Download Otter for your meeting notes

🔬Living Soil Secrets, Reframing the Soil Food Web, and Soil Microscopy, with Matt Powers | Otter.ai

🔬Living Soil Secrets, Reframing the Soil Food Web, and Soil Microscopy, with Matt Powers

Jordan River59min

Jordan River

00:00

Greetings growers worldwide. Jordan River here back with more grow cast powered by microbiology. Today we've got Matt powers on the line. That's right, we're talking living soil with Matt powers. We're going to talk about his new microscope. Course, he's got some books out. He loves talking about regenerative agriculture, fungi, bacteria, all the good stuff you're gonna love today's episode before we jump into it with our brand new guest, though, shout out to AC infinity. That's right. Acinity.com, code, growcast one fives gets you the biggest savings available on each product, including their grow kits. That's right, the grow kit has everything you need to get started, all packaged up into one nice kit. You get your tent, you get your light, you get your fans, pots, all the things that you need, except for some dirt and some seeds. And you can get growing or get that veg tent going. You know, if you're only running one tent, you need to get that veg tent going so that as soon as you harvest, you got some more plants ready to flip. That's gonna really do a number on your total yearly harvest and increase your production substantially. I highly recommend having multiple spaces, even if you just need a little two by two. Grab the cheapest kits around. Go to AC infinity.com. Use code grow. Cast one five. I love their fans. I love their tents. You will not go wrong. Plus, they got a bunch of other stuff. They got glasses for in your grow. They got twist ties and ratchet hangers, all sorts of cool stuff. It's all@acinity.com go and grab some gear. Treat yourself this holiday season and make sure to use grow, cast one five as your code. That is how you support the show, and you support our partners, and you support your own grow. So acinity.com code grow, cast one five, always. Thank you to everyone who supports us and uses our codes and thank you to AC infinity, Okay, everybody, let's get into it with Matt powers, thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners. You are listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today before we get started as always, I urge you to share this show. It's the best way you can help us out. Turn someone on to growing and turn someone on to grow cast. We're on Spotify. Give us a follow wherever you get your podcasts. We're there. Thank you for sharing growcast, everybody. And special, thank you to the members for supporting this show and making this possible. Today we have, oh, very special guest on the line. We're going to talk about soil. We're going to talk about microscopes and the soil food web and all that fun stuff that has to do with microbes and more. Today we have living soil expert, Matt powers on the line. What's up? Matt, how are you doing? Man, I'm doing awesome. Thank you for having me here. Yes. Thank you for being on the show. I appreciate you. You're busy. You're a busy, busy man. You're working on your regenerative conference. You're working on courses and books, and it's very, very exciting how deep you are into soil and the soil food web. For the listeners, though, who are just tuning in for the first time, can you give a little intro about yourself, how you got passionate about soil and the work that you're currently doing now?

Speaker 1

03:03

Well, I would say it started with me being a teacher. So I was a high school teacher, and I taught at a school where there was no books, so I had to create my own curriculum, and I became really and I was getting a master's degree at the time on educational psychology, and so I just got really keyed into this feedback loop of response and being a facilitator as a teacher, rather than like a dictator that a lot of people experience teachers being in public ed. And so I had like 150 kids, and I really thought of it as having 150 different preps. And so I figured out how to like dynamically respond. And so I also, in that process, became a curriculum creation expert. This was years ago, and I was doing permaculture in the background, and then I started mixing it with curriculum. And then I started realizing that there was nothing for kids, and I wrote the first permaculture curriculum for K through 12, for middle school and then high school, and had it all standard based so that it could be implemented. And then it was adopted and accredited, the first government accredited permaculture program for high schoolers ever in North America. They could actually get credit. That's amazing. So yeah, so I did all that, and then I started, just because I'm a teacher, I'm like, All right, well, what else do you guys, like, want me to do? Because, you know, I did all that. I wrote, like, a 400 plus page book on permaculture, iterated it out. And then I was like, should I do, like, another beginner's book, should I do just gardening? Should I do something with soil? Because the longest chapter in my last book was on soil. And everyone said, do soil. And I was like, Huh? I'm gonna have to learn chemistry. No. And it. Like, the greatest decision ever. You know when, when you have an opportunity, but it requires you to, like, face that, like, terrible weakness that you have in your past.

Jordan River

05:13

Yes, absolutely, dude, that's how you grow, right? Like you said, it's like, Oh God, I gotta learn this. But the obstacle is the way. That's the saying. So I imagine that you got into that side of it and then were you just like, off to the races, fell in love with it.

Speaker 1

05:26

It took me months to really crack that side of it and understand there's certain things that, for me, comprehension wise, that take longer than others. I mean, a lot of people will see my work. They see this finished product that I've taken, you know, sometimes a half a decade to, like, figure out, you know what I mean. And so I ended up making everything visual. I started walking through and figuring out step by step. And it was I was scared for part. I mean, I did the whole launch. The Kickstarter made over $80,000 it was this crazy, unbelievable moment I realized how much people needed this, wow. But then I wanted to fully connect everything, and so I I've gone from DNA to microscopy to epifluorescence microscopy, all an effort to serve my students at a higher and higher level, and it started with regenerative soil and it's I'm still in the midst of doing the rewards for Regenerative soil microscopy. So I'm very much. I make a deal with my students, and I honor that obligation, and I still I can't, kind of reshape the hat tune in different ways. I I still am, in many ways, that high school teacher that's helping people launch into the next phase of their lives, because I had those teenagers at the 16 year old, you know, they're the transition right? Get ready, get ready. And so that's what I'm doing, for everyone to go into the regenerative economy. That means all the different manifestations of that. And so that's why I do that conference our future every year, every January, to get people inspired and pumped. So I'm really just a teacher that's, that's that's highlighting all of these people doing great work, and then I've been called at this level to serve, and it's really been this an unbelievable blessing of unfolding things one after the other. I've had these discoveries that have just kind of fallen into my lap, because I approach things from a curriculum perspective, and I'm like, Well, what's what about this section? We have to do the chemistry. Let's go through it, you know, right? And mapping it out in a way that makes it so that it's tangible, to the micro, to the macro, to the hands on, to the action based and strategic. So you can schedule it out. Has been what I did always as a teacher, and it doesn't exist other than very niche applications, and usually it's so narrow, they don't tell you the why. They just tell you, this is what you're doing with your cannabis plant, or this is what you're doing with your corn and you do it then, and this is what you know. This is the amount. And no one really understands that. No one can respond dynamically. So I really want to empower people, give them the tools to form a first principle space, iterate out the whether whatever their entrepreneurship desires are, iterate out in response creatively to whatever they're facing with their soil or their plants or their homestead or the permaculture. It's really about giving people the tools to live that life that we know is possible. That's

Jordan River

08:44

amazing. Man, I love that the R Future Conference sounds awesome. That's the letter R future. I'm honored that you invited me to be a part of that. Man, that's really, really cool. So stay tuned, listeners for more about that. I'm interested in this microscopy course that you made a lot of living soil growers like to get their hands on a microscope and take a look at what's going on and find some nematodes and identify what's going on. How many protozoa they can get their hands on. Tell me about the creation of that, course, and what that was like, crafting that for living soil growers like myself. Yeah,

Speaker 1

09:18

I was talking yesterday to my or, yeah, no, the day before yesterday to my students, about how I had to accordion things. And let me explain. So when you accordion things, you you're taking the same structure and taking it out and bringing it back in, right? I did that with the structure of my tests. So I would do like 20 drops, and then view the 20 drops twice, and then do nine drops, and then and combine things at different levels, different numeracy to figure out what's actually effective for building understanding and. And also, what's a waste of time, right? And so there's so much wasted, like, almost like, like, monks or priests doing weird ritualistic things. We're doing stuff, and we're like, we have the number, the number, right? It's like, listen, it's a number that doesn't mean anything, but you're like, No, it's a sacred number. Back off. And so it's like, it's weird, because there is no true correlation with a lot of these numbers that we're generating. Because, and this is going to blow some people's minds. If you just take any soil and dissolve its structure into a certain amount, all the different structures of the soil that are possible are going to be variable. So let's say you take a one mL of soil, you pack it down so there's no air in it. Well, my compact soil is already compact Matt, so it doesn't do that. Oh, so how are we going to compare the numbers that we generate from your soil compared to my loamy chocolate cake soil that balls up into this tiny ball, because it's 50% air,

Processing audio...