Monitoring your Soil Health with microBIOMETER®

Within the past decade, the agricultural community has been slowly inching away from conventional practices to more regenerative ones. Due to a long history of continuous physical and chemical disturbance to our soils, regenerating our soils is crucial. The knowledge surrounding regenerative agriculture has expanded and more farmers are realizing the benefits of changing practices - not only for their crop yield, but also for our environment. A major benefit to practicing more regenerative agriculture is the increase in the soil microbial community which leads to an increase the amount of carbon being stored in the soil. Having a diverse and healthy level of microbes in your soil improves plant immunity and growth, fixes nutrients, stores water more efficiently, and builds soil structure.

One up-and-coming method of monitoring soil biology is with the microBIOMETER®. The microBIOMETER® uses a two-part patented technology to determine the microbial biomass carbon and the fungal to bacterial ratio of soil, compost, and compost tea and extract. As soil microbes secrete a substance which binds them to non-living soil particles, microBIOMETER® has found a way to separate the microbes from these non-living soil particles, allowing users to extract and sample the separated, soil-colored microbes. The next part occurs in the smartphone application, which measures the size and color intensity of the microbes and outputs the percentage of fungi and bacteria in your soil and how much carbon is contained within those fungi and bacteria.

Goals

At Prolific Earth Sciences, our goal is to help farmers and growers understand and monitor their soil health better with a rapid, cost-effective test. The microBIOMETER® will help determine which practices are increasing the carbon in your soil and helping build a healthier soil. It allows anyone to test living soil on-site with results available in 20 minutes. The test is very easy to perform – regardless of your soil testing knowledge – and each individual test is about $13, with prices decreasing with bulk orders. In addition, once downloaded, our app is easily accessible in any part of the world, with no WiFi or internet needed to perform the test or access results. In the microBIOMETER® app, users can include additional soil property information to their samples, download all data from the Cloud Portal, and create projects and invite other members to access and contribute their test results to the project in the Project Management feature.