Question❓| Upskill 📚 | Information ℹ️ | Picture 📷 | Special Offer 🎁

Edition 23

👋 Hey TropicalBytes family, welcome to this week’s edition of Q.U.I.P.S.!

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In Today’s Email:

• Q: Why the Sudden Interest in Soil Health? 🤔

• U: Empowering the Macadamia Industry with The Integrator 📈

• I: The Who, What, Why, Where, and When of Soil Life 🪱

• P: Viewing Soil Extracts Under the Microscope 🔬

• S: Andermatt Madumbi Delivering the Goods 🎁

This Week's Q.U.I.P.S. is Brought to You by:

Andermatt Madumbi

Have you ever envisioned a future where agriculture isn't just sustainable, but also regenerative? 

A future where farms are powerhouses of health, productivity, and environmental harmony?

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• Revitalise Your Farm, Elevate Your Yield

  Discover the transformative power of Andermatt Madumbi's tailored Root Health Program. A meticulously crafted blend of four essential products designed to revitalise your soil, fostering robust root systems crucial for high-yield farms. Combine this with their Plant Vitality range, and you'll witness not just healthier plants, but a quantum leap in growth potential.

• Sustainable Protection, Naturally

  Bid farewell to conventional crop care. Andermatt Madumbi's unique, biology-based Crop Protection range harnesses the power of nature's own defenders - fungi, bacteria, viruses, and plant extracts - for eco-friendly, long-term crop care solutions. Protection meets sustainability in every application.

• Your Farm, Their Expertise

  With field experts across South Africa, Andermatt Madumbi delivers personalised, region-specific advice. It's not just guidance; it's a blueprint for world-class, sustainable farming practices tailored to your specific needs.

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The future of farming begins with a single step. Take yours today.

Now let’s dive into today’s piece 🤝

Question❓

Why the Sudden Interest in Soil Health?

In the intricate dance of life on Earth, six elemental players – Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Phosphorus and Sulfur – take center stage.

They come to life through a force know as biogeochemical cycling—Earth’s way of orchestrating the movement of these crucial elements through living beings, the air we breathe, the soil beneath our feet, and the waters that surround us. It’s a continuous rhythm, the lifeblood that sustains existence as we know it.

So, why does soil health matter?

It's not just a linchpin for our farming success; it's woven into the very fabric of life itself. Recognising this, we're urged to take a step back and uncover what’s really happening below the surface.

Why? 

So we can:

1. Leverage it to our advantage: allowing us to harness the full potential of our land for abundant yields.

2. Embrace a longer-term view of our planet: Beyond immediate gains, it’s an invitation to adopt sustainability. By tending to the soil, we nurture not just the present, but a future where our farm lands thrive for generations to come.

Beneath our feet, nature has has armed us with immense subterranean armies of soil organisms. These unsung heroes toil ceaselessly, breaking down organic matter like decaying plants, animals, and waste, enriching the soil's organic composition. This process feeds our precious plants. Yet, it’s a 2-way street; a complex symbiosis critical for recycling elements that are tied up in living tissues.

For instance, consider the pivotal role of nitrogen and phosphorus for plants, especially in agricultural soils. Microbes play matchmaker, converting nitrogen into plant-accessible forms like ammonium and nitrate. They also help plants in acquiring phosphorus by mineralising organic forms of phosphorus. Also, certain plants engage in a symbiotic relationship with fungi, called mycorrhizae. This extensive network of fungal hyphae extends far beyond the plant roots reach, helping it get nutrients such as phosphorus.

This intricate choreography with microbes is a timeless barter system—bringing food and water to plants in exchange for other food that is made by the plants. Plants direct well over 50% of the carbohydrates and thousands of other substances they make during photosynthesis into the soil as exudates (food) for the microbes. In return, microbes give plants the food they need, as well as protection from predators. These exudates are a crucial avenue through which plants contribute to the construction and building of a thriving soil ecosystem.

💡Food for thought: Considering all this, it's hard not to hear the echoes of opportunity ringing beneath our very feet. Our orchards and fields hold untapped potential, waiting to be unearthed by just understanding the intricate world below.

❓ What question(s) do you have this week? Tell us here

Upskill 📚

Empowering the Macadamia Industry with The Integrator 📈

In our quest to deliver unbiased, independent, and trustworthy insights into the Macadamia industry, we at TropicalBytes are committed to providing access to the knowledge and expertise every player needs.

That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce you to an industry-first tool and platform… The SAMAC Integrator!

Would you like to have a tool at your fingertips that can assist you to:

• Improve your yield?

• Reduce pest and disease impact?

• Increase kernel recovery rates?

• Improve style distribution?

• Obtain the highest yields at the lowest cost?

• Anticipate risks?

Well, the solution is here.

The Integrator is a powerhouse platform, where growers, specialists and other industry role players come together to share invaluable insights. It's about collective wisdom, all in one place.

As a community, we all stand to gain. By harnessing the power of data-capturing tools like this, we're not just farming smarter, we're farming better. We're talking about enhanced operations, increased yields, sustainable practices, and ultimately, greater profitability.

The Integrator is set to be the glue that ties it all together, to extract value for the farmer by:

• Identifying emerging trends

• Forecasting figures backed by real data

• Mitigating risks

• And establishing a blueprint for industry-wide best practices

So, do yourself and your farm a huge favour and equip yourself with the knowledge and resources you need to make better-informed decisions.

Sign up now for the SAMAC Integrator by clicking the button below 👇

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Information ℹ️

The Who, What, Why, Where, and When of Soil Life 🪱 

Last week, we took a zoomed out view of soil’s place in the cosmos, discovering that what we often think of as just sand and clay is actually part of a much grander system known as the pedosphere. This encompasses all life within the soil—the very stage we look to when assessing Soil Health.

🤓 For a quick recap, check out [QUIPS 22].

This week, we’re delving into the astonishingly intricate universe of the living inhabitants of soil life. Brace yourselves… it's even more complex than the bustling web of life we witness above the soil surface. 🤯

Picture a natural 'orchestra',… where a multitude of creatures (animals, birds and insects) work harmoniously, from composting the soil and pollinating plants, to spreading seeds, aerating the soil, and breaking down waste. The subsoil systems run similarly, but on a much more microscopic and complex scale.

In this section of QUIPS, we’re going to give our very best attempt to "scratch the surface" in understanding the who, what, why, where, and when of Soil Life…

But first, let's lay down some basic knowledge—something most of us had to learn in school. Oh and if you’re like us and have forgotten the detail or relevance; don’t worry, we got you 😉.

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Learning is a journey right?

From facts to knowledge, then on to understanding and, eventually, wisdom. Let’s start with a few facts and hopefully we’ll find our way to wisdom. 🤣 

To give us the best chance at that, let's kickstart this journey by exploring one of the three primary groups each week:

1. PRIMARY CONSUMERS / MICRO-ORGANISMS [bacteria, fungi, archaea, algae]

2. SECONDARY CONSUMERS / SOIL ANIMALS [protozoa (single-celled organisms), nematodes (tiny non-segmented worms), mites, springtails, spiders, insects, arthropods (invertebrates with segmented bodies)]

3. HIGHER LEVEL CONSUMERS [earthworms and other small creatures]

1.) PRIMARY CONSUMERS / MICRO-ORGANISMS

Ensuring a healthy population of microbes is crucial for soil health. As established under today’s QUIPS QUESTION, there's a valuable symbiosis between plants and microbes.

These microbes fall into three categories:

• Aerobic: They thrive in oxygen-rich environments. Most beneficial microbes belong to this group.

• Anaerobic: These die in the presence of gaseous oxygen, so they reside in oxygen-deprived areas, typically deeper in the soil. While they’re not inherently harmful themselves, their metabolic by-products include hydrogen sulphide and other substances, toxic to plants and other soil life.

• Facultative Anaerobes: They have the flexibility to switch their respiration mode based on the availability of oxygen. Both pathogenic (like the human pathogen E. coli) and beneficial microbes, like the yeast used in bread-making, fall into this group.

Now, what do these microbes need to thrive?

• Water: Some require more than others. Bacteria, for instance, thrive in a moist environment, while fungi can handle slightly drier conditions.

• Light: Some even engage in photosynthesize, much like plants. Each type functions optimally within its specific temperature range.

• Food: This comes in the form of plant exudates and soil organic matter.

📸 Photo credit: Mayne Nature Conservancy

The Magic of Mushrooms 🍄

In some forests, the total mass of fungi can actually outweigh that of the trees! Fungi provide many of the same services for plants as bacteria. They can range from single-celled (such as the yeast that makes your bread, yogurt, wine and beer), to complex organisms like mushrooms, which can consist of billions of cells.

While the mushroom itself is the visible fruiting body of the fungus, the majority of a fungus's biomass lies underground, winding through the soil in a network of thread-like structures called hyphae. These hyphae come together to form a mycelium, which can grow astonishing distances in a short period, even though it remains invisible to the naked eye.

Fungi possess a unique ability to break down complex organic materials, like lignin, which most other organisms struggle to digest.

How about this: They even have the capacity to extract minerals (such as phosphorus) from rocks that would otherwise remain inaccessible to other life forms until released by the action of fungi.

Some fungi form a special relationship with plants and actually attach themselves to the plant’s roots. Certain varieties even go right inside the root, and enter the plant’s cells. These fungi, called mycorrhizal fungi (where "myco" means fungus and "rhiza" means root), excel at harvesting and bringing minerals up to the plant, along with vital nutrients like nitrogen and water.

Much like bacteria, fungi receive carbohydrates from plants in exchange for their services, establishing a mutually beneficial partnership.

Growing a Forest? (Orchard) 🌳

In grasslands, the total biomass of bacteria is more than that of fungi or occasionally reaches a 1:1 ratio. In deciduous forests, by contrast, the fungi to bacteria ratio may be 10:1 or more. Understanding this microbial balance that; grassland soil is dominated by bacteria and forest soil is dominated by fungi, helps us comprehend why it isn’t always true that a field will eventually become a forest.

Until the soil community undergoes a shift, the plant community will remain unchanged.

💡 For orchard farmers, consider this valuable advice: “If you're dealing with a field that can’t seem to grow anything other than short grass, it may benefit from inoculation with the appropriate microbes to support taller grass or, ultimately, a forest ecosystem. There is little point in planting any trees until the correct soil food web has been established.”

Further to that, we found this very relevant:

• When applying mulch to the soil surface, particularly wood-based mulch, we promote more fungal growth.

• When we incorporate it into the soil, it promotes more bacterial dominance.

Tilling, on the other hand, severs fungal hyphae, resulting in bacterial-dominated soil. Trees, shrubs and perennials, including most fruit-bearing varieties, thrive in a fungal-dominated soil.

So, if we’re trying to establish a shrub garden or grow trees (orchard farming), leaving mulch on the surface makes practical sense.

📊 Special thanks to these resources:

1. www.nature.com

2. www.serc.carleton.edu

3. www.smilinggardener.com

4. www.hgic.clemson.edu

📝 Next week we dive into:

SECONDARY CONSUMERS / SOIL ANIMALS [protozoa (single-celled organisms), nematodes (tiny non-segmented worms), mites, springtails, spiders, insects, arthropods (invertebrates with segmented bodies)].

Picture 📷

Viewing Soil Extracts Under the Microscope 🔬

This week it’s a moving picture 😂 a.k.a. a video…

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Become a Q.U.I.P.S. partner and apply here

Special Offer 🎁

Andermatt Madumbi Delivering the Goods 🎁 

A big shoutout to our generous sponsor, Andermatt Madumbi, for the back-to-back giveaway! They're gifting you an exclusive Root Health Sample Pack at absolutely no cost! 🤝

Your pack includes:

• Eco-T®: A potent powder of Trichoderma asperellum, a fungi friend to your roots.

• RhizoVital® 42: A liquid blend of the powerhouse bacteria Bacillus amyloliquefaciens.

• V12 Initiate: Tailored nutrition for those crucial early growth phases.

• AgriSil K50®: A fully soluble, liquid formulation of potassium silicate.

These are the growth-promoting microbes and essential nutrients your trees will thank you for.

Don't miss out – claim yours today!

👉 Redeem with Promo Code: QUIPS092023 at www.andermatt.co.za and secure your FREE Root Health Sample Pack.

That’s a wrap folks! We hope you enjoyed this week’s QUIPS.

Happy farming, deep learning, and warm smiles.

We'll see you next week! 🌱

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