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In our germophobic society today, the role of soil microorganisms is often grossly misunderstood
-- to many of us, the only good bug is a dead bug. We join Dr. Kris Nichols in Mandan, North
Dakota to talk about why we need change our thinking.
We have this idea that microorganisms are bad. In reality most of the organisms in the
soil are beneficial. Most of the nematodes that are in the soil are not plant pathogenic.
Most of the nematodes that are in the soil are actually very good at helping with especially
nitrogen cycling because they consume a lot of bacteria and when they consume that bacteria
part of the waste they give off is higher in nitrogen so it actually is an important
role in the system when you have these levels of diversity of organisms.
When an organism becomes bad, it becomes bad because its population is out of control.
That diversity helps to keep populations in check so in a soil predator and prey relationships
are very important and every organism is either eating another organisms or being eaten. There
are types of fungi that actually will kill nematodes and you have fungi that actually
will kill micro-arthropods so even the smaller organisms are able to attack some of the larger
organisms and like I said then that keeps the diversity and the populations in check
so that you don't get a population out of control and it doesn't become bad, so its
really important for us to try and work on that level of diversity and a lot of things
that stimulate that level of diversity are the diversity in our crop rotations or diversity
above ground there is a lot of research that shows the diversity above ground is sort of
equated or even masked by diversity below ground so that diversity above ground what
it does is it provides different foods for different organisms because that organic matter
the materials that is inside the plant have different carbon and nitrogen ratios and because
there are different carbon and nitrogen ratios it's a different type of food. I sometimes
talk about you know if you do a single crop, a continuous crop its kind of like giving
the soil the donut diet cause your feeding it the same thing over and over and over again
and so the only organisms that are able to grow and re-populate are the same organisms
that are feeding off of them whereas when you have that diversity there are different
organisms that become players in the system.