For Jenny and anyone else wanting a healthy and sustainable food system

I received this email from Jenny, one of the Gbiota members. I am very happy for such emails as they tell me that the documentation is not clear which gives me a chance to make it clearer.

I hope this helps Jenny and a few (million) other people.

Jenny’s question about soil-blood gets to the core of the Gbiota system.

Jenny’s question

Hello Colin

I’ve enjoyed your new articles, particularly the one relating to tower growing.

Also the in-depth details about soil-blood and how often to water/flood the boxes.

One question though: what do you do with the ‘soil-blood’ for the week between watering? Does it retain its high microbial quality and expected health benefits, sitting in a bucket waiting for next Thursday until you use it again? I get the feeling it would deteriorate rapidly, being kept in an anaerobic environment.

I am planning to get started making a Gbiota bed because my current compost heap is seriously dry and can’t retain/hold water for 24hrs. Hence everything is very slow to compost and useless for growing food.

Thanks again for the new articles.

Jenny

My not-so-short answer

Hi Jenny,

Many thanks for your message which is telling me that I have not done a good enough job of explaining the Gbiota technology and aims.

I write a lot but sometimes the core of the message is lost in a mass of words, let me have another go.

The needle in the haystack

There is an immense amount of solid scientific research on how food affects health, again the core message is easily lost in the volume. But the core is simple.

Our gut matters

The biota in our gut is critical to health, it does much more than digest food.

The microbes in the gut communicate with each other, like in a computer so our gut forms part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly appetite.

It manufactures a range of chemicals which are essential for the body to operate and lack of these chemicals leads to chronic infectious diseases.

Also, much of our immune system is located in our gut, as we learned with Covid. People eating a healthy diet still caught Covid but were much less likely to die than people eating a poor diet or under stress.

We know from studies of the gut biome that the biota comes from the food we eat (or the food that mum ate) and that these microbes originate in the soil.

Modern highly processed foods – no bugs

Modern highly processed food may be hygienic but is devoid of beneficial microbes. Traditional food is full of microbes, some beneficial some dangerous leading to sickness and death.

Traditionally these microbes breed in organic waste in the soil.

Under some conditions, beneficial microbes breed preferentially and all is fine.

In other conditions, the toxic microbes breed preferentially leading to infectious diseases of varying severity.

Preferential breeding

Learning how to preferentially breed beneficial microbes in organic waste is one of the critical challenges facing our species.

But there is another side to the story.

 

Sustainable food

Recycling organic waste is sustainable, while modern chemical agriculture, based on the exploitation of natural resources is not.

There are eight billion people on the earth, they consume thousands of tonnes of food each year. The current system is unsustainable, we have no option but to learn how to grow food sustainably.

We need to create a new industry of growing plants that act as pre and pro-biotics by breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, both healthy and sustainable.

This will be community driven – join us in the Gbiota movement.

Not all food

Let me be clear here, we do not need to replace the entire food industry – that is just ridiculous.

Most of the food we eat is burned off as energy and our modern food does that very well.

Rather we need to create a new industry supplying gut-brain food which is only a fraction of the total food we eat.

But it needs to be local as microbes have a short life. This will start with a few entrepreneurial home growers setting up their own Gbiota boxes but later local commercial growers supplying their local community.

Gbiota – not just a technology – a social movement

I need to make this message clear to my fellow humans. This is why I put so much emphasis that Gbiota is a social movement, we have to change the way society works. That is more important than profits.

Any space traveller passing by and watching the 7 O’clock news is hardly likely to be handing out gold stars for our harmonious society.

Unks and unkunks

No this is not gibberish in some weird language but an issue at the core of health.

I know I go on a bit about the ‘profits before people’ actions in the food industry but there is another, even bigger issue.

An Unk is something you don’t know but at least you know you don’t know it and can develop strategies to mitigate, bad but not that bad.

An Unkunk is something you are unaware of – so are unprotected from the danger ahead.

The history of food is riddled with unkunks and it is a big issue.

Let us look at lessons we can learn from the history of food.

Hunter-gatherers

For hundreds of thousands of years, we were hunter-gatherers and totally at the mercy of the climate. While our food was generally health a few bad years would leave us starving.

Research shows that modern day hunter gatherers, who diet contains some plants plant grown in living soil full of nutrients have a far healthy gut biome.

They do not suffer the modern epidemic of chronic diseases. We need to feed our gut -brain, we know how – it is just a question of doing it.

Farmers

When we saw the possibility of growing plants ourselves, particularly seed plants like wheat, corn and rice which could be stored we jumped at the opportunity – and why not?

Who could have foreseen that the reliable food supply would lead to a massive increase in population leading to cities which allowed infectious diseases to spread, our actions had led to the creation of terrible plagues.

We also had no idea that repetitive harvesting would exhaust the soil leading to the complete collapse of some civilisations.

Good intentions gone wrong – caught out by an Unkunk.

Had we been aware of the dangers of plagues and soil degradation we would probably have still gone ahead and adopted farming, with all its benefits but taken steps to avoid the plagues and soil degradation.

Hygiene

Then we learned how important hygiene was so we built water and sewage systems, invented the modern bed and adopted regular washing.

Fantastic success – but it led to yet another population explosion which put great pressure on available food supplies.

How can you argue that improved hygiene is wrong – that would be plain stupid – but had we been aware of the population explosion which would result we may have taken steps to manage it better.

The green revolution

Then came Norman Borlaug, and the green revolution and we increased food production, all with the best of intentions but which led to yet another population explosion.

However, with our modern technology, we were able to produce enough food to feed the entire world. That is true we just failed to learn how to distribute food equitably – a social, not a technical problem.

Had we been aware that this could lead to swarms of starving refugees we may have taken steps to manage the gross inequalities – who knows – would short-term greed still have triumphed?

The gut-brain

But again there was an unexpected trap, our highly efficient food system largely based on chemicals for fertiliser and crop protection meant that our food was inert so our gut biome, which is an important part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies was no longer fully functional.

No one is blaming Norman Borlaug and his contemporaries, they worked diligently to feed the world’s ever-increasing population but were caught by an Unkunk and so now we are left with the problem of creating a supplementary food system to feed the gut-brain.

Unkunks and the modern gut biome

At least we have learned about the importance of the gut biome and its impact on health. It is very much the science of the decade. But we are still looking at it from the viewpoint of biochemistry.

We know full well we can make fat people skinny and skinny people fat by changing the gut biome, we know what species of gut biota make us fat and which species make us skinny.

But we have no idea of the mechanism, the how, we just have observational experiments.

Our understanding of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies is still in its infancy (meaning we haven’t the faintest idea of the code that makes it work) and even more dangerous we have yet to recognise its importance.

We don’t do nothing, with 8 million people a year suffering a diabetic amputation that is not an option. We recognise and learn to manage our ignorance.

Calorie balance

Pick up virtually any book on diet or weight loss and you will be presented with the idea that we get fat because we consume more calories than we burn.

Now read carefully, I am not saying that the fundamental laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of mass are wrong. I was indoctrinated with these ideas at University and they have stuck.

But calorie imbalance, eating more than we burn, is not the cause of the modern epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.

I accept the expert’s opinion that these are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place. No augment from me here.

So why do we get fat and sick?

Calorie imbalance is not the cause. It is how, or what I like to call the enabling factor.

The why, the real reason why we get fat and sick is because our intelligent control system, of which the gut-brain is an integral part, has decided that we need to store more fat.

Yet the standard response to storing excess fat is to talk about the calorie imbalance. We are the victim of an Unkunk.

We should have known better, over seventy years ago, after the end of WW2 we learned that people who had been deprived of food in the war became overweight when food was available.

Our intelligent control system had been trained that is needed to store fat, it was a question of survival. When food became available it deliberately created a calorie imbalance by our gut-brain sending our hormones so we were obsessed with eating as much food as we could lay our hands (or maybe teeth) on.

Read the warning label

So, dear Jenny, read the warning label. I and no one else really knows how our intelligent control system works, but we can observe it in action.

What I am trying to do here is to take it out of the Unkunk section and bring it into the Unk section.

There is an old saying, science is the art of managing knowledge – engineering is the art of managing ignorance.

I am an engineer, I was brought up on how to manage ignorance. We build bridges and weird machines and so they don’t fall to bits we use what we like to call safety factors. These are not safety factors at all, they are ignorance factors.

So when you read on please understand that there are no absolute truths here.

The overall aim is to learn how to grow plants which are both pre- and pro-biotics. We need to be able to do this at scale by creating what is in effect a new industry, we are not going to solve the epidemic of chronic diseases by lab-scale breeding of a limited selection of microbial species.

Growing plants as natural pre and pro biotics is a process which has been tested (unknowingly) for millions of years so reducing the risk of Unkunks.

Soil-blood is a key part of this new technology. Learning how to manage soil-blood is at the core of resolving the epidemic of chronic disease. But it is not without risk.

As a pioneer of the soil-blood revolution I have used my body as a piece of lab equipment to see how far I can go before I sense a problem and I can honestly say the worst effect I have experienced is an occasional increase in the consumption of toilet paper.

If you want to increase your level of safety factor then do so. I have tried to indicate how and now it is your decision.

Principles no rule of thumb

It is not possible to give a set of instructions, like a cooking recipe, as climate, season and plants (and people) vary so much so what I try and do is give a set of principles which the grower can apply whether in Finland or Bundaberg.

The basic principles behind the Gbiota system are simple. We want to breed beneficial microbes in the soil. These will enter the plants that we eat and from there into our gut, a process that has been going on for a few million years but we decided to abort with our modern, ultra hygienic, food system.

Part of the reason we stopped is that if the conditions are not right harmful microbes, which make us sick or will kill us will breed.

But the real reason is it is much more profitable to grow plants using chemicals than go to the trouble of recycling organic matter.

We use a simple process of Eco-balance where we create the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes – a process that has been going on for many millions of years so the Patents have well and truly expired.  It is well tested.

Both good and bad Microbes need food so that is not a differentiator, the key differentiator is air and moisture.

How water moves through the soil may appear to be simple but is actually complex and for those interested I wrote an article water which may help understand the Gbiota process but there are two key things to understand about water.

 

Goldilocks water

If the soil is too dry nothing happens, the plants don’t grow and the bugs won’t breed.

If it is too wet most plants won’t grow well, yes watercress and seaweed may be healthy, but life is about variety.

So what we want is Goldilocks water, not too wet, not too dry, just right.

Sounds simple but it is not.

Weird water

Water is weird but very friendly stuff, it loves itself so water molecules are attracted to other water molecules which gives it tensile strength, which is a bit weird for a liquid, but it is also a bit like a teenager, it loves some things and hates others – what we call hydrophobic and hydrophilic.

The other weird thing about water is it does not like being invaded by other stuff so if there is a strong solution then any nearby water will rush in to dilute the strong solution, what we call osmosis.

These two together are how plants work, osmosis means that water will enter the root system as long as the solution in the plant’s roots is stronger than the solution in the soil.

If it is not, the water will be sucked out of the plants and they will die. Something I have demonstrated many times in my experiments.

Once the water has entered the root system, evaporation from the leaves will pull water up to great heights by the tensile strength of water that has entered the root system by osmosis.

Water does not spread uniformly

You may agree with the Goldilocks water approach, not too dry, not too wet just right and think it is so simple – just water a little bit.

But that is not the way soil and water works.

If you are lucky and have hydrophilic (water-loving soil) the water will cling to the first bit of soil it finds. But generally (almost always) soil has different particle and pore sizes.

The surface tension forces are much larger in a small pore than in a big pore (it has more surface area) so the water will move from large pores to small pores and then stop.

When you apply water from above, however you do it – drip tape, sprinkler, hose, flood or a good old fashioned bucket you are applying liquid water that will initially fill all the pores, big and small where you applied the water, so they are all filled with liquid water.

The soil is saturated with no air spaces.

The importance of pore size

But all soils have a range of pore sizes and if the soil is hydrophilic, (water-loving), the forces attracting the water in the small pores are higher than in the large pores so water will move from the large pores to the small pores until there is a balance and flow will stop.

This is wicking.

The moisture level at the end of wicking is normally called field capacity but is really an equilibrium state which is a better term.

This moisture level is independent of how much water is applied. If you apply more water it will just go deeper into the soil.

I will say this again, and put up with the abusive emails it will generate. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, you cannot vary the moisture level in the soil by how much water you apply from above.

The moisture levels at the end of irrigation will always be the same, it will start saturated and then drop down to field or equilibrium value.

Applying more water will mean it will penetrate deeper into the soil.

What we can do

If we change either the nature of the soil, so it is more or less hydrophilic, or change the pore size we will change the equilibrium level.

This is what we are trying to do with Wickmix, create a soil that is hydrophilic, water-loving but with a large pore size – a giant sponge.

Not make sense? Think of it this way.

Clay is generally nutrient-rich but has a very small pore size so will hold a lot of water and very little air and so will be anaerobic which is great for breeding bad bugs.

Sand has a large pore size so contains a lot of air – which is good but will hold very little water and nutrients. Great for growing Cacti but not so good for broccoli.

Wickimix

With Wickimix, which we make from organic waste, rock dust and a bit of soil (preferably with a small particle size like in clay to give a large surface area) there are plenty of nutrients.

But to get (and maintain) a large pore size we need a little help from the creatures of the soil, particularly the worms.

But let us not forget the beetles, larvae, nematodes and all those creepy-crawlies found in good soil.

They are happy to eat all the nutrients we provide but to pay the rent they make lots of holes and passages in the soil so we have soil full of air.

Flood and flush

The other part of Gbiota technology is flood and flush. Instead of applying the water from above, which reduces the air content and seals the surface, we apply the water, at least most of the water, from below and let wicking action take it up to near the surface so the plant roots can grow in Goldilocks moisture.

Let me talk you through the process.

We have a pipe going down into the soil. We could just use a small tube, and that is what I started with many years ago.

But as I was brought up to squeeze the most out of everything so I now use a large tube which I can fill with organic waste, so I call it a compost tube.

For those keen gardeners who understand that labile or fresh compost can be full of growth inhibitors, I should point out that this is separate from the soil in which I am growing plants.

For those of you who have read my article on how water moves through the soil, you will understand that to get bulk water movement you need to use the principle of hydraulic or pressure flow which inevitably means the soil will be saturated.

This pressure flow (I say pressure but it is only a few mm of head but still pressure) will force the water to flow over the base of the bed and being saturated some water will wick up towards the root zone and towards the surface.

Just what we want.

But after we have saturated the base of the bed we are left with all this saturated soil which is ideal for breeding all those nasty bad bugs.

In the Gbiota boxes, we have a swivel pipe while in the Gbiota beds a leaky dam so we can drain the water (or soil-blood).

This is the neat bit, as the water drains out it will suck air back into the soil, we are making the soil breathe. This is a core Gbiota technology.

You can hear the air being sucked back into the soil and for the benefit of any adolescent boys reading this, they may like to call this a reverse fart.

 

What to do with the left-overs

People who know me understand that I was a toddler in WW2 and was brought up not to waste anything.

I could not leave half a slice of toast without being told that I must eat it as there were starving children in Africa. When I asked very politely about the logistics of getting my half a slice of toast to the kids in Africa I was rewarded with less than polite thump to the ear.

How times have changed. But there is still a need for more change.

The idea that ‘greed is good’ has to go. It is absurd to have a society where billionaires are taking joy trips to space so they can see for themselves if the world is round or flat, executives of food companies fly around in private jets when people are having their legs chopped off from diabetes or living under railway bridges.

Things need to change – join the wonderful world of the Gbiota movement.

But back to leftovers.

Soil blood

What drains out from the swivel tube or leaky dam is not just water, it is full of nutrients and weird creatures. I look at them under my microscope and they make the monsters from Aliens look tame.

I call this soil-blood because it fulfils the same function as blood in us, transporting nutrients, air, weird creatures and microbes throughout the soil and into the plants and finally us.

This is just too valuable to waste.

But how best to use it?

The obvious way is to pour it back down the compost tube, but when?

As Jenny asks, will this go putrid if it is left for a week in the collection bottle?

In Bundaberg in summer almost certainly yes, but here is how to find out.

Safe or not?

I admit that I pour some soil-blood onto the plant leaves as this is another way the plants can absorb the beneficial microbes that we need.

I have some concerns about recommending this publicly so I leave it to people to decide for themselves. All I can say is I have been doing it for years without harm.

I have no desire to get sick from some weird disease so just before harvest I will stop using soil blood on the foliage and rinse the foliage with clean water instead.

Surface wetting

Another issue is that wicking works great in transferring water from wet areas to drier areas but there can be a problem in re-wetting the soil if it dries out completely.

To avoid this I will periodically wet the soil surface and often use soil blood for that.

Germination

However, the big problem with this subsurface irrigation is germination, the top surface is dry so seeds do not germinate without love and care.

I have tried many ways, including totally saturating the soil before seeding and applying the covering layer. That only needs to be done once but I find that saturating the soil and the following patting down tend to compact the soil when what we want is a very open soil with a large pore size.

I have now gone back to the old-fashioned way and just seed and cover with the top layer then gently apply water to just keep that top layer moist enough for germination.

A bit more work than ‘saturate and leave’ method but more reliable.

Radishes

Radishes must be the easiest plant to grow so it is with shame that I admit that they do not grow that well in normal Gbiota boxes.

They, and other root crops like beets, grow profusely with an immense display of foliage but the roots fail to swell as hoped for.

I think the problem is that the nutrient-rich soil and frequent use of soil-blood means there is just too much nutrient available for what is a tough plant that has evolved to flourish in tough conditions.

I now grow radishes and other root crops in their own box. I don’t use the soil-blood at all in these boxes instead using it in other boxes and use fresh water both in the compost tube and for surface wetting.

Designing the human body

I haven’t answered Jenny’s question about how long the soil blood can be left.

If you have ever looked in a mirror you may have noticed a lumpy thing sticking out from just above your mouth and wondered why it is there and not somewhere else more convenient.

It is called a nose but why put it there?

It has not evolved as a convenient thing to hold our glasses.

Let’s talk about the design of the human body. I am an engineer and the best design is always the simplest that will do the job.

We need to take in air and food so the simplest design would be to have a hole in the chest for taking in air and another hole to our belly just below – for shoveling in food.

Why go to all this bother of pipes and valves so air goes to the lungs and food to our stomach and why put the nose immediately above the mouth? It seems overly complex.

Evolution keeps on trying out different designs and keeps on increasing sophistication until it finds the simplest that works.

It did try a simpler version, and it did work, we call it a jellyfish, but I ask you, how many jellyfishes have won a Nobel prize? I can count them on the number of fingers growing out of my ears.

Neat design

This current design may seem overly complicated but it works.

Anything you put near your mouth is immediately inspected by your nose.

Any suspicious sign (smell) it hits that red button which is the alarm bell for your subconscious brain and in a fraction of a second (your subconscious brain works much faster than your conscious brain) it has sent out a OMG STOP signal so your arm screeches to a halt before that pongy thing enters your mouth, so possibly saving your life.

What I do

Now as I know nothing about growing food in Finland I can’t tell you what the safe time to leave soil-blood is but you can try what I do.

Gbiota is my job in life, I have over fifty experimental boxes trialing different techniques and plants so I am not too bothered about time.

I have come to an arrangement with my body that I use it as part of the experimental process and as part of the deal, I guarantee it a reserve stockpile of toilet paper, which fortunately is only needed occasionally.

I have trialed different schedules and plants.

I have found there is no problem with using the flood and flush system every day. It guarantees there is no stagnant soil-blood but it makes for a lot of extra work.

This may be unnecessary as I do not recommend flood and flushing every day but useful to know if problems occur (such as when you have been on holiday and on your return are greeted with a bit of a pong.

So Jenny the rule is simple, a big sniff – if pongy irrigate more frequently.

Gbiota beds – developed from Wicking Beds

Gbiota beds were developed from Wicking beds which have the big advantage that they can store a lot of water so you can go for a long time without irrigation.

But the whole point of Gbiota beds is to breed beneficial microbes – not save work and that means a bit more effort.

How often

I typically irrigate twice a week but if I have any suspicion that the soil mix is getting a bit overripe, (using my nose), I will run a flood and flush cycle.

I like everyone, go away for several days or even a couple of weeks and then I will revert to a Wicking Beds and leave the swivel tube in the up position.

It is not ideal but keeps the plants alive. But when I return I may give a few daily flushes to clean the system.

If I have any suspicions (eg a bit of pong) I am too mean to discard this suspect soil-blood so I just empty the container onto my lawn and later capture the nutrients in the grass cutting which are part of my Gbiota bed process.

I understand that it is easy to kill plants with too high a level of nutrients by reverse osmosis. This is easily detected ahead of time by excess green growth.

(How many times have I got all excited over an experiment with fantastic growth but come back one morning to find everything dead.)

This rarely happens but if it does I just use the soil blood on other boxes and just use water in the suspect box.

Different plants exude different sugars to attract different species of microbes so normally I use a wide spectrum of plants in one box. This is very practical using some slow and fast-growing plants which increases the time span that the box is producing.

(Link to ‘What to grow’)

So I still like to spread the soil blood among the boxes to introduce as wide a range of microbes as possible.

As I have mentioned some species, like the root crops, seem sensitive to over-nutrition so I may stop using the soil blood and use water.

I am sorry to my readers in Finland that I can not offer them any specific advice, but I am sure that in winter they will be growing indoors with plant lamps and they will soon find a schedule which works fine without getting a pongy mess.

Final word

So Jenny there is a very long answer to a very simple question. Keep the question coming they help make the total system better and don’t forget that this is a social benefit movement as well as growing a few veggies so help spread the word.

It is not a bad feeling that you have saved someone from having a foot chopped off from diabetes.