Microscopy Links

Monday, September 18, 2006

Teaming with Microbes- The World Through a Powerful Electron Microscopes.

Jeff Lowenfels is a columnist for Anchorage Daily News. For over 30 years he had put out a gardening column every week, making him the longest published garden columnist in American. For most of those years he had advised many gardeners and was the posted child for Miracle-Gro. He had lead the debate with organic crowd at GWA conventions trying to persuade that water-soluble fertilizers were the best way to go. Until one day he received an email with an image that was taken through a microscope of a fungus attacking a nematode. In an instant everything had changed for Lowernfels. He had felt that he betrayed his readers for over thirty years and was oblivious to the truth. Soon after, Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis co-wrote a gardening book “Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web”. This book covers relatively new soil- science discoveries, a world opened up through powerful electron microscopes. Regular gardeners and other growers have been pouring toxin chemicals on their souls for years without realizing that those chemicals hurt the very things that make soil healthy. Using of these toxic chemicals kills off elements of normal flora and fauna, which creates the perfect habitat for raiders.

Posted by OpticsPlanet at 6:54 AM Read Article

3 Comments:

Anonymous wrote (@ 12:14 PM):

WHAT A FANTASTIC BOOK. EVERYONE MUST BUY IT. BEST GARDENING BOOK IN THE PAST DECADE. A MUST READ.

Anonymous wrote (@ 6:50 PM):

We agree that this is the best gardening book written in years. There is so much information in this book that our heads are spinning. Wow, have we ever been mislead by the Miracle-Gro folks. You must get this book. Read it. Then decide for yourself. It is sure to be a bible for organic gardening....or should we say "Soil Food Web Gardening." We are sure glad we bought it. Thanks for the tip!

Erich J. Knight wrote (@ 4:52 PM):

I thought Jeff Lowenfel may be interested in Terra Preta Soils and the roll they could play in establishing a sustainable agricultural technology in our climate for his next work.

I feel we should push for this Terra Preta Soils CO2 sequestration strategy as not only a global warming remedy for the first world, but to solve fertilization and transport issues for the third world. This information needs to be shared with all the state programs.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:

These are processes where you can have your Bio-fuel and fertility too.

'Terra Preta' soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.
I thought, I first read about these soils in " Botany of Desire " or "Guns,Germs,&Steel" but I could not find reference to them. I finely found the reference in "1491", but I did not realize their potential .

Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442624a.html

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehm...r_home.htm

This Earth Science Forum thread on these soil contains further links ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-preta.html

The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.pdf

There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.

Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

Also, Terra Preta was on the Agenda at this years world Soil Science Conference !
http://crops.confex.com/crops/wc2006/te...P16274.HTM

Here is a great article that high lights this pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.

Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research_paul/2006/0106/charcoal.shtml

.
If pre Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies since Tobacco.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society. As inversely Tobacco, over time has gotten back at same society by killing more of us than the entire pre-Columbian population.

Erich

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar@aol.com
(540) 289-9750