Inoculants

It is easy when growing Gbiota plants to become focused on the plants, which you can see, and forget that the real aim is to enhance the gut biota, which you cannot see.

Engineering problem

The key to the Gbiota system is the engineering problem of creating the right conditions to favour the beneficial microbes and out-breed the harmful microbes.

Beneficial microbes generally prefer aerobic conditions, while the harmful microbes breed in anaerobic conditions, except for fermentation which is anaerobic but can be beneficial.

But you still need some microbes and fungi to start the process and this is what inoculants are for – they are the starter microbes.

I am tempted to say they don’t appear out of thin air – but that is not true. I read that every time we breathe in we can suck in some fungal spores which are literally floating in thin air.

Microbes are everywhere

Microbes are just everywhere, but we don’t want to rely on random events – we need those starter microbes, the inoculant.

People have known about inoculants for ages. It has been standard practice for donkey’s years to save some old compost to get a new pile of compost going.

But we don’t want just any old bugs which will get a compost heap going – we need the sort of microbes which will enhance our gut biota and that is a bit more of a challenge.

Google inoculants

Just Google “inoculants” and see their long and glorious history.

Centuries ago farmers understood the benefit of legumes to capture nitrogen and had worked out that they needed to collect untouched soil from the roadside to mix with their legume seeds.

There are thousands of kilometres of country roads in Australia with a border between the road and the local farmland. I used to think this was provided by the local councils for the benefit of old men with a swollen prostate, but maybe it is in honour of those pioneering farmers.

Now of course legume seeds come pre-inoculated but you can readily buy a suitable inoculant if you want.

Inoculants are also widely used in preparing silage but this time the inoculant is some variant of the Lactobacillus family.

Then we have the mycorrhizal fungi inoculants which are sold on almost every street corner (well nearly, but they are so common).

So inoculants have a long history – but what sort of inoculant do we need to enhance our gut biota?

Starts simple and gets complicated

When I first started to understand that the gut brain is our control system and the gut brain was really important to health, I found only a limited number of species were of interest in the science community.

For example: Prevotella, Ruminococcus, Bacteroides, Firmicutes, Peptostreptococcus, Bifidobacterium, Lactobacillus, and Clostridium for gut health. The good news was that inoculants were readily available – maybe not as nice pills but as something you could poke in closer to the gut (e.g. up your bum).

So I deluded myself that this was going to be easy.

But then the number of species of interest grew up to a thousand and, to make life even more complicated, they all worked in some form of close organisation we like to call swarm intelligence.

This was beginning to look more than a little difficult.

Then, just as I was beginning to think it was impossible, a few leading-edge researchers began to say that a thousand species may be conservative and it could be in the tens of thousands of species and sub-species.

The idea that you could have a thousand little vats bubbling away producing a specific species is ridiculous – increase that to ten thousand and clearly this has gone way past being absurd.

Science and engineering

One of my favourite sayings is that science is the art of truth and engineering is the art of ignorance.

Think back to the time of the Romans: they did some totally spectacular engineering, particularly the aqueducts carrying thousands of tons of water across deep valleys.

And no – they did not have finite element stress analysis to calculate out all the loads and stresses. Instead they adopted a different, simpler and more brutal approach.

They built the aqueduct with the wooden structure holding up the arches, then they would sit the engineer under the central arch and remove the supports. If he got it wrong that was the end of him – an old-fashioned incentive scheme.

It sure made him use the best technology that was available to him at the time.

Do what you can then fill in the holes

So how does that help us resolve the problem of making a suitable inoculant?

There are some excellent inoculants already on the market made by brewing up minerals and microbes. We understand this well, so it makes an obvious starting point.

But how do we start filling in the hole caused by thousands or even tens of thousands of microbial species forming our gut biota? And just in case you are feeling brilliant, we have the issues of our DNA which is different for everyone and then there is epigenetics which switches our genes on and off.

Logically, starting with a clean sheet of paper, I would have to say it is impossible – but for one overriding factor.

Going back over a million years, the creatures we have evolved from have solved that problem and, certainly for the last two hundred thousand years, when modern humans emerged, we have been doing that highly successfully.

You want proof? We are here.

We have only had a real problem with our gut biota since we invented modern industrial chemical agriculture and started killing off that complex maze of beneficial microbes that live naturally in the soil – the bacteria, fungi, nematodes and that army of small and large creatures that inhabit the soil, each with their own gut biota contributing to the variety that exists in natural undisturbed soil.

So my approach is exactly the same as the poor Roman engineer – make the best use of the technology that is available at the time.

And that is simply to start with the inoculants that are available now, then use the principle of creating the right conditions that benefit the beneficial microbes.

We already have the technologies of flood and drain and recycling soil blood; using organic waste supplemented by additional minerals; growing green manure crops that are known to encourage microbial and fungal activity in the soil (like sunflowers and other deep-rooted plants); avoiding any toxic chemicals – and letting the microbes, fungi and creatures of the soil breed away.

So what happens next?

You simply have to order the inoculant. I supply in nominally 4 kg packs, often together with a seed pack of green manure, baby greens, diabetic plants etc.

I post on Mondays so you receive it before Friday and you then put the inoculant straight into a pre-prepared box with organic waste as per the video.

To find out the current availability and price of inoculants please email me at colin@gbiota.com.