Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success
pacifichorticulture.org113 points by mooreds 2 days ago
113 points by mooreds 2 days ago
For my work, I spent roughly a year studying the mechanism of roots, on and off. The different routes for nutrient and water uptake, transport, the different types of fungus, the differing ways plants interact with those fungi. And, of course, this is without going into the nematodes and how the plant attracts specific species by emitting tailored carbohydrate packets to both attract the nematodes and feed fungal growth right at the root surface. The very last piece is the ions put out by the roots to electrically attract specific elements, like potassium, nitrogen etc.
It takes hardly any artificial fertiliser (10g per sq meter) to eliminate beneficial fungus from the soil, at which point you are basically running an open air hydro system and have to artificially add nutrients and adjust pH. It takes upwards of 3-5 years to start getting proper results from organic farming methods when switching back and basically involves adding years of organic material to kickstart the organic cycle.
It is totally possible to get comparable results to fertiliser based farming when farming organically, you just need to focus on 'growing' the soil, not just providing nutrient to the plants. In my opinion the former is farming, the latter is hydroponic production. Both have their benefits, it's just that one leaves behind barren soil and the other enriches the soil and is part of a natural cycle that leaves the soil exceptionally fertile.
The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) sells little packets of mycorrhizal powder that you can put into your garden if you feel it is lacking beneficial fungi. Another more natural route is to bury a kilo of cooked white rice near a very healthy tree, where the soil is soft and 'healthy' then retrieve it after a week. It will be mouldy, but with the right type of mould. Mix that into compost, grow tomatoes in that compost, then when they are finished, chop up their roots, mix it into the compost again, add fresh compost from your compost bin to make seed compost. Mix that seed compost into whatever you want to 'infect'. Some people grow just the fungus using sprouted barley and add the mouldy sprouted barley to their compost.
Organic grown food is more nutritious and I'm glad we have a significant percentage of farms who have gone organic, but the yield gap is very well documented. Organic fertilizers release nutrients slowly and unpredictably and can't match artificial nitrogen for plant uptake.
E.g. a 25% average yield penalty in this meta-analysis:
Alvarez, R. (2022) ‘Comparing Productivity of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems: A Quantitative Review’, Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science, 68(14), pp. 1947–1958. doi: 10.1080/03650340.2021.1946040.
I studied the productivity benefits of adding beneficial fungi as part of my master's thesis. On average they provide a yield benefit, but it's not ubiquitous and they're far more likely to work in arid and semi-arid soils that have poor microbial diversity in their baseline. They don't tend to be as effective in temperate soils - partly because they have to compete with existing soil microbes.
Fairly old news at this point.
A bit more difficult is growing edible mushrooms along with the plants, for example Boletus edulis, which are symbiotic with oaks and other trees.
The difficulty lies in the waiting period, it can easily take years before any fruiting bodies appear.
I grow rare cactus and succulents and after experimenting with Mycorrhizal inoculants I’m completely blown away with results I’ve seen. Even with soil that dries out completely between water (for extended periods of time) they still work their magic wonderfully and I see wonderful growth and survival with the roots showing the fungi growth as shown and described in this article.
Where do you get your inoculants / which do you get? I'm a mere dabbler in growing cactuses, but very curious to hear what worked for you
The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) sells little packets of mycorrhizal powder that you can put into your garden if you feel it is lacking beneficial fungi. Another more natural route is to bury a kilo of cooked white rice near a very healthy tree, where the soil is soft and 'healthy' then retrieve it after a week. It will be mouldy, but with the right type of mould. Mix that into compost, grow tomatoes in that compost, then when they are finished, chop up their roots, mix it into the compost again, add fresh compost from your compost bin to make seed compost. Mix that seed compost into whatever you want to 'infect'. Some people grow just the fungus using sprouted barley and add the mouldy sprouted barley to their compost.
An old gardeners trick when planting a tree is to go into a forest and grab a few shovel fulls of “forest floor dirt” and add that to the hole you dug for the tree. This provides that good fungi to help the roots establish. Same idea, though the practice is centuries old. Someday we will learn the lessons of our ancestors
I currently use a product called MYCO+ but I’m always looking for potential other options. From what I’ve read and researched Glomus and Trichoderma strains are the most beneficial and found to populate within cactus and succulents environments. Contrary to some opinion/online advice , the bacteria can remain healthy even in a dry environment for extended periods of time. Also, if your interested in growing welwitschia mirabilis (a prized collectors plant) I have found it to be astoundingly helpful in helping them thrive (don’t ever let these plants dry out though).
If you haven’t read Entangled Life: How Fungi Shape Our World, I can’t recommend it enough.
Couldn’t agree more. And for what it’s worth, its aptly-named author Merlin Sheldrake is an absolutely charming human too. As quirky iconoclastic woodland enthusiasts go.
For a taste, Joanna Steinhardt for the LA Review:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-mycophiles-plea-on-m...
I suspect some folks here might also appreciate his early-career (2011) musical collaboration with brother Cosmo Sheldrake and friends, as the Gentle Mystics:
As someone who's read a lot of pop sci on this topic as well as published research I went into this book expecting the tropes I've become very familiar with. Merlin Sheldrake actually brought some refreshing and unique takes and I walked away actually learning some new things. It's become my goto introductory book to get people interested in the world of fungi
I have added spores to my garden for a few years, & the results have been excellent. Not only have the plants thrived, the network spread through the lawn to a further extent every year, & the grass in that zone looks much healthier than the rest of the lawn. Mostly I sprinkle a bit in with each seed or row — it does the work from that point on.
Trees have shown the same pattern — we had a large, older tree go down, one which had quite a bit of fungus growing around it, & the trees planted near the old site did well while new trees on the other side of the yard did not, even with significant, regular watering.
Do you mind sharing which product you use? Every time I look into this I have a hard time telling which products contain useful amounts of good strains.
The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) sells little packets of mycorrhizal powder that you can put into your garden if you feel it is lacking beneficial fungi. Another more natural route is to bury a kilo of cooked white rice near a very healthy tree, where the soil is soft and 'healthy' then retrieve it after a week. It will be mouldy, but with the right type of mould. Mix that into compost, grow tomatoes in that compost, then when they are finished, chop up their roots, mix it into the compost again, add fresh compost from your compost bin to make seed compost. Mix that seed compost into whatever you want to 'infect'. Some people grow just the fungus using sprouted barley and add the mouldy sprouted barley to their compost.
fwiw I got one of the first products listed on amazon when you search mycorrhizal fungi and I'm seeing the same effects stated by the grandparent comment
Although mycorrhizal fungi have their place in plant ecosystems, in commercial horticultural production their benefit is typically outweighed by fertilizers, which result in considerably faster growth and crop cycles. We have trialed and encountered significant results with other "natural" products, such as harpin proteins for ~20% increased plant growth, entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana for insect pest control, and Prestop (Lalstop G46) Gliocladium catenulatum (Strain J1446) for preventing pathogenic root fungus.
Note that fertilizer applications are not synergistic with mycorrhizal fungi, fertilizer applications typically prevent the benefits of mycorrhizal fungi, plants no longer need to rely on mycorrhizal fungi for nutrients. I have noticed an "explosion" of fertilizer and supposedly growth enhancing products touting their microbial benefits with labels that show long lists of various beneficial microorganisms, but it's mostly just marketing hype.
Regenerative agriculture advocates would argue that cultivating a permanent mycorrhizal fungi ecosystem in fields will lead to longer term yields and few if any inputs in the end. Adding a fungal product into a system that wasn't already conducive to natural growth seems like a recipe for minimal benefit.
For anyone not familiar, look up Gabe Brown's talks on growing soil.
It is extremely early days for these offerings. Synthetic ferts are a relatively mature technique and the related product offerings (which are now effectively commoditized) had state-subsidized R&D for several decades. Mycorrhizal inputs have had a hundredth of the R&D and only been used commercially for a few years at best.
Its not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing PDAs to desktop computers in 1991, and surmising that mobile devices are just marketing hype.
I like how Ohio state university created a shiitake mushroom memristor. Fungi are fascinating
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Sounds like communism to me.
It's more like the free market, but with all of the market failures, parasites and bad actors that implies too
I wouldn't say that. There's plenty of behaviors where plants and fungi act in the interest of the community as a whole. Mature forests are made of late-successional species. These species could only possibly grow after earlier succession species had "prepped the soil" (nurtured the soil ecology, transitioned the nitrogen cycle from ammonia to nitrates, etc) and provided shade to allow them to grow. Since these trees are dependent on the well being of so many other species there is plenty of incentive for them to act in ways that we might call "selfless"
I think it would be be more illuminating to call it "enlightened self-interest".
Which is a far cry away from the “free market” we see in the west.
Wild how I got downvoted for stating a pretty obvious fact. Long term planning and self sacrifice in the interest of long term community benefit which transfers to one’s future self / progeny is actually very similar to communism.
Fuck me I guess