the Wicking Soaker bed system. This can happily deal with rain that falls on the beds themselves but it is necessary to protect the beds from external flow. There are two type of floods those that flood backwards from some choke in the natural river systems (which we can’t do much about) and water flowing at speed from uphill catchments (which with a bit of site planning we can do something about).

Unfortunately you can only test these methods when there is a major flood which make experimentation and verification a bit of a problem.

Flooding is clearly a major threat to the worlds food supply leading to food shortages and price hikes.

Life span and health span

But we don’t want just any food – we want food that will make us healthy.

Life span has been increasing steadily over the years due to a combination of medical services, hygiene and sanitation.

By contrast health span has been reducing, even kids are showing reduced health, particularly from chronic, non-infectious diseases.

Information and vested interests

These issues on health were not widely understood. We may live in the information age but we are saturated with information – some right some wrong. Vested interested have shown they are willing to manipulate the truth if it means making more money.

It started at scale with the tobacco industry, and was adopted by the fossil fuel and food industries. They don’t lie directly jut select the facts that suit their argument.

Climate has always changed (correct fact) fossil fuels are not causing climate change (invalid implication).

Sugar is essential (correct fact) energy bars are healthy (invalid implication).

Selected information

We are flooded with information, so much that it is possible to find facts that support any particular view point. We live in an age of information silos it where it is difficult to stand back and take a holistic view of a particular problem.

Yet this is the only way we can develop a valid view on complex issues.

This is the great weakness of the information age – expecting simple answers to complex problems. “For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken.

Valid and relevant Information

The key purpose of the Gbiota movement is to make valid and relevant information on how food affects health widely available. We do not make or sell anything – we just supply information for others to implement.

Paradigm busting

Colin Austin (that’s me) was a pioneer in the use of computers to solve complex engineering problems (Computer Aided Engineering). The company I formed (Moldflow) became Australia’s leading exporter of technical software and world leader in its field.

I was selected as among the top one hundred innovators by the Institute of Engineers.

Have no doubt this was not because I was spectacularly brilliant but because I looked and challenged the conventional wisdom, the current paradigm, and was prepared to say this is just wrong.

But I decided that my real interest lay in soil and water which were critical to human survival so I sold my company to see if the paradigm busting attitude could give results in this critical area.

But my wife became diabetic and we are told this was a chronic disease with no cure. When it looked as though she would need to have her food amputated when it turned black it was time to put all my paradigm busting abilities to work.

It would be wrong to say she cured her diabetes but by changing here diet it became very manageable and she still has her foot.

The conventional food paradigm was simply wrong.

Global population

In the last eighty years the global population has tripled (simply staggering). This has created an equivalent pressure to increase food production which has been well and truly met by the food industry. In fact food production has increase 40% faster than the global population but the food balance is wrong.

The Calorie Paradigm

The food industry is obsessed with calories. That is not wrong – it is just a restricted view about what food actually does. We are warm blooded creatures so we need food as fuel to keep us warm and provide energy – some 80% of the food we eat is just burned as fuel.

Calories matter but they are only part of the story.

An even more important part is our gut brain.

Jelly fish and our gut brain

Humans are not like Jelly fish flapping aimlessly around. We are a highly complex organism which needs an intelligent control system – that is a combination of our gut and head brains.

This intelligent control system manages our appetite so we want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food, it manages the production of the complex chemical to replace our body part as they age and wear and it hosts and trains much of our immune system.

Our very complex gut brain

There are trillions of cells of thousands of different species in our gut. They communicate with each other, just like in a supercomputer, to take real world decisions.

The simple fact is that we have no idea how the code in this supercomputer actually works.

But we do know that we can change the species of microbes in our gut by simply changing our diet and that as we change the species the decisions it takes are very different. It can change us from being fat or skinny, timid or risk taking and in fact our whole personality.

The species we have in our guts is key to our health.

The great food paradigm shift

We need to replace the current food paradigm which is obsessed with calories to a new food paradigm that focused on the food we should be eating to feed our gut.

From soil to gut

For millions of years creatures, including the early hominids, have been eating gut food with the beneficial microbes breeding in the soil – they never thought about it or took any decisions – it just happened.

The beneficial microbes bred in the soil and in the guts of creatures that lived in the soils, they entered the plants which the creatures ate packed up in the plants which act as pre-biotics so they can survive the journey to our gut where they act as pro-biotics.

A totally natural process tested over millions of years and we never paid any attention to it – it just worked.

What we forgot

But we just forgot about it or never even thought about it – with the tripling of the global population we were just obsessed with getting enough calories.

The result

It is a sad result – we simply do not have the healthy gut that protected previous generations had so we endure epidemics of both chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and dementia but also infectious diseases.

Our poor gut does not cause these problems – it just enables them to turn into epidemics.

Two things to do

First we have to work out how to grow the beneficial microbes in the soil – that is the easy bit and something I have been working on for years.

Secondly we have to solve the problem that faces every innovator, how to get adoption eg setting up a system of growing gut food at scale and getting people to eat gut food.

Innovators are rarely able to promote their own innovations – for that they need early adopters who are prepared to pioneer a new technology.

Early adopters and the Wicking-Soaker bed

The most favoured early adopters are likely to be home growers – they are the group who will benefit most from having a healthy gut from home grown gut food.

I developed the Wicking-Soaker bed to make it as easy as possible for these home growers to grow their own gut food in their garden.

Kales and Kales

The challenge we face now is to get the message out that there are Kales and Kales. Kale may be a considered a wonder food by some, but if it is grown in dead inert soil without life and the critical minerals it is pretty useless as gut food.

The message is simple – get the soil right and everything follows on.

Why not join the Gbiota movement

The Gbiota movement is not some operation run by some mega global operation – it is a grass roots movement of those weird people who have failed to be convinced that as long as there is food in the supermarkets now everything is fine and dandy.

We are not dumb donkeys but think ahead for the future of our grandkids.