Soil as Microbial Community
Carlos A. Postlethwaite – June 2022
There is no top or bottom of the food chain.
Food cycles in nature are large, messy interactions of who eats whom and how; and also of how everything flows back into a neat, harmonious, living spiral.
A food chain is only figuratively a ‘chain’. With different species being considered ‘links’ due to their role as predators or prey along a certain line.
In our conventional view, at the top of the food chain is the predator on whom no other predator preys. (That we structure things thus is surely evidence of how our anthropocentric biases get in the way of our scientific intentions.) Similarly, at the bottom of the food chain is the prey which preys on no other.
Any biology book will state that plants are ‘producers’ because “they make their own food”.
Being overly simplistic, we are talking about humans and plants: top and bottom, respectively. But let’s attempt to stay open in identifying a specific species for each of these links. We may want to consider other food chains, where, say a fox is at the ‘top’.
On any occasion, our conceptual food chain framework finds a limit when we realise that the soil eventually gobbles the top predator and any other link as well, be it predator or prey.
Still, this ‘predatory’ behaviour of soil should not convince us that we have now found the actual top of the food chain.
On one hand, seeds and plants ‘prey’ on the soil. So the soil is not free of predators. On another hand, if we zoom-in enough, we see that it is not the soil which does these jobs, but rather a thriving community of diverse and diminutive species made up of individual microorganisms that both gobble the uppermost echelons while feeding and nurturing the vegetation.
Science is constantly finding out that things are not as they seem. No matter how far we zoom-out or how near we zoom-in. Let me mention three lessons from what I have been saying under the thrust that things are not as they seem:
1)There are no predators without predators or prey without prey. All links are consumed by other living things for the continuity and enhancement of the food cycle.
2)Soil seems to be a diverse community of living microbes. (But once it seems to be such a community, we should realise that in time we will discover that it is different than what it now seems.)
3)No waste exists in the cycle, only material that may potentially contribute towards the health of further links and the cycle as a whole.
The healthiest of cycles optimally mixes, transforms and delivers each existing link as the ideal food and habitat for other links in the chain.
In the case of soil, this means providing a healthy medium for seed and plant. Which means providing an ideal population of beneficial microbes in a physico-chemical medium. Which is done by mixing different ‘links’ in order to have a mix of the optimal macronutrient ratio, with each part having the adequate particle size at the correct humidity, temperature, pH, aeration, etc., during a specific amount of time in presence of the appropriate actors during different phases. The production of an optimal medium can go wrong in many ways. But I’ll ignore that enormous tangent for the moment.
The time is now ripe to think differently about the food cycle. Specifically, we need to reconsider the relationship between plants and humans. We can now start to play a role in optimising our soils’ profiles by ensuring the presence of beneficial microbial communities that enhances plant health and growth.
This requires that we stop treating certain materials in the food chain as waste, and start to optimise their transformation into living mediums that enhance the health of not only the ensuing links in the food chain, but of the living cycle in its entirety.
