Reconstructing Agriculture

• All the components required for plants to grow are more than sufficiently abundant and free.

• Energy from the sun.

  • There is a direct and significant relationship between the amount of sunlight energy captured through photosynthesis and crop yield. Photosynthesis is the fundamental process by which plants convert light energy into chemical energy, which is stored in the form of carbohydrates and lipid fatty acids and used to fuel plant growth and development.

  • It is common knowledge that present day high input production systems do not photosynthesize at optimum capacity.

  • Regenerative agricultural principles correctly applied can improve the efficiency of photosynthesis.

• Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, CO2.

  • The atmospheric CO2 concentration is around 420 ppm which is 0.042% and considerably less than nitrogen and oxygen for instance. With the stomata found at the bottom of the leaf being the entry point for CO2 it could become limiting and the CO2 from a high respiring healthy soils can contribute to limit deficiencies here.

  • Carbon being the main building block of biomass must therefore not be limiting in any crop.

• Nitrogen from the atmosphere.

  • The atmosphere consists of 78% nitrogen gas (N2) which are 2 Nitrogen molecules held together with a triple bond, which is the strongest bond in chemistry terms.

  • There are more than 30 000 tons of nitrogen gas above every acre of soil.

  • Plants are not able to assimilate atmospheric nitrogen gas.

  • It is a stable inert gas and requires a lot of energy to separate the two molecules so it can become available to plants.

  • There are however two groups of soil bacteria; legume associated Rhizobia and a whole host of free living non mutualistic bacteria that can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it available to plants.

• Oxygen gas required by soil microbes is abundant at 21%.

• The soil is made up of 45% minerals, many of which are mineral nutrients required for plant growth. These minerals amount to 540 tons in every 12"-acre depth of soil.

  • Phosphorus measured to a depth from 68 farms in 7 USA states have an average of 1050 lbs.

  • Potassium 4315 lbs.

  • Calcium 6985 lbs.

  • Magnesium 5085 lbs.

  • Sulphur 425 lbs.

  • Just to name a few.

  • Going to a depth of 3 ft multiplies this number by 3.

• Water is not always in abundance but can be preserved in healthy soil.

 

Why are these freely provided essential mineral building blocks required by plants not available to high input conventionally grown crops?

​

Because the plant root association with the beneficial soil microbial communities that perform these “fetching” and other soil health maintenance tasks have been disrupted and replaced by chemicals.

At Reconstruct-AgTM   our objective is to restore these microbial associations. We assess the soil health state of the soil using the gap analyses method. This quantifies the damage or improvement effect on soil health caused by the present cropping system against a baseline natural non-cultivated soil.

We establish what the present microbial functional communities look like and identify the gaps in the system. We also look at the root Mycorrhizal colonization as well as Rhizophagy potential of the crops being grown.

With this information at hand, we have a much better understanding of how to improve and fill the gaps in the plant soil microbiological communities.