2022 Things To Come: The Fungal Focus Research Garden

I spent most of my twenties travelling the country working on vegetable farms. It was the time of my life, really- life was off its leash and unfettered by expectation. I met some amazing people and felt a sense of purpose that I hadn’t experienced prior to connecting with the land.

As time went by, I started to notice that farmers struggle with the same problems year after year. Every year the beets get leaf miner. Every year the squash plants succumb to powdery mildew. Every year the bok choi is chowed down overnight by flea beetles. Every single year. Are these facts of life or was I missing something?

As I was observing these things, I also started wondering how it could be that forests were able to sustain massive amounts of life without fertilizers, herbicides, tilling, etc. Why did it take more time, attention, and money to grow a corn stalk than a fir tree? I had a lot more questions than answers. I still do!

I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it until I started studying fungi in 2016.  Then things started coming together. Forests have functioning ecological systems. In fact, the more we intervene in a forest ecosystem, the worse off it is. Much of this self-sustaining work is performed by fungi.

Many of the methods that we use in modern farming are detrimental to fungi, and we end up unintentionally doing a secondary cascade of negative things to try to compensate for the lack of fungi in our agricultural soils. Let’s look at tilling as an example.

We typically till to “aerate” the soil or to clear weeds. While tilling can give the visual appearance of nice fluffy soil, it actually causes a compaction layer at the depth of the till. If you till six inches down, you will get a compaction layer at 6 inches. This means your next till will have to be eight inches to a foot. Essentially you will be in a perpetual state of trying to outrun the compaction layer you are creating.

Compaction layers prevent plants from growing long roots, which limits their access to water and nutrients. It also creates anaerobic (lacking oxygen) conditions which favor microbiology that will select for weeds and poor soil structure.

Tilling also kills fungi and plants, leaving only bacteria in the soil. This means that there’s not enough microbiology left in the soil to create structure and retain nutrients for our crops. So what do we do? We till again to “create structure” and clear weeds.

Without fungi, the nutrient cycle screeches to a halt. Now what? We add inorganic fertilizers to feed our plants. These are often mined through harmful processes and are poorly retained in agricultural soils that lack proper soil structure. This results in immense greenhouse gas offput and nitrogen leaching. What do we do when our nitrogen leaches? We add more fertilizer. It never ends.

Only when we begin to understand soil biology and the important roles that fungi play can we break this cycle. Fungi create soil structure by producing glomalin, which binds together microaggregates to create macroaggregates- this is what creates soil tilth. Fungi break down minerals from parent material and deliver them to the plant. Fungi retain carbon. Fungi are a key component of what allows forests to exist for millennia without needing to run to the garden center for fertilizer.

Every farmer I’ve ever worked with had the intention of mindfully and responsibly stewarding the land. We love what we do and we commit our blood, sweat, and tears to making it happen. But many of us- myself included- were missing such a huge piece of the puzzle. This is a testament to how overlooked fungi have been historically.  

The good news is, what we know about fungi now has a huge potential for changing the way that we farm and for mitigating- if not reversing- the environmental damages that have been done. We have more information available to us than ever before, and we are continuing to learn more and more about soil ecosystems and the fungal roles within them.

As Fungal Focus evolves, we will be allocating more of our resources toward understanding and working with soil fungi to grow better yields, more resilient crops, and to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. 2022 will be the first year of the Fungal Focus Research Garden, where we will test different methods of inoculating soil with beneficial fungi.

Our goal is to create easily repeatable methods of working with fungi specific to Utah. We want to provide farmers with fungal tools for preventing leaf miner, warding off powdery mildew, and telling the flea beetles to get lost! We want to create soil that can withstand drought conditions by growing plants that have deep roots with wide access to beautiful, aerobic soil.

We anticipate many challenges but cannot wait to get our hands back in the dirt!