Mycobacterium vaccae

They say that everyone gets their fix. There is always that one thing that gives you a burst of satisfaction, of happiness. Everyone has their thing, whether it be exercise, food, religion, alcohol, drugs, tinkering, whatever. We all need that little burst of serotonin to stave off depression.

For some people, though, being outside, specifically in nature, is the drug of choice. There is even a group on Facebook called Gardenoholics Anonymous. This time of year, they mostly talk about pouring over seed catalogs with longing. The rest of the year, they wax poetic about the wonders of dirty hands and conquered weeds. We have all known the outdoor enthusiasts, as well. The ones who couldn't imagine a weekend without camping and go for a hike in the nearby wooded area almost daily. I have known lots of both kinds and have noticed that overall, they tend to be a pretty happy lot. But what if the key to happiness for both groups is the same? What if they are getting their high from an all-natural source?

It turns out that they just might be doing just that. Scientists have discovered a bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae. M. vaccae has been shown to trigger the release of serotonin in the brain when live bacteria are inhaled. Scientists aren't quite sure why just yet, but the results of studies have been undeniable. And the release of serotonin is significant enough that it is referred to as antidepressant. Is it harmful? It doesn't appear to be even a little harmful. It might actually be very beneficial. Is it addictive? Well, probably. Just about anything that can trigger the release of serotonin is potentially addictive. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Exercise can be addictive.

So, you might ask, this sounds like some pretty good stuff. Where might I get some? It turns out that M. vaccae is a bacteria that commonly occurs in healthy, living soil just about everywhere in the world. It also tends to aerosolize easily, becoming suspended in the air we breathe with minimal disturbance of the soil. Cool stuff, right?

Now do me a favor, please. Scroll back up and look at the top of the page. What is this blog called? Mad Bioneer, right? So you KNOW we aren't going to leave well enough alone. Now that we know something new, how can we use it? There is an air filter some brilliant soul (no, it wasn't me) invented several years ago called the Andrea Air Purifier. It puts a plant inside a clear plastic case, with vents at the top. Air is pulled down through the vents, over the plant, down through the soil, over a water source, and then through the fan that pulls it all through and back out into the room. Not only does the plant help purify the air, but the soil helps as well, through both filtration and microbial action in the soil.

What if we were to modify this wonderful piece of technology just a little. First we find out what the M. vaccae uses as a food source in the soil and make sure there is plenty of it. We get the soil good and alive. But with just a few design and maintenance tweaks, the air wouldn't just filter out the bad stuff. It could also be used to load the air inside a building with all that wonderful M. vaccae goodness. You get the wonderful benefit of breathable, healthy antidepressant filling your home.

But who is to say we need to stop at home? Want people to come to your coffee shop? Get them addicted to the antidepressants you pump into the air! The uses are endless. But the benefits, if something like this were to be put into widespread use, would be to increase happiness on a broad scale. How awesome would that be?

Soil as a Living Organism

Sometimes, looking at something commonplace with new eyes, new perspective, and new insight can be one of the hardest things there is to do. And sometimes there is nothing more important to do. What can be more commonplace than soil? We walk over it every day. Yet to dismiss its importance, its power, is to miss a great deal. Sylvia Bernstein, in her book Aquaponic Gardening, printed a quote from Kobus Jooste from South Africa that attempted to strip down soil into its constituents, ending in the following conclusion: “UBERFACT: Soil is an anchoring medium to plants that may or may not, over time, release some of the stuff plants need to grow.” I nearly stopped reading the book at that line, but powered on for the other wisdom the book has to offer. Still, that sentence comes back to me often. Rarely have people been more wrong.

The first thing to realize when looking at soil with new eyes is that soil is a living thing. True, it is not a single organism, but rather a complex media filled with tens of thousands of different organisms. But the organisms work so well together that they can almost be treated as one organism.  So, when a biologist studies an organism, what are the first couple of things they look for? Two of the most important aspects in understanding an organism are what it eats, and what role it fills in the ecosystem.

First let’s tackle the food source for soil. Yes, soil needs to be fed. Like any other living organism, soil breathes air, drinks water, and consumes a food source. In the absence of any of those, the soil will fail and die. As for what soil eats, it is really simple. It eats whatever organic matter falls to the soil surface. From there, through a series of digestive processes of different organisms, the particles of decaying organic matter get broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, the larger organic molecules digested into smaller ones. Mass is lost as carbon from cellulose and lignin and a host of other molecules are slowly turned into carbon dioxide. But the process is so much more complex. The cellulose and lignin were locked in what used to be the body of a plant, a plant that had metabolic processes and scent and its own DNA. All of those complex molecules that created the things that made the plant alive came with their own chemical signature. As they break down, the carbon is lost to the air, as is some of the nitrogen. However, the phosphorus and potassium and calcium and iron stay behind. They get recombined and further broken down by that wonderful process of decomposition and soil creation. What they finally create is exactly what the plants need to take up and start all over again.

The pile of mostly decomposed plants in the background
was living white clover two months earlier. The heat of
summer killed them and the soil gobbled up the readily
available food source.

 As an engineer, understanding soil isn’t just enough. What does it DO? What can I use it for? In order to tackle that question, I need to answer the other question: what role does soil play in its ecosystem? You probably learned in grade school science class, as I did, that soil provides nutrition and structure for plants. While this is true, it is a tiny portion of what is really going on. Soil plays an incredibly important role in the ecosystem. To work that out, let’s look again at soil’s food source. It needs decaying plant matter to feed on. Where does it get decaying plant matter? Well, it first needs healthy plants to grow, so they can drop leaves and eventually die. What produces more decaying plant matter, a lush growth of plants, or a few spindly plants that are already dying? Anyone with a lush landscape in their yard can tell you the answer to that one. The more plants there are, the more waste they drop.

So now we know that the soil organisms have a vested interest in growing a lush stand of plants. How do they do this? Again, we will answer a question with a new question. What is the biggest problem facing the plants? Plants need sun, water, air, and a good source of all the minerals and micronutrients they need to grow. The first three are outside the control of the soil organisms, but the last is fully within their control. There are two primary sources for the nutrients the plants need: decaying plant and animal material and the minerals in the soil around them. The soil needs to be effective at releasing those nutrients from both sources and getting them to the plants.

That brings up the next problem. How does the soil retain the nutrients long enough for the plants to get them? Have you ever performed a soil test? You put soil in a jar with water and shake it really well, then test the water for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Why is that? Well, the shaking is because the soil is working really hard to hold onto those nutrients. You test the water and not the soil because those nutrients are soluble in water. The soil has to find a way to lock those nutrients in, and where they fail, filter them back out of the water before they are lost to the water cycle.

It turns out that soil is remarkably good at doing just that. The bacteria produce polysaccharide glues that hold soil particles together. Fungal strands also serve to bind soil particles together. Fungal networks are shaped like a tight net, and have proven to be very good at filtering water.

There is another function of soil that is often overlooked. There is an old gardening addage: If you want to raise the pH of your soil, add compost. If you want to lower the pH of your soil, add compost. Plants are only able to absorb nutrients within a certain pH range. The problem is, different compounds work best at different ranges. Since the organisms in the soil have a vested interest in getting those nutrients into the plants, they also want to make sure the plants can absorb the nutrients. So they also take on the task of balancing the soil chemistry.

Naturally, all this is a gross oversimplification, but it has to be. There have been volumes written on tiny portions of this process. There are whole fields of science that study nothing but soil chemistry and biology. But when you think of the problems you have, think of what soil needs to do and how a healthy, living soil can help you and your plants. Then go out and feed your soil.

Onward Into Aquaponics

I know this blog has been silent for many months. It is certainly not because there is little going on here in Mad Bioneer world. Life has been full of changes and I have been working very hard on some very interesting projects that have come together very, very well. The picture shows my current setup, which I now have fully assembled and functional. Over the next several posts I will explain my intermediate steps, of which there have been plenty, and how I got to where I am, including my successes and failures.

But first of all, I want to start with the hypothesis I was testing. After all, that is where all good science starts. As I have mentioned before, I am not a big fan of hydroponics. My passion is the understanding of each of the roles that living organisms play in the overall health and functionality of a living system and making sure that those roles are filled by something in my system. Any system that removes all of the life except the plant and requires the operator (and expensive machinery) to do their work is pretty much the opposite of what I want to do.

However, with some great conversations with the very knowledgeable guys at Home Grown Hydroponics in Tempe, AZ, I have come to understand that that is just one version of hydroponics. As I dug farther into this on my way to eventually designing and building my very own aquaculture greenhouse, I settled on some version of aquaponics. For those of you not familiar, this is a system where a fish tank is connected up to some grow beds. The water from the tank is regularly pumped through the grow beds, where the plants filter the fish waste out of the water. It filters the water for the fish and fertilizes the plants all in one ingenious system.

However, being at my core a soils guy, I was just not content to toss the soil out the window. After all, that is where the magic happens. I have said it before and I have said it again: A gardener doesn't take care of his plants. He takes care of his soil. The soil takes care of the plants. So I wanted to see if I could manage an aquaponics system using soil instead of media.

I did some amount of digging and most of what I found used media with aquaponics, not soil. The one book I had not only discouraged its use, but actually said some stunningly inaccurate things about the role soil plays in a plant's health. But aside from saying that the soil essentially is just holding the plant up, the only reason it gave for not using soil is that it will color the water, making it harder to check on your fish. I can tell you from experience that this is true, but that the colored water is in no way harmful to the fish. While it would be neat to watch my fish closely every day, I have other ways of determining how healthy they are.

So here I am, with a fully functional test system that incorporates not only soil into aquaponics, but also hugelkultur. And, boy oh boy am I having fun. Stay tuned, as I will be going into great detail about how I got here. It will probably be way more detail than you wanted, but hey, I find that everyone else leaves out all the details I want, so I may as well be different.

GeekDad: Better Pest Control Through Biology

I have another blog post up on GeekDad. This one talks about Paul Stamets' use of, and patent for, the use of cordyceps mushrooms as an in-home alternative to traditional pest control. You can check it out here: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/06/better-pest-control-through-biology/

Herbivores vs. Vegetarians

Okay, here's today's random thought: Are vegetarians the largest true herbivore ever to walk the earth? Sure, we have had lots and lots of really large herbivores that have walked the earth, but how many of the big ones really have a 100% vegetable diet? Let me put it to you this way: have you ever gotten a bug on your vegetables? Now think about how meticulously we wash them and look them over before eating them. Cows barely look before taking a mouthful. There is even a parasite whose life cycle depends on the fact that large herbivores don't look before eating. It invades an ant's body and takes over its mind, causing it to climb as high as it can on grass to hopefully be eaten by whatever is eating the grass.

So, what nutritional benefit do large herbivores get from the bugs they inevitably eat and, more importantly, is it a source of protein they rely on, or is it just incidental to their diet?