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What does it take to grow nutritious food for the world? It starts with healthy soil, which provides nutrients to crops, supports a diverse ecosystem of beneficial microorganisms, and helps suppress harmful pest and pathogen, all of which leads to healthier crops and higher yields.
In a recent episode of the Voices of the Valley podcast, Megan Kavanagh, VP of Science and Agronomy at Bio S.I., joined Western Growers Jeana Cadby, Environment and Climate Director, and Kara Timmins, Communications Manager, to discuss the science of soil health and why it’s important for growers and consumers alike.
Megan Kavanaugh: Thank you so much for having me, Kara and Jeana. I’m really excited to be here.
Kara Timmins: We’re excited to have you here. So, we’re going to talk a lot about soil and bioscience and all kinds of things that are going on at Bio S.I. For starters, can we get a little bit of a history about Bio S.I.?
Megan Kavanaugh: It’s a very small family-owned company. They manufacture biological inputs. They are located in Texas, but they have worked in all kinds of specialty crops in California and all throughout the Midwest in potato production. They have been around since the mid-nineties. The founder was a veteran, and he also grew up on a farm. He realized over time that the soil was becoming over applied with a lot of pesticides and fertilizers. His idea was to rebuild, restore and renew the soil using soil biology, which, you know, back in the mid-nineties was niche, right?
He started to collect soils from challenged environments, hydro-carbon contaminated environments, agricultural fields that had been heavily managed and from areas of different fields that had high productivity. He grew these microbes together and scaled out the facility over time. One of our primary tanks contains microbial communities that have been coexisting together for 25 years.
So when I came on, I thought that was really cool. It’s a family company, it’s small, and there for the grower. And I really liked that mindset. He passed in 2018 from cancer, and his wife had taken over the company. They had been in sort of limbo, and they needed somebody who wanted to take this fermentation ─ I call it liquid gold ─ and put it out in the field and generate relevant data to look at the molecular impact of these microbial communities in large scale agriculture.
Jeana Cadby: Can you talk a little bit about the nexus of soil health and why we should be thinking about soil health in our production systems?
Megan Kavanaugh: I think it’s really important to think about the pillars of soil health and what that entails. If we just look at soil health from a biological perspective, we’re missing the chemical, we’re missing the physical. Because it really is a three-pronged approach. Biology is one extremely important metric for soil health. However, it’s the metric you can’t see. You can do basic soil chemistry analysis and target how this chemical application impacted soil health in this way. Same thing with physical. If you’re looking at aggregate stability over time, well, aggregate stability is also modulated heavily by microbes, fungi in particular. We’ll provide glue for the structure for the aggregate so you have better water infiltration, water holding capacity, and all of a sudden the aeration is better, the crops are happier, the roots are happier, so you have the physical component. That’s also really easy to track.
If you’re doing deep tillage, you’ll see an impact to the structure. But biology from a soil health perspective is something we can now afford to sequence. Real time, quickly.
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If you look at farming as a whole, it’s very expensive. It’s really high risk. So it’s all about working with the growers, working with the agronomist, and instead of going out and telling them, “Hey, you should only be using biologicals. What are you doing?” I don’t take that approach. I think it’s counterproductive to collaboration. What we’re finding is, when you go out and you talk to these growers, you talk to the PCAs and CCAs managing these acres, they’re really innovative, and they actually want to find different ways, and they want to try to trial it and generate the data. I come behind those trials, and I start sampling the soil microbiome. I’m able to actually show them with data, and then it starts to make shifts. It’s a paradigm shift right now that’s really occurring, but it’s really interesting to see the interest and willingness to collaborate.
Kara Timmins: A lot of growers have scientific minds and a desire to be stewards of the land. And they take that title very seriously. One of the tools in their toolbox is science. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen in terms of the agricultural community and how they utilize that and how they share that information with one another and how this is one system?
Megan Kavanaugh: That was spot on. This is what’s been such an exciting journey for me in the last 12 years is I’m all about fundamental change. It’s really easy to list all of the things that are wrong, but it’s really cool to look at issues and provide solutions and then see when things are starting to go right. And I think you’re completely right about agriculture and research and also preserving and supporting our agricultural lands. We are not creating new soil. I cannot say this enough. We are not creating new soil. So if our producers, if our growers who are stewards of the land, if they cannot support their family, their operations, their livelihood, if they lose that and we don’t support them, they will have to sell that land.
And that land may potentially go out of production. We’re losing a fairly substantial amount of agricultural lands every year. So I think if we look to producers and we thank them, right, thank you for preserving this soil that can feed an entire world, it’s really powerful. So I think that’s why a lot of the growers are so willing to be early adopters of technology and innovations.
To learn more about Bio S.I. and their range of products, visit their website here. For more information about the advancements in ag-tech and ag science, visit the Western Growers Center of Innovation and Technology website here.