Growing gut brain food

Gbiota is an evolving technology. Whenever some new bit of technology comes along I write a new article to describe what is new. This has led to hundreds of articles which, for a person new to the Gbiota movement, is a bit overwhelming. So I am writing this article – Gbiota Overview 2024 – as a review article to give an overview of the Gbiota technology.

Modern food

Modern food technology enables us to produce enough food to feed the entire world. We can choose to eat food which will make us fit and healthy or we can eat food which is addictive, makes us fat and sick and die young from some chronic disease like diabetes, heart attacks or dementia.

Humans are the creator of technology which can be of immense benefit or could eliminate our species. What matters is how we manage technology.

Fifty years ago I was a pioneer in computer-aided engineering and internationally recognised as a leading innovator in my field. Now I am eighty-four years old, still fit and healthy, and I understand the power of technology to be either for the benefit or the destruction of humanity.

I write on the web so people have access to the technology they need to live a fit and healthy life.

Information is the greatest of our technologies. I can sit in the corner of my living room, watching the birds in my mango tree, writing my articles about food which will make people healthy and anyone in the world can choose to read and use this information.

We have been led to believe that the problems of modern life can be resolved by three-word slogans and that we should all become dumb donkeys following simple instructions.

That is not the way to solve the problems of the world. We have to do what humans excel at – and that is to think.

I am not part of the internet marketing machine – I write for the concerned thinkers of the world. I hope you follow me here.

What we need to know about us

Homo erectus

We can trace humans back to about a million years ago – Homo erectus.

We were a puny little creature, light on in the teeth-and-claws department, which barely survived with a population under a million.

Like most creatures today, life consisted of getting enough to eat and not getting eaten by a creature with bigger teeth and claws.

Homo sapiens

Then we made the greatest innovation of all time – fire and cooking.

This made it much easier to digest our food and it completely changed us as a creature. Our guts shrunk – we didn’t need a massive gut – and our brain grew.

Brains take a lot of energy and that is what fire and cooking gave us.

We became a totally new creature, Homo sapiens – that was about two hundred thousand years ago.

We developed two characteristics which dominate us to the present day – we were intelligent and cooperative.

We developed our very greatest invention – speech. We could make plans on how to kill giant creatures like the woolly mammoth and pass on information and skills from generation to generation.

We developed tools and weapons – flint axes, spears, bows and arrows. We hunted in teams and generally had adequate food and could protect ourselves from the more ferocious beasts.

Although we were hunter gatherers and moved around a lot, we became very attached to a certain area of land which we came to think of as ours.

If the next tribe over had something different to offer, the two tribes would trade in an amicable way.

If the neighbouring tribe’s leader happened to have a particularly attractive daughter then a trade of marriage might be done to establish long-term harmonious relations between the tribes.

Big ears and the invention of war

If the daughter happened to be less attractive, say with big ears, then the tribes might exploit humanity’s worst invention and go to war.

The warriors would fight to the death without questioning why because they were members of a tribe and that was the done thing.

Had the warriors known they were risking their lives because the neighbouring tribe’s leader’s daughter had big ears they would unanimously have said, “but she has a cute bum so do what we do and make do with what you’ve got” – and war would never have been invented.

Nothing much has changed – we still go to war for no viable reason.

Food security and agriculture

Apart from the odd tribal scuffle, and they did not have atomic bombs which could end humanity, things were not that bad apart from time to time lack of food.

To prevent this humans invented agriculture aimed at ensuring a stable food supply.

The problem with inventions is that you never know quite what they may lead to, but it is almost always some good and some bad.

Agriculture led to classes, with some people claiming they owned the land. They became very rich and had time to develop music, art and writing, while the poor worked their guts out (figuratively) growing food on the land.

Cities and civilisation came into being, offering a totally new way of life – good for some, less good for others (actually most).

Cities, with overcrowding and lack of sanitation, led to diseases on a grand scale not experienced before.

Many civilisations came into being then just disappeared. I have no idea if they knew why but we do now – they destroyed the soil that grew their crops.

The solution then was to create a new civilisation on new soil that had not been destroyed.

We do that in modern times. The difference is we have now developed much more effective ways of destroying soil and we have run out of new land to exploit and destroy.

Population explosion

Before the industrial revolution the total population on earth was under a billion and people ate food grown in natural soil (soil fertilised with manure and other organic waste) which meant that people were naturally eating gut brain food.

Then the population tripled in size and then in just my lifetime tripled again.

This put enormous pressure on the global food supply which we thought we had resolved by the technologies of synthetic fertilisers and plant genetics.

This increased the supply of energy food dramatically and we are now producing enough energy food to feed the entire global population. True, there are people still starving but that is because of equity and distribution problems – not an overall lack of energy food.

We are actually growing more food than we need – we waste a lot.

The two roles of microbes

But the nature of soil has changed. Previously the soil was full of microbes which broke down minerals in the soil to make them bio-available and also entered the plants to feed our gut brain.

Our modern food system lacks both the beneficial microbes which power our intelligent control system and essential trace minerals.

Our intelligent control system – our gut brain – regulates our appetite and how much fat we store. The wrong fat in the wrong place is the root cause of the modern diseases of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

Technically we know how to resolve these problems but this does require eating plants shortly after picking and before the beneficial microbes die.

Climate change

For a long time the energy companies learned from the tobacco industry and tried to persuade us that climate change was a myth or at least unproven. But with fire and floods across the globe it is no longer possible to pretend that climate change is not real.

Owning shares in an oil company makes pretending easier.

The combination of the destruction of our top soil coupled with climate change is now the biggest threat to humanity – not so much from a lack of food but the lack of gut brain food which is at the root cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The food industry learned from the fossil fuel and tobacco industry that they can convince the bulk of the population for many years that there is no problem – nothing to see here.

Concerned thinkers

In the short term the only practical way to do this is for people to grow some plants at home which provide these beneficial microbes and trace minerals.

But how to create a general awareness that there is a simple, economic and practical solution when the food industry is spending multi-billions of dollars on manipulative advertising with the clear message that everything is fine – nothing to see here?

David and Goliath

What strategy can the Gbiota movement (which, let’s face it, is an amateur operation) use to make people aware that the lack of gut brain food is the biggest threat to humanity?

The strategy is simple – form a social movement of concerned thinkers who set up their own Gbiota growing system which they can show to a much wider group so people can see that there is a solution that works and is practical.

That is what the Gbiota movement is all about – showing people how to grow plants at home which provide the beneficial microbes and trace nutrients.

And that is why I write this post about soil blood.

Soil blood

Soil blood is literally at the heart of the Gbiota system – so what is it and why do we call it soil blood?

Think about our blood. I did not think much about blood before Gbiota. I would cut myself, bleed for a few minutes then about a week later the cut had just disappeared.

When I bang my car on my gate post, why doesn’t it mend itself in a week or two like my cut? My body is better designed than my car.

The answer is that human blood is flowing all the time transporting useful stuff from here to there – air from my lungs and sugars from my gut to my muscles so they work; stuff to stop the baddies getting into my cut and fixing it; immune cells to sort out any interlopers; messages (hormones) saying “time to eat”, “stop eating” or “hey there is a pretty girl, time for a quick look” (I am old but not that old).

All in all blood is truly remarkable – “truly amazing” as my grandkids would say.

How water moves

There are some people, like me, who are a bit obsessed about how water moves through the soil and plants, and spend hours thinking about the peculiar properties of water that make life possible.

Water is just plain weird – a liquid with tensile strength, wicking, osmosis, the nocturnal cycle as water is sucked up by the plants in the day then redistributed at night, the Brownian movement of random water molecules and another weird one – Pedesis. There is certainly plenty to keep us thinking about water and how it moves.

We may talk about water, but just squeeze some out of the soil and no way is it just water. Look at it under a microscope and it is full of weird and wonderful creatures – large and small.

Look at what is dissolved in the water – a whole range of complex chemicals which are used to feed plants. Sometimes, if there is a bossy plant about, chemicals to stop other plants growing, and some chemicals to encourage the beneficial bugs or to repel harmful bugs.

It is not right that we should just call this “water”. It is moving about transporting all these useful things around to keep life working (but unfortunately not mend my fender bender).

So I call this magnificent fluid “soil blood”.

Two rules for managing soil blood

1. Breathing

The first rule is that while we have lungs the soil does not. So we must make it breathe – which we do by flooding the soil which expels all the stale air, then letting it drain – which sucks in fresh air. We are literally making the soil breathe – as I see from all the bubbles when I flood.

2. Moving

The second rule is that this soil blood must not be allowed to become stagnant as then it will become anaerobic and breed up the malicious microbes which have a nasty habit of making us sick or even killing us.

And that is about all there is to the Gbiota technology. Everything else is just finding practical ways of making this happen.

Making it happen

To make all this work we need nutrients and energy. By “all” I mean us, the plants, the soil, the microbes and the other creatures which make up a total ecosystem.

Plants are singularly good at capturing energy. Most of the energy that we use has come from the sun one way or another. Photosynthesis uses the energy of the sun to break down the water molecule, releasing the oxygen molecules and linking the hydrogen molecules to form complex hydrocarbons.

Photosynthesis does require some minerals which it cleverly extracts from the soil by exuding sugars from its roots. These sugars feed and attract microbes in the soil which break down rock particles and convert them into bio-available chemicals which the plants and we can use.

This is a perfectly balanced ecosystem which has evolved over millions of years – we don’t have to reinvent it from scratch.

But there are many ecosystems depending on the conditions.

A desert ecosystem is pretty rugged for us humans to exist in, with not much in the way of food, but deserts are generally free of the infectious diseases which can make us sick or kill us.

A jungle ecosystem is the opposite, with oodles of food but a whole variety of microbes which will make us sick or kill us.

The Gbiota technology is not some new technology about inventing a new ecosystem – that has already been done for us by nature.

It is about controlling the conditions, particularly water, which give us the best balance between the beneficial microbes which give us food – particularly gut brain food – and the harmful microbes which make us sick.

Raised beds and boxes

We have the option of using raised beds or boxes, or in my case both.

I have never quite mastered the art of enjoying picking vegetables, cowering under an umbrella in the middle of a thunderstorm, so I like to grow some vegetables in boxes on my patio where I can just pick and eat.

On the other hand, I have a bit of a thing about in-ground composting largely because it avoids blowflies (“blowies”) which, despite my love of nature, I have never managed to develop an affection for. So I use raised beds.

I used to just use flat beds but since the “powers that be” decided that climate change was for the woke generation we now experience a one-in-a-hundred-year flood every three months so I now use decidedly raised beds.

“Decidedly” means that the lake that used to be my garden has veggie patches sticking out above the water. This tendency to flood is another reason I like boxes which I can lift above the flood level.

Raised beds

Let me start with raised beds as they are actually the simplest and make ideal in-ground compost.

The first step is to investigate the soil. In my case that is a yukky duplex soil with a layer of yukky silt sitting on a layer of even yukkier clay.

Actually clay is a decided bonus. Gbiota beds are really about making soil and clay particles are incredibly small so have a huge surface area.

Microbes and nutrients like to attach themselves to this surface which then performs one of the wonders of the world – turning yukky clay into easy-draining aggregates which probably make one of the best growing soils.

If your garden is clay you probably don’t need anything to stop the water leaking down into the subsoil.

If you build a raised bed in the dry season (and I live in Bundaberg, Queensland) the clay will have dried out and it may seem that the first time you try and use the bed it takes an excessive amount of water.

But once the soil is wet it expands and self-seals and works fine with very little further water wastage.

But it is important to appreciate certain basic principles of Gbiota beds, particularly if you are used to drip lines.

Dig a trench

Start by digging a trench. This should be about 300 mm below the intended top of the raised bed (which in turn depends on anticipated flood levels) and lay an ag pipe in the bottom of the trench.

The trench should ideally be level.

But I have made beds on a slight slope and just raised the ag pipe every few metres along the length so it is actually a series of short beds. Definitely not ideal – but we don’t live in an ideal world and if we wait for the ideal we would never get anything done.

Both ends of the pipe must rise up to higher than the top of the soil so when water flows into the pipe the water builds up in the pipe to create pressure to force the water out of the holes in the ag pipe.

Fast is good

This section is for those used to drip tape. Drip tapes work by surface tension: water is very slowly dripped into the soil, the moisture content rises until it is saturated then slowly wicks away under surface tension forces, giving a moisture gradient which drops off the further away you go from the drip. Only a relatively small area of the soil is actually fully wetted.

Drip tapes are normally used with fertigation where chemical fertilisers are added to the irrigation water. These chemicals suppress the level of biological activity.

It is a bit like automated reverse parking – it works great but people forget how to reverse park manually. Add too many chemicals and the natural processes that supply nutrients stop working.

When we feed plants all the chemicals they need, the natural ecosystem where the microbes break down rock particles to provide bio-available nutrients just atrophies, so we miss out on the beneficial microbes.

This is the way industrial chemical agriculture works – producing large quantities of food which provides plenty of energy but is inert and does not provide the beneficial biota to enhance our gut biota.

The whole aim of the Gbiota system is to breed beneficial microbes to power our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.

In the Gbiota system we use hydraulic pressure – maybe only a few millimetres of head but that is enough to drive the water over a large area to ensure the soil is totally saturated.

We then stop the water flow, allowing it to drain under gravity, sucking in fresh air which creates the conditions for the beneficial microbes to breed.

Clay or sand

If your soil is clay (or clayish) and you can apply the water at a sufficient rate then you probably won’t need to take any precautions to stop the water leaking away from the root zone.

If your soil is sandy you have two options.

You can dig down and make a wide trench and line with plastic (which is how I started with Gbiota beds, even though I live on clay).

The second option is to go back to the sponge beds which I promoted some thirty years ago. In a sponge bed you clear off the top soil then build a layer of organic waste, which acts as a sponge, then lay the ag pipe on top of the sponge and put the top soil back.

Sump or tomatoes?

From a technical viewpoint there is little doubt that the sump and leaky dam is the best system.

The trench is extended so the water can flow back into a sump.

The ag pipe is laid along the base of the trench then is raised up (to create the pressure) over a leaky dam.

Sump pumps are low pressure, high flow, so deliver a lot of water very quickly to flood the trench. But they only need to run for a few minutes to flood the trench. When the pump turns off (normally by a float valve) the excess water in the trench can now drain through the leaky dam back into the sump. (Leaky dam is the posh name for a pile of grass clippings or sand.)

This is really a great way of meeting the two objectives of flood-and-drain and keeping the soil blood moving and is naturally automatic from a timer which fills the sump with top-up water.

The only manual input is cleaning out the sump and turning the top-up water off when expecting heavy rain.

For me this is great fun – I like playing around with pumps and have no worries about getting down to my shorts to clean out the sump which inevitably gets filled with rubbish.

But, fortunately for the world, not everyone is like me and there are people who just don’t appreciate the fun in messing around with sump pumps and dirty water.

The alternative is simply to have both ends of the ag pipe coming up to the surface with no direct attempt at drainage.

It is then simply a question of putting a hose in one end of the ag pipe and waiting until the water comes out of the other end.

This is normally a manual operation but if you are totally addicted to timers you can spend happy hours experimenting with a timer, working out how long it takes to flood the trench.

This is a great solution if you are a bit like me – get busy doing something else and forget to check to turn the tap off.

However there is no natural drainage system so some irrigation scheduling is required to ensure that the plants have used up the water before starting the next irrigation.

If we wanted to we could go high tech and use modern moisture sensing technology or we could do it the easy way – just grow some water-loving plants, like tomatoes, and wait until they show the early signs of wilting then re-irrigate.

Burying the rubbish

There is a whole school of people who are totally addicted to compost technology – they must have exactly the right ratio of carbon to nitrogen and ensure there are no baddies like citrus skins or onions.

No doubt this is a very efficient way of composting and the microbes can generate really high temperatures, which sound great until you think that the aim is to breed gut biota and our guts do not operate at 80ºC.

However my experience with in-ground composting is that there is always something, probably a fungi or weird beetle, that will eat up anything you bury.

Also the soil operates at a more reasonable temperature of around 20ºC which is closer to our gut temperature.

I have to concede that it is slower than high temperature composting but it costs absolutely nothing to have weird beetles and fungi munching away on your old orange peel, so why worry.

Things we have to add

You may have got the impression that I have a bit of a thing about recycling. I would argue that if we don’t learn to recycle humanity will not survive so it is more than a bit of a thing.

But even I have to admit that recycling rubbish, however important, is just not enough and we have to add some extras.

First on the list is rock dust – we need the minerals. Volcanic rock dust is clearly the best as it has a full spectrum of minerals including those trace minerals which are lacking in our modern diet.

But if a broad-spectrum rock dust is not readily available it is fine to use what is available locally and supplement. Blood and bone fertiliser contains many of these trace minerals.

We also need nitrogen – decomposition, particularly if it contains a lot of woody material like sawdust, needs a lot of nitrogen. So we will need to add nitrogen in some form or other.

My favourite is chicken manure, particularly if they are free range running around scratching in the dirt.

I live close to Baldwin Swamp in Bundaberg and many wild birds visit my block to eat the seeds I have just planted.

I have no option but to cover the seeds with netting but birds not only deliver a significant amount of poop but they also supply a mixed bag of microbes which they bring in on their feet.

So I encourage them because this is an extremely simple way of increasing biological diversity which is the key to gut health.

This leads to the next and most important additive – the inoculant. This is so important I write about it separately.

Plants and exudates

There is one more way of increasing biological diversity – by growing a spectrum of plants.

Each species of plant exudes sugars which attract specific species of soil microbes.

Perhaps the best known is sunflower which attracts mycorrhizal fungi – a singularly important group.

In-ground raised Gbiota beds are a highly effective way of growing gut brain food but not everyone has access to a garden and so are forced to use Gbiota boxes. Perhaps the best system is a combination of both, using the Gbiota beds to create the soil for the Gbiota boxes which are then used to grow gut brain food in a more controlled environment.

Gbiota boxes

Gbiota boxes are based on exactly the same principles as Gbiota beds – flood and drain to breathe the soil, keep the soil blood moving, breed beneficial microbes in the soil using organic waste and rock dust to supply nutrients, and supplement with additives such as manures and inoculants.

Boxes have the advantages of being much easier to protect from climate (particularly floods and heat waves), insects and birds.

The major problem is to find a way of decomposing food waste without attracting hoards of flies.

Queensland is in many ways a beautiful place to live but we did not miss out when flies were allocated.

In Bundaberg we don’t need to buy our kids bikes to have fun on – they can simply hop onto one of our mega grasshoppers and bounce around in a series of mega leaps.

Well maybe a bit of exaggeration, but they certainly are big and can destroy a crop in a matter of minutes.

The imperfect research project

Researchers spend much time selecting their preferred area of research – very few would select how to develop a system where someone living in a flat can recycle all their food (and other) waste to breed beneficial gut brain food without attracting those swarms of insects which have decided to make Queensland their home.

So that seems to have fallen into my bin.

Let me tell you for sure that failure brings real consequences, with thousands of blowie larvae breeding en masse in Gbiota boxes ready to make the neighbourhood unliveable.

This is certainly a great challenge but look at other great challenges – for example creating a password system which makes the entire internet inaccessible to anyone over eighteen. Yet with the combined effort of our youngest and brightest computer scientists we will achieve that within a couple of years at the current rate of progress.

The key is why in-ground composting is so effective – there is always some creature or microbe which is more than happy to use the larvae as a food source and in the process protect us from the hoards of potential blowies.

It is really simple – have a sealed box – or even a polythene bag – load it each day with the organic waste, each time adding a layer from the additives box which contains a mix of soil particles, rock dust, manure and inoculant. At the end of a couple of weeks the flipping technique (see elsewhere) is used to load this into the base of a regenerated Gbiota box to grow the next generation of plants.

Obeying the two golden rules

There are two simple ways of achieving the breathing and moving rules.

The simplest is to have two boxes. The top box has holes in the base which sits on the smaller lower box. Soil blood can simply be poured onto the soil surface, or maybe better into a pipe or hole so flooding does not move the seeds or soil.

It flows through the soil and holes into the lower box. When it is time to re-water, the top box is lifted off and the bottom box emptied into a watering can or equivalent and used to flood the top box – or other boxes.

It is good to mix different soil bloods.

This is the safest way as the soil blood can drain completely out of the growing box.

The disadvantage is the boxes have to be lifted at every irrigation – well actually not every irrigation. It is not a bad idea to irrigate with fresh water until the bottom box is full, but it must not be left standing for any length of time (e.g. over a week).

The other method is to use a swivel tube and just allow the growing box to drain.

This is really easy – nothing has to be moved. I use a 3-litre milk bottle to catch the soil blood and simply pull it away from the swivel tube, put my finger over the pipe, pour the soil blood into the top box and put the milk bottle back under the swivel tube – total time under a minute, no lifting or any hard work.

The only issue is that the soil blood does not drain from the growing box completely.

The easiest solution is just to wait until the plants have used all the soil blood remaining in the bottom of the box.

I have also tried flushing frequently so the soil blood in the bottom of the box is always moving. A bit more effort but it seems to work fine.

Growing

That is the end of the overview. You can find more details in the growing section here.