Of course I had to go check it out right away, what a great morning read, thanks!
It's fascinating to see how similar conclusions are being reached from different perspectives. I wasn't aware of this agronomy-angle, and find it delightful how closely it matches up with what has been found in soil microbiology/ecology in the past decades.
While the idea of the soil being a living organism is not new, this has now been being looked into scientifically for the past few decades. And even though very little is known in detail, we have a good
systemic working hypothesis of how the soil ecosystem should look at different stages of succession. A hypothesis that has proven itself true in countless practical cases, where farmers were able to leave synthetics behind whilst greatly improving their yields and the quality of their produce. The only ones who don't win on this one are the chemical industries
I'm currently learning this approach with Elaine Ingham, and in fact, we even have benchmark numbers we try to attain for each of these stages, which are mainly expressed in the ratio of bacterial to fungal mass (it's mainly they who mine nutrients from the organic and mineral materials in the soil) along with the presence of higher-level predators (flagellates, amoebae, ciliates, nematodes, microarthropods..worms!) who will eat those bacteria and fungi, excrete any excess nutrients, and thus make those nutrients available to the plant.
We also know that bacteria prefer simpler sugars, proteins and carbohydrates for their food whilst the fungi like more complex and carbon-heavy foods.
So we can get a good approximation to the plant's needs just by combining the right amounts of nitrogen-rich and carbon-rich inputs, and providing adequate aeration.
And lookie there, the agronomists discovering that too, even without checking what's going on with the soil microherd - which if they did, would surely blow their minds
My hunch is they'd discover how with adding both C&N inputs as they're postulating, the diversity and complexity of the soil ecosystem increase dramatically (the more diverse the foods are, the more drama lol) - expressed not only in species of bacteria and fungi, but also in the presence of besaid predators.
That ecosystem can be more bacterial to accomodate short-lived crops or more fungal for perennials, it doesn't matter. But it
has to include those higher level organisms to make the nutrients actually available to the plant, otherwise they just stay locked up in those little microbe bodies.
There's also a nice explanation of this all in the Soil Biology Primer published in 2000, also available online, here for example:
https://extension.illinois.edu/soil/SoilBiology/soil_biology_primer.htm
I know right! It's the simple beauty of it, that gut feeling of "yes, it
feels true", that wows me over and over.
Cheers!
I don't really need to thin them out though, just have been able to feed more frequently as they get faster at processing.
