Soil Health

Soil Health

Healthy soil is crucial to plant health. Soil microbes have a symbiotic relationship with plants, as plants provide sugars/exudates to microbes and microbes make nutrients bio-available for plants, plants then provide nutrients to animals and plants and animals provide vital nutrients to humans. Healthy Soil - Healthy Plants - Healthy People.

Plants produce complex organic molecules like sugars that they exude from their roots to encourage the microorganism populations that comprise a healthy soil. In turn, microorganisms, by way of their complex ecology, release minerals that are already in the soil so that they are bio-available to plants. Microorganisms such as fungi with their extensive network of filaments, deliver water and nutrients from a wider area than the plant roots cover. These symbiotic relationships between microorganisms in the soil and the plants above are natural processes and will maintain themselves, provided they are not destroyed by excessive chemical or mechanical disturbance.

This natural process of productive plant/soil symbiosis can be fast tracked by inoculating the soil with the biological agents that a soil lacks, and reducing chemical fertiliser and pesticide use. Other factors which limit microbial and plant growth, such as salt, compaction, or extreme lack of available nutrients, can be overcome by the addition of appropriate biological agents and, in some cases, nutrients