Greetings, cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here back with more grow cast blurring the line between microbe and man. Today we have Colin Bell back on the line. This man is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to microbes and how they interact with plants. And we go on a real deep dive, going deeper and deeper, following the iceberg of microbial interactions all the way down into the murky depths. I know you're gonna love this awesome exploration of an episode with Dr Colin Bell, but before we get into it with him, shout out to AC infinity. That's right. AC Infinity has been with us for a long time. Acinity.com, for all your growing needs, tents, lights, fans, the best in the game, and grow cast one five gets you the biggest savings there on the site, plus new to Amazon. If you use code growcast One five on your AC infinity Amazon order, you now get 10% off on Amazon. So they've raised that code a little bit. I think it used to be like 5% so if you prefer the Prime shipping. Go to amazon.com whatever AC infinity product you need, put it in your cart. Use code grow, cast one five, you'll get 10% off or go right to acinity.com use code grow, cast one five, and you still get free shipping on orders $99 or more. So like I said, grab a Grow Tent kit. There's no better place to just grab a complete kit. Their ion board lights are nice and affordable. Their ion bar lights are fantastic to use for flowering tents of all different sizes. Like I said, the best aeration in the game. Go check it out. Grow cast one five works on the website. Gives you 10% off on Amazon on all AC infinity products. Huge shout out to AC infinity. Thank you and thank you listeners for using our code. It helps us, it helps you, it helps them, and it's all@acfinity.com with code grow cast, one, five. All right, let's get into it with Colin Bell, thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners who are now 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 share this show with a friend, send grow cast to a grower, or turn a smoker on to grow it. That's the best way you can help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed. Go to growcast.com, the brand new website. There you'll find everything the show, the seeds, the membership, the events. It's all waiting for you. There. Special shout out to the members as they make this whole thing possible. Today, we are back on the line for a deep dive. This is going to be a microbial iceberg Deep Dive. I know you guys love these buzzwords. We're going very, very deep today, and with a guest that I've been excited to have back on the main program here, he joined us years ago now, came on the show, made huge waves, did an awesome episode, and then just recently, we caught up with him on the member show on grow cast TV, me and the members, got to meet with this individual and see what was going on after a couple of years working in microbial development and product development microbial research. It is none other than Colin Bell, formerly of mammoth microbes, now of meme Hort and so much more. Dr, Colin Bell, how are you doing? My friend, Jordan, it's
really great to hear your voice and to be back on the show. I'm doing wonderful. Thanks very much. And how are you, sir?
So, so good man. I just, I gotta give you props. Obviously, your first episode on grow cast was amazing, and then you came on for the member show, and you did another amazing microbial mind blowing knowledge bomb. But you also kind of just gave us a little bit of a little bit of backstory, man, a little bit of lore on what you've been up to and changing companies and all of this stuff going down. I don't know how much you want to talk about that and your story, but what have you been up to and what are you doing now? Well,
thanks and happy to kind of update you on my journey through life as we all have them, and I think they're all fascinating and fun, and that's what life is. Is a big journey. So, you know, listen, working with mem horticulture and building up this brand is something I'm very passionate about within the microbial and biological agriculture space. We have a ton of fun. It's a very small, bootstrap related company with great people and and really driven. And so, you know, part of the passion is bringing biology and natural tech solutions into agriculture, and this opportunity allows me to do it quite honestly, having a ton of fun with that, and with that, there's a lot of personal learning and growing. I've created a whole new platform of a personal growth and a spiritual growth for myself, along with my professional growth. And I'm really measuring this year, just to kind of get intimate with the audience for a minute, the metrics that matter in my life. And so there was goals that I shape in my professional life, in my personal life and my spiritual life, and I'm really adamantly treating my life as a business that's goals driven with strategies and tactics to achieve those. Yes. And I talked to my son often about this. In my family, my daughter about, you know, this, this spiritual, this mental and this physical, like trifecta that makes us whole as individuals and allows us to experience fulfillment and happiness and success. Now I've just come to believe that, you know, those, those tears in life should not be out of balance, and so I've redoubled my efforts to make sure that I'm honoring those different aspects of my life. And I'll tell you what, there's nothing more fun than kind of gamifying your life, which is what I do, and I measure these data, and I celebrate my success from fitness goals to doing things that think enhance me spiritually and then professionally, no shortage of opportunities to understand how to learn and grow and and develop new business strategies. The whole thing is just, you know, it Life can be so much fun if you create an environment and a game that that allows you to have fun. What
a way to open the show. I couldn't agree more. You know, crafting your life consciously. I think there's a lot of craziness in the world. There always has been, but if you focus in and you don't let those distractions spin you out, and you decide what you want and how you're going to get it, step A, B and C, man, start knocking those out. Start to get some momentum there. Colin, sounds like you got some momentum. Jordan,
you're absolutely right. And you know you and I were talking about focus before the show started. And what else do we really have in our control besides ourselves? There is so much craziness in the world. I mean, I have young children who spend more time than I care to then I care for them to about things out of their control. And it's very easy to get spun out on life and the world and all these things that are happening. But at the end of the day, we have us, and we have control of our choices, and if we can structure a plan that fulfills us as humans. I don't know if there's another way or another process that that that meets our needs as individuals any better.
This is, this is going to be a really impactful, deep episode, because this is a great way to start, and I agree. Man, I want to cap that off like this, which is, there's a lot of different ways to live life. There is no one right answer, but I will tell you this, in this crazy world, one super, super secret hack, shortcut, life hack, that you can install in your life to counteract all of that negativity, getting into the garden, getting your hands in the dirt, getting some microbes on your skin, and caring for a plant with the quiet hum of fans or maybe some birds if you're outdoors, something about growing and cultivating plants on this planet that is the cure for all that bad stuff we just mentioned. That is the one thing that I can unequivocally say, no matter what walk of life you come from, I really suggest you do this, because you need it. We all do.
Jordan, I don't know how that just made the listeners feel, but I'll tell you, as you were describing that so eloquently and articulately, I just had a sense of calm and peace and a little bit of tingling my arm come over me. And so, you know, sometimes there's just a universal truth. And I think you nailed it. Yeah, we click
on a lot of stuff we were talking before, before the show, but it all, it really does all come together, man. And if you want to break it down to a microbial world, you absolutely could, and that's what I wanted to do with this episode, is, you know, there's, there's a lot of content online that's like an iceberg. And basically what it shows is like, here's the base layer, what you know, what you see, and then one layer deeper, it kind of blows your mind, because there's all this deeper stuff that you didn't know was going on. And then you go even deeper, and there's an even faster it just gets bigger and bigger as you go down, right? So I wanted to create a microbial iceberg Deep Dive. Exactly the guy you want to do it with is Colin bell. And so what I'd love to do is start from the tippy top, do our best to summarize how we should be thinking about things from a 30,000 foot view tip of the iceberg, and then slowly work our way down into the dark, murky waters and get really esoteric with it. Does that sound good? Colin? That
sounds awesome. Let's start. So like I said, 30,000
foot view from the very top. I'm going to lay out some of these kind of thoughts. You go ahead and clarify, confirm or correct, please. You know, if there's something that you would like to expound on and change from what I say, please do. So the way I see it from the very tip of the iceberg, we've got microbes, these tiny living organisms, your bacterias, there's fun, guys, there's protozoas, and all the things that are just tiny living organisms living in the soil. Historically, throughout nature, throughout time, they've just been breaking down minerals in the soil, exchanging available minerals with plants. Right? The plants exude different things that the microbe wants. There's a little. Bit of an economy. There those things that the plant exudes, basically comes from the sun, energy from the sun, right? And then they have their little economy. The microbes break down the soil, and then the things in the soil, the mineral in the soil, and feed the plants, in exchange for these coins, these delicious, delicious coins. How should we be thinking about the general concept of microbes in nature and in our gardens here. Yeah,
so let us break it down from the iceberg of information, or knowledge. Our knowledge represents that iceberg. And I think that, you know, the iceberg is a really good visual, where that tip of the iceberg is all we can really see or understand with the current knowledge. And we're continuing to dive deeper in under the waves and and realize more and more about microbiome benefits and microbes in general. We've learned so much in the last 20 years, and the last 20 years has represented a mountain of information that we didn't know the prior 20 I remember the first time I was in an agriculture conference, and it was a soil ecology society, and the theme was, we're going to finally open up the black box that we call soil, because soil was treated like a constant in agriculture and agronomy, and we were going to open that up and start exploring the microbiome. And that was not that many years ago, and so just scratching the surface of considering soil and microbiome are constant to really understanding how it engages. And so absolutely positively, you want to look at this iceberg, and you think about how life started on Earth, billions of years ago. And this is from a geological data set. And so for what it's worth, this is the understanding. So we're talking about human information, or the human understanding and science of where life started on Earth, and it started at the cellular level, with bacteria specifically. And for billions of years, all there were was a microbial in a bacterial world, right? Ultimately, much, much later on the geologic time scale, fungi, and then relatively quickly after fungi plants evolved. And so why I'm sharing that geological time scale with you is that in all reality, we're living in a microbial world where bacteria and fungi are everywhere, not only in the soil, but in all our water sources and in the oceans. And if you think about maybe swimming in a pool or swimming in the ocean, well you're just surrounded by microbiological life, bacteria specifically and above ground, you can think about that in the same frame As we walk on land, we're surrounded in an ocean of above ground, microbe life, and it's invisible, and it's very unintuitive as humans not to be able to conceive or study what's invisible. And that's why, to a large degree, human science, because it's more intimate with humans and more relevant in many ways and plant science, because it's tangible and it's a macro organism, it can be touched, it can be observed without special equipment. That's why those studies are way more advanced than microbiology, because microbiology requires specific methodologies, techniques and tools and magnification, for lack of a better word, and genetic work to study. And so that's a lot more recent type of science work compared to the relatively older studies of plant genetics and all these details where and the human sciences and medicine, right? So you think about how we're living in a microbial world. And plants, as they evolved, grew up into a microbial life, into a microbial world where their roots were extending into soils that were literally teaming with microbes. Not to steal that term from Jeff Lowen fells book, you know, he did a great job on that book, and it's a great one, but plants have evolved with microbes since the very beginning of time, for the reasons that you kind of explained, they are very effective at facilitating certain needs for their growth, and they have utilized forever the other functions that microbes provide to help nourish them and complete and fulfill their nourishment. COVID So they can succeed. And biologically, this is, you know, prior to agriculture times, success in biology means passing your genome from one generation to the next, which means you have to mature and in the case of plants, in most cases, or plants, as an example, producing a seed which will then germinate into another offspring or another generation. And so microbes, forever in nature was the question have been facilitating functions of liberating nutrients that allow plants to take them up. But there's so much more that microbes actually do that we're starting to understand, because we're able to look a little deeper under the water at different layers or horizons of this iceberg, as you call it. Yeah,
that's just fantastic explanation. And I think really what's important to highlight there is how good these two different organisms are at working with each other because of the history that they've had with each other. So, so think of the human race and how we've gotten really good at building things. Like, think of how old we are. Think of how old architecture is, and then think about how far some man we've gotten good at building things in a short time. Now, think of how long microbes have worked with plants. Think about how good they've gotten at that relationship. So that makes sense, that it's like, you know, we showed up recently. We came at the end of the song. You know what? I mean, very, very important. So you talked about the way that these microbes essentially play and communicate. I don't want to use the wrong word here, but talk to me about microbial elicitors and how they can kind of elicit plants to do different things, sure,
absolutely, well, you know, you think about this relationship and functionally, we're just going to dive into for one second, what plants do, well is they're basically biological pumps. You know? They're charismatic carbon pumps, and there are charismatic water pumps. We used to say that in our microbiology lab back in graduate school, and sometimes we would tease the botanists and the horticultural so we were working with in that. But the truth is, how plants are able to nourish themselves is they're able to uptake or fix carbon dioxide, suck it in from the air, into their lease and take that into their body. And they do that through a process that all we know of is photosynthesis. And so the photosynthesis process is actually catching CO two from the air, and it's keeping those carbon molecules to allow the plant to start forming biomass below ground. The plants are actually pumping or drying up water, and in that water, there are either available nutrients or there or not, and that's partially where microbes come in to facilitate and charge the water column in the soils with nutrients, they're able to cycle nutrients producing enzymes chelating naturally trace metals and micronutrients that might be sorbed or basically biologically immobilized in the soil. And they do that through chemical reactions with sand, silt, clay, at variable levels and metals associated in the soil, and they can liberate those ions, which is basically, you know, nutrients, deliver those ions or nutrients into the water column, into the available water pool in the soil or substrate that the plants simply draw up effortlessly what they're doing anyway. So that's one of the major functions that microbes facilitate, especially in nature, and that's what they've been doing forever, saying that there's so many more chemical reactions or interactions that plants and microbes and life in general, facilitates at the end of the day, although we consider ourselves macro organisms as humans, there's macro organisms as plants as insects. It's driven by a chemical world. There's chemical stimuli, and the further back you go on the evolutionarily evolutionary chain to plants, fungi, bacteria, it's all driven by chemical signaling. So plants can't talk through hand gestures or through tonation or their voice or their facial expression, because they don't have those attributes, how they communicate with their environment, and how they sense the environment is through chemical stimuli. And so that happens in many different ways, but microbes do a wonderful job of actually. Are interacting chemically just naturally, how even their presence and absence and their activity will put off chemical signals that the plants are actually receiving, reading it like a book and with different chemical stimuli, the plants are able to physiologically respond to their environment as they're sensing it. We all know plants are very sensitive and aware of their environment. Well, how are they aware of it? They're aware of heat, they're aware of moisture and humidity. They're aware of sunlight. These are all abiotic stimuli. They're also very chemically sensitive and biologically sensitive, and so the plants are super intuitive within their environment, and the environment speaks to them, and they respond to that environment in a variety of ways. So no different than a plant sensing changes in temperature or changes in sunlight or intensity or changes in VPD or overall humidity. Plants are sensing the interactions of different microbial species and strains as those species and strains are interacting with the plant in the root zone, even above ground on the leaf, in STEM, depending on the type of microbe, and even Jordan intracellularly, as there are different groups of endophytic microbes that will actually grow and live inside the plant organism itself.
So that that is really interesting. It is basically their I like how you relate it to their senses as we have ours. You know, we like to think that, like you said, they can feel a breeze, they can feel a temperature. I've never really thought of microbial chemical exposure as also one of those feelings, one of those detector type feelings. Let's just move on to what you were just saying. You know, what really blew my mind is how I've always thought of these microbes as operating outside of the plant and trading with them. And the more that I speak to microbial experts such as yourself, there's all this wonderful research about microbes inside the plant, microbes even in the Trichome head. On one paper that I read for cannabis, totally I did not know that. I didn't know there was bacteria in a trichome head. It's got to play such a massive role. I'm sure of it. So talk to us about that. Talk to us about how the microbes are actually part of the being, and blurring this line between what is plan, what is micro? Yeah,
well, you know, for me, it's fascinating and really, really a fun area to to explore, but it's very intuitive. I've been doing this for a while now, and I remember the first time I saw one of my really favorite scientists, who was looking at the human microbiome as a major area of his study and his body of work, and will relate this to plants immediately. But the human microbiome has clearly shown that there's different communities of microbes that live on our skin, that live on our face, area, that live in our mouth, that live in our guts and through our digestive tract. And those microbial groups are different, and they all support functions across our body. And even more fascinatingly is if we have gaps or disruptions to that healthy microbiome in any area of our body, we typically have problems with our health or our immunity, and even some cases, to be fair, there's a lot of evidence that suggests disruption in our healthy microbiome as humans affects us psychologically and emotionally, which is just super deep. I mean, we're talking about multiple dimensions of fascinating in my humble opinion. So you think about the potential of microbes occupying all different pieces or parts of a plant, it makes perfect sense. I mean, honestly, I don't know how many of the listeners have heard of the concept of the endosymbiotic theory, but it's actually conceived, and we talked about bacteria being one of the first early organisms on Earth. Well, there's a lot of evidence that suggests chloroplasts, which are the cells of the organelles in plant cells that facilitate photosynthesis were at one point free living microbes, bacteria that formed into larger structures to help shape the evolution of that function, which is now an organelle within plants and implant cells, the chloroplasts, the carbon feed. Mixing unit that makes plants grow, that allows plants to grow. The same thing about mitochondria in cells, which is also in humans, there's really clear evidence that suggests multiple microbes bacteria came together to form larger organisms. And so if you think about that, and you can agree with those concepts, and there's tons of evidence that supports you, I mean, a ton. It's like, considered a theory, which, in in biology, is, you know, irrefutable. Basically, it makes sense that, you know, these microbes are coming together to help shape and support life. So there's a real bond between microbial life and all other forms of macro life, saying that there's chemical interactions that microbes facilitate on a regular basis, that we talked about the chemical signaling in a chemical world well, that induce plant responses. And so as microbes grow, they cannot help producing metabolites, secondary metabolites, and even chemical signals that are hormone analogs and even real hormones. And we know how these chemistries influence plant growth. Well, they're originated from bacteria and fungi,
right? And like you said about the importance of human health, I can't imagine that the rhizosphere doesn't play into the plant's health and the plant's mood. Grow. Cast membership makes cultivation fun and easy the way that it should be. Go to growcast.com/membership, and find us your new cultivation family. What are you waiting for? Come and join up. We have so much exciting stuff going on. Not only are we supporting our members every single day with accurate, fast, personalized garden advice, solving any problem you have, any infestation, any nutrient deficiency, any pathogen, don't go to Google. You're going to have a terrible time trying to get your internet advice from randos. You want to come to grow cast membership, where we solve problems in cannabis gardeners. Grows every single day. Plus we have a whole host of benefits, like members only live streams, where you can interact with me and the community members only discounts, where you can save bigger savings than anyone else in the entire cultivation world, things like 20% off hlG lighting, 35% off SD, micro soil, and so much more. It's all waiting for you at grow cast.com/membership, but best of all, you can plug into our positive and vibrant growing community. Our cannabis cultivation community is the most active, the most thriving and the most positive. Go ahead and plug in. Find some gromies in your area. Come start attending the meetups. It is so much fun to be a grow cast member, and now is the time to jump in Grow cast.com/membership go ahead and grab one. It'll be the best move you ever make as a cannabis cultivator. I will see you there. Everybody. Grow. Cast.com/membership, huge. Thank you to all the members for making this show possible and continuing our mission to overgrow the planet. Grow. Cast.com/membership, let me turn it one degree sideways, though, because this is all very eye opening and profound, but let's get greedy with it, and let's get personal with it. If microbes can elicit plant responses, how can we learn more about this subject and deepen our understanding so that we can elicit some of the desirable responses that we want? And I know I'm greedy. I'm joking about being greedy, but I do. I'm a big fan of the pursuit of the Botany of Desire. We've got specific goals here. Colin, is there any way that we can better understand the microbes and harness their power to elicit the plant responses that we are looking for? The good ones, you know, the aromatic compounds, the cannabinoids, the the delicious parts?
Yeah, that's right. You know, one of the beautiful things about what we're talking about here is, is the plant, especially the cannabis plant, expresses in such wonderful ways that a lot of other plants, we probably don't observe the expression, because there's not that desire at that human level, but cannabis plants are exceptionally responsive to some of these chemicals signaling some of these interactions between microbes, and I'll tell you, one of the new major areas of microbial application is in relation to systemic acquired responses and systemic immune responses, which are well known, but the application we're just on, you know, again, kind of opening up the black box of microbiome applications with real purpose and intention, instead of just observation. I'll give you some of my work. Real world examples of just working in greenhouses. Even back in the days with with mammoth microbe, we would have our own greenhouses, we spent quite a bit of money hiring guys just to grow and validate the effects of of different natural solutions, versus a completely only fertilizer program versus the fertilizer with some type of bio stimulant program. And this is completely repeatable, and I've seen it across the board. So just from a results driven point of view, you can take maybe a GH program. I'm just using that as a general example. Our team used some dry powder brands. They use, General Hydroponics. It's whatever we wanted to use as a base fertility program, which all plants need that I'm not saying that plants don't need that nutrition. They absolutely do, but to optimize that program, to express those phenotypic potentials that that you're referring to the quality, the flavonoid, the nose, the resin, all these things that make the plant great, the things that the qualities that they were bred for. Well, I've seen those almost completely disappear in just using a salt related program. And when you can add simple microbes, which we've done a bunch, it looks like, it smells like and it the experience is 100% different from just thick, dense, sticky, smelly flowers to something that literally smelled like hay or cut grass. To me, Jordan, it was the same exact cultivar in the same exact randomized tables in the same environment. And it was shocking to see that repeatedly, and I'd seen it repeatedly, and it's because plants sense that microbe environment, and to a large degree. And some of this, you know, it's hard to measure some of these direct modes of actions, but there's a lot of metabolites the microbes produce and some stimuli that induce responses systemically, or plants trigger their acquired responses just through a presence or absence. Right? For example, plants can sense chemistry of fungi. How do they do that? Well, there's chitin associated with fungal cell walls, and chitin has a particular chemical signal, and plants have a receptor for that chemical signal. And so it comes down to a real structure of being able to receive a quantifiable signal, but once plants receive that, they're able to genetically regulate some immune responses. And immune responses in this particular case can translate to increased terpene profiles, increased trichome production, increased resin production, all these details, which are the response to particular potential pressures, fungal pressures, or plant pressures, that the plant perceives it's experiencing in the environment. Are those, usually
in the form of like an enzyme, like in the case of chitin, is it some sort of enzyme that's given off or produced.
It's not an enzyme. It's actually a chemical species, a structural species with a carbon backbone. Like everything is, there are enzymes that break down chitin, called chitinase. You know the thing about chitin, and that's one example that a lot of it's used often in agriculture, you can find chitin in actually crab shell walls or shrimp shells. You can find it in insect cells and exoskeletons, and you can find it in fungal cell walls and so, especially in the case of insects and fungi, it's just a chemical constituent that helps make up that particular structure, it can be break broken down by enzymes. You know, I've done a lot of work on enzymes over the years as a research scientist. They actually created a pretty cool video publication on how to quantify enzymes. So it did a lot of work on it. Enzymes are proteins that break down in the environment, they'll actually break down substances from larger substances to smaller substances. They're really important for nutrient cycling and biodegradation, because the larger structures, chemically, macromolecules or chains, are harder for plants to take up, or harder to actually get broken down in the environment. But the enzymes are those little I call them little Pac Man because they just go around and they gobble things up, and they break a larger strand into into two smaller strands. And they'll do it again and again and again. And at some point, the smaller the molecule will get absorbed into the environment, typically through. Through plant uptake or or some other type of, uh, incorporation, you know, microbes take up things as well. And
that's really the deeper layer there, you know, at the top layer, there you have, you know, microbes are just these things that sit in the dirt and kind of feed the plants. Then you learn it's much more than that. They elicit all sorts of responses from the plants and communicate with the plants and dance with the plants. And then, if you even go deeper than that, as you said, they are part of the plant. They are freely uptaken, utilized within, spat back out every which way direction by the plant. And in fact, the plants themselves may have just evolved from collected
bacteria, microbes. So the deeper you go, the mercury it gets there, Colin. But I like it in a good way. It's very hard for me to separate a plant program and microbiology. I think of them as an integral kind of Yeah, I would, I would call it a program. You can't get away from microbes in the environment. No matter where you are, you can mitigate and have a very clean you think about I've seen some very wonderfully Clean Indoor, commercially run grow facilities, many of them, and as clean as you can get those facilities, there's always a microbial signal. It's impossible. There's no such thing as sterile anywhere in the world. You can put stuff in a high pressure system and sterilize, you know, certain things for a short period of time, until you take them out in the environment, and then there's the opportunity to get them re inoculated very quickly, depending on that type of material, microbes grow everywhere, on everything, all the time. And so, you know, we think about, I always think about the understanding of how this works allows us to kind of conceive how to work with what I would call the ultimate power of nature facilitates all the energy on Earth. You talk about the microbes being present and their cells, and they're taking in nutrition, and they're also exuding exudates and other things into their environment through their cell walls. They don't have mouths, just like plants, don't. They take things in through their cell membrane, and they spit things out from their cell membranes. They exude enzymes into the environment, which are these degraders? And they'll chop larger molecules up into smaller molecules and create alternative food sources and available food sources for plants and for themselves. They create all sorts of different chemical species that are used in a variety of ways. I mean, you think about, let's just take it back to the human example. You know, where did penicillin come from? That's an antibiotic that changed human health. Where'd it come from?
Isn't it a whole family of fungi, Penicillium or whatever. Yeah, it came from a fun
guy. Okay, cool. There you go. It was a fungi. It's penicillin, yeah? So it, that's what it that's what, that's where the name came from. And they had a contaminant. It grew on a particular media or a food source. They realized it was found by accident. The scientists that found it by accident was pasture, that's, you know, no, no microbes were growing, or containments were growing in this area where this one fungi was exuding this, this liquid substance, and it turns out to be one of the first antibiotics known to mankind that was used with intention and scaled with intention that changed the game for how humans lived their lives and could combat against, you know, pathogens of some nature and bacterial infections. And where else are there examples in every particular case? You know, before there was modern medicine, there was homeopathy, and a lot of that was focused around either Plant Therapy or some type of microbial therapy. The whole thing is just fascinating microbes. I thought about this one time, Jordan not to change the subject, but one of these days I want to farm that's nothing but microbes. And so if there's not a microbial process involved in it, I don't want to do it. And what, I started making a list. And there's too many things for a business to do if it's just microbial process. I mean, joking aside, there's, there's so many functions. You know, some of them are obviously scaled and and reproduce synthetically at today's day and age. But that all started with the understanding and the effects of living in this microbial world
and how much it dictates our lives, right? I guess that's the bottom of the iceberg. Is you listening to us right now, your ability to focus and your coherence and everything is reliant upon the trillions. Have they quantified how many gut bacteria are in the. The human biome,
yeah, but I don't actually know that number, but there's, like, thought to be over a 9 million. I believe that's the right terminology, way off a 9 million cells. I mean higher than
the number of cells in the body, right? There's more, more bacteria, if you count up, more bacteria than human cells. Yeah,
that's what I used to have, this t shirt. As any good microbiologist has a nice, witty microbiome t shirt, and it said, well, and all it said on the front of it was only 10% human. We think that we're 90% made of, actually, microbial cells. And you know, you think about a 9 million. We think that there's the world's covered with a million bacterial cells, which is so much energy for us. You think about a one with 30 zeros behind it. Jordan, think about that. And all those are powerhouses of energy flow. You know, how many other things can you count up that equate to a 9 million on Earth? I don't think there's anything that is so wild, so wild man.
We do live in a microbial world, and that's why I think we have an unfair rap in the cannabis game, specifically, and not just unfair, but it's very up and down depending on where you are, how different cultivators and how, more importantly, different regulators look at microbes, and what their opinion on microbes is, because, you know, there's strict testing in some of these states where they don't want hardly any of these total yeast and mold counts, total, This count, total, that count. And basically what's happening is people who grow in a very, very clean and healthy style, and the plants look great, and they're doing a living soil style, maybe they're using compost teas, they're dealing with some level of microbes around the flowers. I'm no doctor, but a lot of people would say this is healthy medicine that's popping hot. What do you think about regulations and some of these yeast and mold counts being low. Do you think that's a bad idea?
I think it's disconnected with the practical reality of any level of harm or risk for human health. I get it also, if there's regulators, and there was a lot of in trepidation of regulating cannabis for legal use, and I think that there was a lot of fear and irrationality around creating these laws, and it went overboard. And that happens when there's a risk line that regulators or bureaucrats want to stay very, very far away from they over regulate. And so I think it's a normal thing. I don't think it's rational. I think it just happens out of the out of the normal state of being as careful as possible. You know, we want to be mindful. I would say that if those regulations were in line with other agriculture crops. It wouldn't happen because regular farmers of most crops couldn't abide or pass the regulation criteria that cannabis farmers are exposed to at the moment. That's a good way to phrase it right there, and you're right. It's a hard sell to say, hey, lift the regulations on these products that are destined for patients, right? But at a certain point, I completely agree. You have to be realistic. You might be completely throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as they say. Well, yeah. And I think about, how was it like before regulation? And I'll tell you, I don't think there was any bad medical concerns without the regulation that there is, yep, in this bureaucratically driven, I'm not trying to be derogatory there, but there's a lot of bureaucracy in government, and that created these rules that are extending way beyond what I think are necessary to protect humans, to be honest with you, and human consumption, there aren't home growers that I know that have to abide by those standards, and they are just fine with the product, and in many cases, it's beautiful product. In the legacy market, there's never been that type of criteria, just the opposite, quite honestly. And there's never a concern of human health risk during those large time periods. And so I would like to see it normalize and correct at some point. It's once you're in the system like that. You know, this is a whole different type of challenge that the industry faces. Yeah,
and that's my biggest worry, is that they take this fight, this regulatory testing fight, to home grow. There was a bill proposed in Florida that has home grow on it now, finally, but it's one of the most ridiculous laws you've ever seen, and part of the. Law is that, as a home grower, you submit to a testing company coming into your home and into your grow to test it for health compliance. I really think that's a bizarre situation, like you said back in the day, I knew some real connoisseurs back in the day. And first of all, you can tell when you've grown homegrown, moldy products. It's not rocket science, but even if you want to go kind of deeper with testing, I knew people that would get a microscope back in the day and then microscope their product. I mean, it's not a it's not a chemical test, but I, like you said, I don't think there's any big difference between observing this product through his entire life and then inspecting it with a microscope. That's that's got to be considered due diligence. Now, yeah,
I mean, listen, if it works, it works. So it's say that it's about risk. It's not about reality. Of course, cultivators need to do the right thing. And just like anything else, I'm not gonna go buy let's just use a simple example. I'm not gonna go buy a block of cheese at the grocery store if I see it's covered in mold. But I'll tell you even that I see some cheese, and maybe this is a gross example. I know how mold interacts with cheese, and I know I can cut that slice off and there's so good cheese underneath it. I just understand that about cheese, and I've gone camping enough and actually made cheese, so I understand these things pretty well. Not that I'm condoning or that's the case for for cannabis, but the truth is, as a producer, you want to put product in the market that is high quality and sellable and creates and creates a good experience for your consumers, and for the most part, you're going to get that type of of mentality if you're going to stay in business, no matter what industry you're in. So I never had any horrible examples when I, you know, I grew up in West Texas, which was a very, very challenging environment for cultivators in the panhandle, whoo, you had to really be careful, and you could do some in some serious trouble. And so we were very discreet. It was great product. And we never thought twice about, you know, human health concerns. We were just grateful for being able to experience what we were.
Yeah, that's so true. And it was before a lot of, I don't know this is kind of dependent on who you were and where you were, but I feel like a lot of the old school, you know, growers that I knew or growing up, it was a lot more wild grow. They weren't spraying pesticides yet. It wasn't until I was kind of in the industry, when I learned what some of these nastier chemicals were that people were using, you know what I mean. So it's just really interesting keeping the microbes thriving and using them all in my garden, in the soil and all over the plants, because we do live in a microbial world. Colin, I think that's the best way to put it. And I'm sure we could do another entire episode on another entire iceberg. But please, no need to wrap just yet. Do you have any final thoughts on this idea of the relationship between microbes and plants?
Well, listen, it's just an ongoing phenomenon. I think this awareness and thinking about it perspective. Everyone has their own perspective. And as we get older, get more experience, as we get wiser, I mean, and gain more experience. We start looking through through life from a little bit of a different lens. My perspective really opened up in the study, in the journey of the understanding of microbiome and microbiology and full microbiology and ecology. And I'm realizing you know how life functions a lot more with the presence of microbes. And so, you know, honestly, you know, going back to the home grow and the legacy grow, everyone was using microbes at one form or another, if they knew it or not. You know, there was no understanding of differentiating. And this regulation, which is important to understand now that there's a criteria, microbiology criteria you have to mitigate that risk as a cultivator, but you're not getting away from it. So I'd say my perception now, and I still have a unique perspective. As a microbiologist, you can't separate any type of biology from microbiology, and so I think that's just the universal truth and understanding that will allow folks to understand where there's an opportunity To utilize the power of biology or microbiology to maximize, you know, these type of cultivation efforts. Let's talk about
that. Tell me about what you're doing right now. You're working with MIM hort. Are you doing any like research trials, or are you growing cannabis? What are we working on day to day?
Well, it's a Canadian based company, and there's a lot of efforts going on up there day to day. You know, honestly, as much of a passion I have as as a microbiologist, and years and years of experience in the lab as a research scientist, I kind of work on the science of sales now, to be honest with you, and focusing how to solve problems related to strategy and business strategy, which in some ways doesn't sound as exciting as biology, and in some ways it's not, but there's a lot of really interesting fulfillment I get out of piecing my expertise as a scientist together, with piecing, you know, business development, and working with teams and building teams out together, I'd say. And this is a side note. I'm in the middle of writing these books. I've always wanted to be the author of books. I've published many, many papers as a scientist. I always wanted to be an author of book. And so after co founding and building up a couple companies that I still do service work at Colorado State University, now I'm helping lead one of their startups, just as a part time service role as their CEO to help them get focused. Jordan, when I came in to work with them, there was no focus, no structure. There was enough understanding of how to select or identify their priorities and their goals. And so we've put in the very basic structure into that organization so we can focus everybody, and everyone's celebrating success now through activity driven process, and it's just been a joy to help lift people up and to help, you know, help people feel some success. And ultimately, one of the basic biological principles is structure equals function. Whether it comes to the human structure. Think about an arm, if it's broken, it doesn't work. Think about a plant, if the stem breaks, the function breaks the microbial cell, if it lysis, it doesn't work. The chemistry, as soon as the chemical bonds broken, denatures, and it does not become an active chemical. It just becomes a conglomeration of different ions that are in a different form. Right structure equals function. And so what I'm I'm putting together a little bit called the biology of a business, and it's really focused around the Principles of Structure equals function. And I went through a lot, a lot of understanding, in real world cases with mammoth microbes, in particular, how that learning process and where we did a good job with structure, and it led to good function, and we had some challenges with structure, and it just played out like you would expect, like clockwork. And I didn't really acknowledge it at the time, but in retrospect, it was this perfect type of of description where it is a biological organism. In my humble opinion, there's people and there's actual biology. A company is no more than a group of people working under some type of you know, structure. And a great company is that same group of people that are all focused the same way, on a specific goal, and they have a purpose within that organism or that organization to accomplish something to move forward. And so there's some very, very simple biological principles that were that I'm pursuing and kind of illustrating in this book, which is cool. And the second piece of that is the book too, and I'm kind of doing these simultaneously, is the science of sales, and it's the same type of of speak that you and I talked about, where focus is absolutely everything for success in our personal life and our professional life. And we can structure an outline that we can execute, evaluate, learn from adjust and repeat and over and over again. It's just the process of life. And so we're incorporating this process of life in a highly focused way into the sales structure. We did that at Mammoth it was just an incredible experience. And so, you know, that's a side note, but it's a lot of fun to work on these endeavors while I'm actually working and building and helping contribute to these other businesses. That's so cool.
You're writing some books. Man, there you go. Author, now. Author, Colin Bell, fantastic episode. Man, I just want to reiterate and kind of wrap it up back to the beginning, which is bringing back this idea of peace of mind and time in nature, and how all these things add up, just as microbes are part of us and the plant and part of everything, everything is part of everything, and sometimes in life, you just got to step outside in nature and get your hands in the dirt, be around plants, be around microbes. And no matter what your life goals are, that strategy is always worth a few minutes of your day. So, Colin, thank you. This was incredible. Where can people find you? Lastly, Instagram website, whatever you got, yeah,
so there's always MIM horticulture.com and that's memorticulture website on my Instagram account. Colin, W, Bell, C, O, L, I n, w. B, E, L, L, you can always find me there. You'll know it's me because I have posted the real Dr Colin, there has been a lot of impersonations over the years, but you'll see my picture there and it will say that. And there's only one real Dr Colin, it's me, and feel free to reach out to me anytime. I'm happy to respond.
All right, everybody, thank you for tuning in. Big thanks to Dr Colin Bell, that's all for now, and we're signing off. We're saying to you, be safe out there everybody, and never grow alone. That's our show. Thank you so much to Colin Bell. Thank you to all of you listeners, and a huge special thank you to the members. We just kicked off the grand fino hunt in membership. But you want to jump in either way, folks, even if you didn't line up your timing with the hunt, go to grow cast.com/membership and go ahead and grab one, because I'd love to see you in the community. We are having so so much fun about to do the cultivators cup. We got some new challenges on the way, some resources being cooked up. You don't want to miss it. Folks, huge thank you to the members. One more shout out to rooted leaf. That's right, the carbon based nutrients you don't need to pH, rootedleaf.com code, grow cast for 20% off if you're not completely satisfied with your current nutrient regimen, go ahead and get some rooted leaf. Use the medium feed chart that you find online. Water to run off every time. And don't pH, just start with nice filtered water. Mix it and feed. I promise you, you're gonna see incredible results. Rootedleaf.com code grow cast and stay tuned. We got some more episodes coming up with Nick, and a huge thank you to rooted leaf for sponsoring cultivators cup 2025 that's right, so Nick will be there at the Colt cup. You guys probably want to grab your tickets before they sell out. Grow cast.com/events. For that. That's April 12 here in Illinois, and until then, I'll see you around. See you at the next class. We got the autumn immersive this autumn, we got a breeder class coming up. Just stay tuned. Everybody get on the list@growcast.com so you don't miss anything. And until then, be well. Be safe. I hope you're doing amazing things in your garden. Bye, bye. Everybody see you next time you.
