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What are Microbes and what do they do?
• Microbes are the oldest form of life on earth. They’ve been here for 3.8 billion years!
• Microbes are microscopic organisms. Fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and viruses are all different types of microbes. Eventhough you can’t see them without a microscope, microbes are practically everywhere.
• Microbes are the ultimate survivors: they are found just about everywhere on Earth!
• In the soil under your feet, there might be a million different types of microbes! A single gram of soil can contain more than a billion microbes!
• Microbes produce more than half of all oxygen we breathe!
• Some microbes are bad because they can cause diseases, but other microbes are good and help peoples to make medicines for people and their animals.
• Different combinations of good microbes can help farmers grow bigger crops without using fertilizers that may harm the environment.
• The soil is alive! Invisible to the naked eye are the great digesters of the earth, constantly breaking down organic material into a more “usable form” that plants roots can identify, absorb, and ultimately incorporate for their new growth.
• The wonders of a variety of living organisms, called microbes, that are hard at work converting complex organic compounds such as tannins, liguins, proteins, carbohydrates, cellulose, pectin, etc. into a usable form that plants can incorporate for growth.
• Microbes help to stabilize the soil by physically binding soil particles together. They release a by product called glomalin that acts like a “glue” to help bind clay particles and organic materials together, contributing to soil aggregation. All of this happens to create a healthy, productive soil.
• Healthy soil should contain no less that 10,000,000 microbes per gram. The presence of microbes ensures that nutrients are made available to your plants at a steady rate.
• However, continuous use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides will result in virtually sterile soil. Unfortunately, beneficial soil microbes are not able to co-exist in a chemical soil environment for a long period of time.
• Farmers are not even feeding their microbes in the soil with organic material in order to have a healthy, fertile and productive soil for plants to live in.
• If you feed your plants with a synthetic chemical fertilizer you are feeding the plant, not the soil or the microbes. When we feed our plants instead of our soil, we loose all the benefits that the microbes can contribute.
• The importance of microbes is immeasurable, they are essential to the health of all productive soils.
• Many of today’s farming practices deplete our soils of nutrients and beneficial microbial life, creating imbalances that invite disease and insect attack and environmental problems such as ground water pollution and erosion.
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