Assessing Soil Health Using a Microscope with Meredith Leigh

oh hey everybody I'm Meredith and I work here part-time I'm mostly focused on the livestock but I do work in one of our greenhouses raising vegetable crops and I've become a really focused on soil and as well as well as water assessment with the microscope here on the farm just to inform our management decisions and everything we're gonna be talking about today I'm not taking any credit for whatsoever it's completely the methodology of dr. Elena Ingham who came to visit a couple of years ago I guess and did a class and then one of her certified trainers then trained us a few of us here on the farm I'm going through her online classes now and hope to become certified really soon with her methodology but that's kind of where this comes from and if you're interested in more information about you know once you leave today that's the go-to place her business is called environment celebration and it's her and dr. Caroline Rollins partnering to educate people about the soil food web as well as proper composting and compost tea methodology and just contracting and consulting to build soil for people with using beneficial biology um from what I know we'll go through a quick PowerPoint will talk about the difference taxonomic groups in the soil that you might see under the scope and I'll do a couple sample slides we'll look at some samples together then we're gonna take a break until about 4:00 then we'll do breakout groups and we'll have a good amount of time to do that it'll be really freeform should be fun at 6:00 Pat has prepared a meal so we'll come together we'll eat and then hopefully once everybody gets their food we'll get to share what we've seen discuss about that so I just made a quick list of all the things that we're hopefully gonna accomplish today we're not doing any kind of quantitative process I want to be very clear about that what we're doing is taking a look at the morphology or the physical characteristics of the organisms in your soil samples and getting a sense of what kind of life is there how much diversity life is there we're gonna look at nonliving clues that you're gonna be able to see through the scope for context about what's going on in the soil you're gonna learn how to do that we're gonna quickly be able to see the cumulative effects of soil management so I don't know how each one of you manage your soil but based on what I tell you when you look through that scope you might be able to say hmm I tell too much or something like that you know so you'll have some really really good visual cues that allow you to see how your management's affecting the soil life and then hopefully you'll use your new knowledge to think about ways to change I can say I've been growing food on and off for twenty years both as a commercial farmer as a home gardener working for a non-profit and I would say that nothing has solidified the way I manage soil and the management decisions that I make as much as looking at the soil through the microscope it's been like I would say as a veteran grower you're constantly hearing different ways to manage soil or manage crops or use equipment and you think oh these are all just different options that I can use based on my preference are based on convenience but taking a look at the soil has really changed my mind about some of that stuff and I see certain management things that's non-negotiable now in the way that I managed soil in the way that I managed crop plans and so that's been really powerful for me if you've never done this before it's absolutely mind-blowing I mean just just to see everything that's going on that you what's going on all the time but that realistically none of us ever get to look at you know what I mean it's really powerful to know how small we are yet our actions have serious magnitude right on the earth for hundreds sometimes hundreds of 200 200 years when you're thinking about the body of a fungus in the soil if it has been there and never been there or if it's dead or alive like the impacts of that are humongous for future generations so this work is really exciting in that in that capacity so let's look let's talk about what you might see when you look the scope what we're looking at is different feeding groups basically different taxonomic groups of soil organisms bacteria are gonna be by far the most abundant organisms in the soil and they within their bodies carry lots of nutrients for plants so when they get eaten by things like protozoa or nematodes their nutrients and their bodies are being released for plants to uptake right so we need the bacteria but we also need the things that eat the bacteria what we're looking for is an intact food chain in other words so when we when we say the word soil food web that's what we're talking about we want a diverse dynamic living dying eating pooping array of organisms in the soil and that's gonna inform the structure it's gonna inform the availability of nutrients etc etc so going up the food chain a little bit you're gonna see protozoa which are gonna be and I'll show you pictures in a little bit so these are mostly things that eat bacteria we're talking about flageolets we're talking about ciliates amoeba hopefully we're gonna see some Bunji so these are really hard workers in the soil they give the soil structure they also I mean depending on the type of fungus they can you know if we're talking about Michael Raizel fungus which we'll talk about a little bit more detail they're actually acting as a carrier system for plants seeking water seeking nutrients and other things really powerful stuff nematodes look like worms if you've never done this work you might think you have a parasite in your soil but they're actually mostly good guys unless we're talking about root feeding nematodes which actually can kill your plants right so there's several different types we'll talk about how they're identified you might see micro arthropods are really not common in agricultural soils but those are like they're gonna look like big insects on your microscope slides kind of scares the Dickens out of you when you see them because they're much much bigger than the other organisms that you'll see but they're kind of the choppers and the shredders in the system you're also gonna see mineral components so you'll see big you know humic acid fuzzy-looking amber colored items you're gonna see silica you're gonna see clay particles sand particles you'll see organic matter bits of cellulose plant tissue leaves seed coats and they're gonna tell a bunch of things that aren't even any of your business and that we don't know how to explain and that probably matter but we don't know why so there will definitely be things where you're like whoa what's that and no one in the room will have any idea so what that's one of my favorite things about this and I do a lot of food fermentation and it's my opinion that our science can never really measure the synergy of what's going on in the microscopic level and so there's a great deal of that work that is none of our business um and all we have to do is provide the conditions and nature does the rest so let's look at some photos this is a picture containing many things but the most of what you see is a lot of bacteria you can see the little round dots you can see the rods you can see slightly larger rods slightly smaller rods lots of different shapes of bacteria have a chart from Elaine coming up that will show you the different sizes this is a pretty low dilution so this is probably a one to five dilution we'll talk about that when we go to make our first sample so it looks you know very very heavy in bacteria so there's some examples here's some different shapes of bacteria so the cox i are gonna be the little dots of diplococci as two dots together this stuff doesn't necessarily matter for us today the main take-home is that you want to see a lot of different types of morphology in the bacteria the ones in the right side the others those are gonna be really characteristic of pathogen causing bacterium so you don't necessarily want to be seeing those but if you're seeing good diversity of morphology on the left-hand side with a few exceptions then that's a good thing you know protozoa this the big the biggest thing on the screen is what I want you to focus on right now that's a test state amoeba and it actually looks like it might have very recently died in this photo because I don't see a lot of its internal plugs so they'll just like take a plug out of the soil solution and including bacteria and then those they're in digests the bacteria it's very rare in a soil sample that you've shaken up to see an actual amoeba that is outside of a test date so the test date is a protective little home for the amoeba and a lot of times protozoa you really need to learn how to if you want to get into this work you really need to learn how to identify the cysts of those protozoan because they go in and out of cyst cysts are protective environments for them basically a membrane so that they can't they're not going to be toxic if they are a toxic organism and they're not also not going to be killed or affected by what's going on in the environment so say I you know a livestock animal with a bunch of protozoa and it's gut drinks some very very cold water it might shock those organisms and the gut cause them to insist it doesn't mean they're dead it just means they're gonna wait around until the environment is favorable again they're gonna come back out but in the soil that we have scooped chopped up you know taken a clump of put it in a test tube put some water in you know done a gentle shake on you're mostly gonna be seen do you see these round blobs kind of on the left there and then on the right so those are examples of cysts and if they're super ornate and double walled in general they're amoeba and if they're smaller and single while they're gonna be flagella or they're gonna be silly it's so those are the three main groups of protozoa that you might see the way to differentiate flagella from a ciliate is that everybody familiar with like the term flagella from if you reach back to like 6th grade science it's like this whip-like tail thing that comes off I mean think of a sperm it has a flagellum right so that's how it moves around so if you see one that's not insisted you might see that very faint whip-like structure and that's how you'll know it's a flageolet if you see a protozoa looking structure with a bunch of tiny little hairs all over it or tiny little hairs on the front of the back that's gonna be a ciliate so the difference is cilia are little tiny hairs you have them in your throat you know to help food go down unless you're a smoker you've burned them all off you know and so the ciliates have the little hairs of the flagella have the longer whip like structure so this is a really beautiful fungus that was in a pile of compost that we made over at a Grand View farm what you're looking at is a fungal hypha or the root and they look like this they generally have uniform diameter and then they are branching and if they're beneficial you'll see little lines separating the cells those are call this set day and so that's a good thing if they have irregular SEP data more likely to be oh oh my seats or not so good fungus but the wider the diameter the darker in color and the more uniform the SUP de the more beneficial the fungus in general so if you see something that looks tattered or frayed but it's a strand and you don't see cepting it doesn't have uniform cell walls you're likely looking at a piece of organic matter or plant tissue you're not looking at a fungus right so using those characteristics is how we identify I think I put that one up so you could see the septa a little bit better you see those little tiny segments between the cells it's just the end of one cell in the beginning of another one Bunji are so fascinating I'm I can't even get enough of them so this is an example of an oh oh my seat or a not-so-great fungus so there see how they're those pencil and strands they still have uniform cell walls for the most part and you can still see SEP D but they're clear very thin they're a mass of them the little balls that you see are their little clematis pores or the ways that they're going to reproduce and grow so if you solve this in a soil you would be like yikes this is not a good thing right this is this is an indicative of a really highly anaerobic situation we won't be able to see this but I wanted to talk to you about Michael rui-zi all right so it's there's a bunch of different species basically but it's a it's a particular type of mutualistic fungus that grows in association with plant roots and so basically think of a little fungal spore you'll see fungal spores today they're usually they're usually dark and like oval-shaped or they could be segmented but think of a little fungal spore and a plant is releasing so do we know what plant exudates do we know this term so the plant photosynthesizes light from the Sun produces sugars almost 40% of that product photosynthetic product has actually pumped down into the soil in the form of a plant exudate and it's basically liquid carbon it's like sugar for the soil organisms one of them being mycorrhizae so if a little fungal spore Michael Rousey spores sprouts has about 48 hours and this is a really interesting fact has about 48 hours to sniff out the exudate and make its way with its high fee up to that plant room and depending on the type of michael rousey and the type of plan it could colonize the outside of the root which you'll see on the left there that's an octo Mike arousal Association which is mostly on conifers so not really typical in agricultural situations depending on I don't know if a major - Forester and then on the right this is more common for what you'll see in agricultural crops is endo Michael razzle Association so that's where actually the fungus will grow inside and in association with the plant root so the plant tells the fungus what it wants in terms of water in terms of macronutrients micronutrients and the fungus sends out this extreme network of hyphy to go mining all that stuff from the soil brings it back to the plant in exchange for continued plant exudates or sugars which it then uses basically only to reinforce its cell wall so because everything else that's going and getting anyway on its own right so really powerful you're gonna have much healthier plants and plant ecosystems if you have good michael rousey associations because the plants themselves really aren't able to grow that extensive of root networks especially in agricultural situations when we're going and plucking them out of the soil all the time alright so they just don't really have the opportunity to do that they need the Michael razzle associations and we there's a lot that we can talk about if people have questions about like oh well I by mycorrhizal inoculant is that the right one or you know whatever we can talk about I don't know a lot of trade names but I have done a fair amount of research about if you find out where they're getting it from knowing whether or not it's gonna be more effective or less effective I just wanted to you have to have like a UV situation going on with your microscope or you have dyes in order to actually see the Arbus schools which are those little florist fits inside of the route you can actually dig a route and wash it in like a vinegar solution and then put it in India ink back and forth until it takes up the India ink and you can look at it under a scope and sometimes you can see the Arbus cool on a plant that's the one way to kind of see them that I know of but I've never actually laid eyes on on it that would be very exciting you might see in what they call it extra Matrixyl Spore which means that's outside the root but if you wanted to see whether the root was colonized you would have to have more capabilities than what we have right here here's some nematodes as you can see they're much much bigger than the other organisms we've looked at so and in in general they move very very fast so they're hard to miss if you have one or two on a slide for the most part they're good guys they eat different things there's a whole groups of them that eat bacteria which is great we need something to keep all that bacteria in check then we have ones that eat funghi and then we have ones that eat each other and then we have some that spear our plant roots and kill them and so if you want to get rid of the ones that spear the plant roots you have to have the ones that eat other nematodes right see what I'm saying so we need a good balance in general it's a higher taxonomic group so in highly disturbed soil you're not gonna find hardly any number toads at all and definitely not fungal feeders or I mean I mean think about it if there's no funghi in your soil you're not gonna have fungal feeding nematodes right depending on what you're looking at if anybody brought worm castings I almost always see nematodes and worm castings when I look at them but you'll probably see some bacterial feeders in there and I have a few more pictures I think the way we identify nematodes is by looking at their mouthparts and this is probably something that we won't get into today if we see a nematode we will try to identify what kind it is but don't worry about going into big detail about memorizing all the mouth parts today because that I still have to refer back to this on a regular basis but the way it's differentiated as things like the medial bulbs see the bulb there after the mouth and then the terminal bulb after that so you'll almost only see a medial bulb and a terminal bulb on a bacterial feeder if you see a nematode with fancy lips like the ones up there some of them are very fancy indeed it's almost always a bacterial feeder fungal feeders have a lesser defined bulb sometimes they won't have one and then they have a very tiny little spear see that spear up near the mouth where they injected into the fungal hyphae root feeders have a very strong spear and it has a little a little knob at the end of it that's pretty discernible if you're looking at a root feeder under the microscope because they have to have a lot of strength for shooting into the root and killing it predatory nematodes have that weird tooth thing right there near the mouth and all that skeletal looking stuff and then omnivores so those are really interesting they normally feed on fungus but they'll feed on other things too if there's no fungus there and some of them will actually switch over and start eating roots which is not awesome so the point there is if you have omnivores there they're not bad guys unless you're doing something wrong and you don't have fungus for them to eat right so yeah if you're not doing anything to foster fungal populations in your soil and those two groups are gonna it seems like keep each other in check right if you run out of fungus you're gonna run out of the fungal feeders but you do want you do want balance on all of your taxonomic groups so if you have fungus you do want to have some fungal feeding nematodes there's also there's also funghi that traps nematodes it's just really cool I didn't upload any photographs of it but but it's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life and the first time I heard about it I was just like wow people don't matter at all so it's like this fungus there's a couple different kinds but one is like it creases though lassos and there's a nematodes like even put a piece of their body like near the lasso it'll constrict and trap them and then it just like grows into them and kills them and it will kill any of these it doesn't care but it's one of the ways of keeping some of the other nematodes in check you know so that nature sort of balances yeah so I mean fungal dominant soil is typical of permanent ecosystems like forests but the more the more we can foster much horse oils in agricultural situations the more carbon we're sequestering and the more nutrients are going to be available to plants and so one of the biggest impacts on me of this work is understanding that even in alternative agriculture there are things we've borrowed from convention that are not ideal continual soil disturbance keep soil in an early successive state where you will not find a fungal communities you will not find higher taxonomic groups and you will find heavily bacterial situations and I was going to talk about this later but we can talk about it now but what that means is I mean think about a roadside that's get been blasted what an early successive plant species look like on that soil they look like weeds and invasive groups right if you are constantly disturbing your soil you're gonna get early successive organisms they're mostly bacterial overgrowth of bacteria equals weeds you know equals crusting of the soil equals always you know all these things that we consider unfavorable in organic agriculture so yeah that really hopefully turns on a lot of lights for you about management which we can talk about as we go here's an example of a bacterial feeder I always get excited finding bacterial feeders in agricultural soils because I just want to find things to keep bacteria and check I want to see higher taxonomic groups I get excited when I see fun gee I get excited when I see bacterial feeding nematodes I'm working on completely undisturbed compost right now which may show me some higher fungal feeding nematodes and some predatory num and hoods and things like that the only time I've ever seen a fungal trapping nematode or a predatory nematode is in some like ancient leaf mold that Pat brought me from his house and CeeLo that no one had touched her many many years and it's like probably the most mature thing I've ever looked at in terms of a soil but this is a bacterial feeder I just wanted to show you it like you just try to get as close as you can to the mouth part it's very hard to do they're moving very fast you have to change the focus because even if you have smashed your soil droplet droplet of soil sample under a coverslip it's still three micro meters deep and microscopic organisms are moving around within that depth and so you're gonna have to be focusing in and out through the depth different soil types to harbor different toads definitely you mean like silt versus sand versus clay well I haven't tested a lot of soils where I knew the order I guess but I would from what I know about what causes these organisms to flourish soils with higher mineral content like clay soils are gonna have more life in them than sandy soils for example that leach nutrients and leach water and a super clay soil that's really compacted is gonna be anaerobic which is not going to foster these kinds of lives so it definitely the mineral Condren the soil definitely affects it and the physical character cos of the soil are gonna affect it most of these organisms will cease to thrive at lower than six parts per million oxygens so in general as you move towards anaerobic conditions you're gonna see less favorable organisms and the answer is gonna be aerate right that's like really simple way to get the life back into the soil first and foremost all right so here's an example of some of the like non taxonomic organism things you're gonna see mineral components like the clear really crystalline refractive things are gonna be examples of like sand sometimes if they're very geometrically exciting they might be minerals like from fertilizer or something that are that are loading around in the soil if you're seeing a lot of that it means that you have a salt problem and that you're feeding too many simple amendments all the time with all these loose minerals in them and what you need to do is just chill out let the life in this will unlock everything and send it out to the plants so these kinds of things are what fad what are fascinating to be able to see the big brown fuzzy things are aggregates organic acids so humic acid is that color that's a great thing to see if you're seeing aggregates in your soil it means you have decent aeration right so one of the things I didn't mention about the ciliates in that group of protozoa I was talking about the flageolets the ciliates in the amoeba the ciliates are kind of like I care and they're no problem but if you see huge amounts of them it means you're heading anaerobic so other clues in a really anaerobic situation if you're like mmm I see a bunch of little critters moving around really fast I wonder if those are ciliates and you're not sure because you can't see their little cilia or just starting out well do you also not see a bunch of aggregation right do you also see a bunch of lactobacilli which is in the anaerobic bacteria that's really long and skinny so all these contacts lose the living and the non-living come together to give you a picture and help you understand what's going on in your soil so if we're not seeing aggregation like that probably need to get a little bit more air and will more structure and work on the structure of the soil and I think that that's one of the things that our compost was suffering from when I first started looking at it is that we were overworking it we were turning it far too much and so we were not only just obliterating any fungal hypha that were there but we were also destroying structure and creating more of an I mean it wasn't anaerobic but it was leaning that way and it was just way over grown with bacteria and so it looked really good it was crumbly it was dark and I had all this visual cues II associate with good soil but when push came to shove under the scope there really wasn't much to it at all well it's glue called glomalin basically that comes from bacteria that what's that it does it comes from fungus but I think it also mostly comes from I mean all bacteria create glue some of its really acid and some of its not so anaerobic bacteria are gonna create a glue that's not so awesome and syn acidic but the good bacteria to create a nice alkaline good gluey substance that pulls together carbon stable carbon into these clumps and then all all the little guys like to live on and around those clumps and so if you're if you just want to look at the soil and see exciting things Zone in on your aggregates because you'll see around the edges like or you'll see I've seen silly it's like scurrying all around an aggregate and just vacuuming all the bacteria off but off the top of it or I looked at some compost he from the season the other day and I saw these little baby bacterial nematodes they were so cute and they were just like I guess they were the larval form but they were just like scooting all around going really fast but I was able to just like follow one of them and he was just going all around that aggregate it's like amazing the depth that I was witnessing in this tiny little like soil sample he was just having himself a feast you know yeah exactly here's just a few examples of the types of plant tissue and different stuff that you'll see it'll be like whoa I found something no one's ever discovered and it's like no it's actually cellulose so the curly the curlicue thing is almost always gonna be cellulose from wood or paper the top right is actually a seed coat that has it has fungal hypha growing over it and it's being decomposed and then the thing below that looks like the trachea of something is likely just plant tissue of some kind and you'll see all kinds of things like this where you know I found this one thing one time it was like round and it had these two little round ears kind of coming off and it was about this big and I sent it to my mentor and she said it's the famous Mickey Mouse pollen of the blah blah blah Connor I was like oh my I'm no idea what you're talking about so we can go back to that slide later I mean we we should probably just go to the scope No [Music] you you

Channel: Living Web Farms

Views: 59,253

Rating: 4.9369249 out of 5

Keywords: meredith leigh, soil microbes, healthy soil, living soil, nutrient dense soil, soil food web, living web farms, microscopes and soil health, cilia, flagella, bacteria, organic soil, diverse microbes

Id: eG5eQroUSGo

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018