The key is it's not just bacteria or fungi or something it is a culmination of all of the single organisms working together which is really good
and the nice thing about the Vita Soil here and what I am here to talk about is its ability to formulate everything
so if you look at that nature knows more than a million Einsteins some say more than a teenager why are you trying to control it
why try to control it instead of working with it I think that's the key the key point is
lets stop trying to control and work as much as possible with nature nature is free for free lets get all that back
and this is quite an interesting insert that is 1963 and now 2003 that arrow shows
the same mountain its a bit dark in here but that is what can be achieved we can there and back to there
at the same time we were probably there and went back to there so which direction are we going
we got to start heading in that direction so anything we can do also has a cumulative
effect you say I am going to go all biological next year and probably you going to go bust cause you didn't
stay in balance and building up those soils and this I have put in there that's basically
looking at the plants below ground and you can see a whole lot of different reactions taking place
try and read those but don't worry too much about it and when you put it diagrammatically that's the type
of thing we got in our soils thats a healthy soil all those working together improving growth nutrient availability
and that's where we focusing all these goodies here as we get them going and that's when you start getting
your performance I have got something here we can sort of visualise more easily it's a starfish experiment
done in a marine environment where they identified 15 species and they monitored it
they then took the star fish out of that environment and only 8 species remained we need start
replacing those starfish back in our soils to get those those biological processes going and
to the free everything and start getting on with it now if you look at still at the ocean
ocean reefs have on average 25 times more fish and the key to that is first of all is
refuge there's a reef here those small fish have a lot of places to hide get away from predators and they reach
adulthood they also have an abundance of food in that reef so while they hide they can still feed and
then you got diversity and all those fish and algae and coral everything all working together
in that environment to flourish so what we are trying to say is how can you
create other biological reefs in your soil and that is what we do with Vita Soil
if you look at that the first photograph there is biochar difficult to see here but in one gram
of biochar you are getting about 250 m2 metres of surface area
so you can imagine you are looking at millions of millions of microbes that take refuge in that biochar
and if you only put the biochar down the microbes there would obviously not have its uses so if you
look at it highly decomposed pine sawdust which Murray made a little bit it is very high in humates and
that is know a source for the biochar so that the microbes are there and again you have
those two and you only have the microbes again it is not going to be much use so then we
would be looking at vermicasts and cultured microbes so you are inoculating that medium
which can now hold on to those microbes and with that cultured microbes which are in this case the microbial solutions
which have been bred to be tolerant of chemicals and heat so basically they can
tolerate the agro chemicals which you apply to the land and they become to a large extent
the starfish together with the vermicasts and also what you have is an abundance of
natural microbes sitting in the soil which often need these symbiotic relationships to actually be activated
so you look at the sleeping beauties most soil microbes are in a dormant state and waiting
and we put it with the Vita Soils with the microbes which help wake up the sleeping beauties and get them active in the soils
if you look at mycorrhiza and this to me is the most important microbe in the soil
and it is in all of our soils in there are many different
types of mycorrhiza and they link between different plant species and different mycorrhiza
connected to the same plant and the mycorrhiza then mix up with other soil biology and different
bacterias and works like an internet highway so if you look at in one square metre of highly biologically active soil
you have about 10,000 km of mycorrhiza
they are about a tenth the thickness of a root-hair and they can spread up to 70 metres and in that spread of 70 metres
they definitely will meet different plants in a diverse pasture and many different species which all work
together so you got a 2-way transport it's like a highway communications network with
nutrients moving up and down as well as things like water it helps with warning of attack
so if a plant was over there by the door traps chemicals traveling through the micorrhiza
with a warning of attack and plants activating its immune systems so we getting the plant activated
but if I digress here if you look at especially diseases there are very few diseases which
actually manifest before the crops set off fruit or whatever and the reason for that
and using another analogy if you have a lot of women working the land and some with babies
on their back and some not and a Lion comes along who is going to get attacked not the
baby so the plant has its baby and will sacrifice itself at the expense of the baby as it starts
put under stress by yield its ability to fight off disease deteriorates and if we can change that
and give some chance to germinate and get the nutrient balance and water availability
that ability to fight off disease is increased and as I mentioned it links different species
together and those species of for example of Fairfield dairy trying to grow maize without herbicide on
an established pasture with rye lucerne and clover and they grazed it flat and went with zero till
and up to about knee height was weeds like all over the place and the maize started growing ahead of it
and shading out the lucerne and the clover and the rye grass and when you got into that
crop that was fully grown you still had the clover and the lucerne all actively growing
in that canopy and what happens is legumes were feeding the maize nitrogen in exchange
for sugars and they did not need to photosynthesize in that canopy and that's why we talk so much about
cover crops and multispecies pastures and that's where these microbes become very
important next is a product called glomalin its like a glue for mycorrhiza and that causes
the clay particles to stick and create that crumb structure and all that water capacity
increases your air and porosity increases and all soil becomes more like a sponge instead of a rock
then due to the 10,000 km wide feed mychorrhiza can hold four times its weight in water and if you compare
that to the soil so binding that whole biology going your water holding capacity start increasing
in high organic soils with a much high water holding capacity you know if one endeavors to induce massive
crops and in our ignorance we to a large extent negated or ignored some of the benefits
it does not mean to say you can grow crops without chemicals but if we can start reducing chemical usage
this whole thing starts coming back to life and when we start looking at organics
this is an example here this is probably a month ago on the land and this is the root
system of the treated plant and the untreated and we went back yesterday to re-look
and make sure and it was not as big but it was bigger roots this is we have chosen plants
roughly the same size and these are some of the cobbs that came out this is one extreme case
for those that don't know it's on a center pivot on virgin land Eskom did not connect the electricity
and this is potentially a low rainfall area so you are putting that entire population crop under high stress
so this is the way it is all the time it shows what is possible when the shit hits the fan so to speak
ok the next one this is out at Grassy Park at Kamberg here look at a farm with low
high organic soil but in a high rainfall and you can see a fairly noticeable difference in root growth
and then with Butt farming has got all those perfect soils high rainfall untreated treated once not a big difference there were smaller roots and that and then we noticed
a bigger response on the double treatment of the trial so even in those ideal conditions you
are still getting better root systems we are now going to look at getting this is work done in Australia
not so much common interest but holistic planned grazing and same grazing cow concept
and that has been grazed and ungrazed for 10 years and thats across the fence line
conventional and that received fertiliser every year and that didn't and you can see
that if you go by around those root systems and you get down create the value and get everything going
there's a marked difference so if you look at that your effective soil depth there and
versus your effective soil depth down here your effective soil depth is 3 to 4 times deeper
soil fertility and soil analysis most nutrients here are 50% higher there even though its fertilised here
quite a bit
and we can go into what is happening here later
carbon is at the sort of level here 4 times higher in carbon content
which equates to roughly double the water holding capacity water infiltration rate here was
10 to 16 times faster than this side which if you look at that with effective rainfall
on a medium type slope you probably getting 90 to 95% going in there vs 50% going in there
so that water available to the plant root system you have double the water holding capacity
it is 2 to 3 times deeper you got double rainfall effectiveness and that can be 8 to
12 times larger for that plant to access when you go through a dry spell over here
and I think the next slide will show that if you look at Natal Oct Nov though to March April when you look at the rainfall pattern
the green line is average rainfall pattern and you can see in this Jan and Feb drought
drought was quite a bit but we do have excess rain earlier on now this is you critical growth phase
phase if we were able to build up that soil reservoir you know the roots are deeper to
get down and utilise that we start making a massive difference here this can be your
1 2 3 4 times difference in yield especially dryland especially in a dryland area so if we
look at economics goals what we are trying to do do we are not necessarily trying to increase
your yields performance vs input costs what we are doing is we are trying to reduce your costs
if you take this on your farm you can get a curve like that in the space of 5 different phases
first you got your foundation setting things up get your biology going and
things like get the soils right and fertilisation and once that foundation is laid then you start
seeing very high returns on investment so in this zone spend a grand and get 500 back
you spending money but you are not getting it all back in its incentive phase and then you get to optimal
where we should be aiming and when you get to optimal and you look at it profit margin you find
in fact is even better than here too often we try and go for that maximum yield and now
here we have the maximum yield how fast it gained quite considerably so our goal is
so let's look at break even line if you have an excellent foundation versus a poor foundation
with your poor foundation your profit margins will be small and margin of error whereas with a good foundation
costs are established and suddenly things change quite a bit
and that is where we are and focusing our attention getting that foundation and the status going
and as a result getting the better foundation right
and this is just showing the importance of the cumulative effect
and having brought that back and it might take you two years before you start seeing big results
and in some extreme cases you can see results straight away