First Come, First Served Underground
Timing matters below ground too
Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS
I have been thinking about timing. Not spray timing, drilling dates or whether the forecast is going to change its mind five minutes after somebody has finally decided to get going, but what happens underground when a new root first starts pushing into the soil.
That root isn’t arriving into an empty space. There is already plenty going on down there, and none of it has been waiting patiently for us to turn up with a plan. Microbes are competing for food, space and influence, some useful, some less so, and plenty simply getting on with their own business without much concern for what we would prefer them to do. The soil already has biology, quite a lot of it in fact, which is slightly inconvenient.
The bit I keep coming back to is whether timing changes the odds. If useful organisms are going to compete for space, interact with the root, or influence nutrient availability, it seems reasonable to think there is an advantage in them being there while that little root zone is still forming, rather than arriving later, once everyone else has already settled in and put their feet up.
That does not mean a few microbes suddenly take charge of the whole soil. Soil biology has never shown much interest in being that cooperative. It is more about trying to nudge the balance a little while the plant is still small, the root system is limited, and it has less to fall back on if conditions turn against it.
Some beneficial microbes can compete with soil-borne pathogens for space and resources, while others can influence nutrient availability, including phosphorus that may be sitting there in the soil but not exactly queuing up to be taken in by the plant. There is also the crop’s own response to pressure to think about, because establishment is not just about what is around the root, but how well the young plant deals with whatever it finds there.
That is where the idea of a biological starter starts to make sense to me. Not as a way of pretending we can control the whole underground population, because that would be optimistic by anyone’s standards, but as a way of trying to put a few more useful things in place early enough to matter.
ActiV8-Bio was originally built around a fairly simple idea: could we create something that behaved a bit like the liquid equivalent of compost? Not compost in the literal sense, obviously, but something that brought together useful biology and compounds that could help condition the soil around a young root and make that early environment a bit more favourable.
Alongside the selected microbes, it contains salicylic acid, which is involved in plant signalling and defence responses, so there is a plant side to the story as well as a soil one. The aim was never to make establishment magically problem-free, but to give the crop a better environment to get itself going while it is still small and vulnerable.
SFS wanted to put some science behind the biology, and that is what I like about the NatureMetrics DNA work. We have looked at ActiV8-Bio through their lens more than once, so we are not hanging everything on a single result and hoping it tells the story we want.
Across those tests, we have seen proper positive changes in the biological profile after application. As always, I remain cautious about pretending soil biology gives neat answers all lined up in tables, because it rarely does, but seeing that positive movement more than once gives us something a bit more solid to work with.That matters, because applying a biological product and then simply deciding something good must have happened is not terribly useful.
For me, though, the real question is what sort of crop we are trying to carry into winter. If it has had the chance to put down a decent root system, find nutrients more easily and establish in a more active environment, then it goes into the colder months with a little more in the bank. That does not guarantee an easy winter or a perfect spring, because unfortunately nobody has yet managed to put either of those in a drum, but it does mean the crop has a stronger starting point when growth begins again.
We tend to think about spring only once spring arrives, but by then quite a lot has already been decided. A crop that has spent autumn establishing well is not starting from the same place as one that has spent the whole time trying to catch up.
That is probably why the timing keeps coming back to me. The point of a biological starter is not really the application itself. It is what position the crop is in a few months later.
And by then, first come, first served has already happened underground.
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