Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
196 Toby Kiers, the Jane Goodall of fungi and mycorrhizal networks on being an underground astronaut
Toby Kiers, Executive Director & Chief Scientist at SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) shares about their research into the mycorrhiza network, mapping biodiversity, DNA sequences of mycorrhizal fungi and a lot more about the wonderful world under our feet.
She is the Jane Goodall of fungi (according to the words of previous guest Rose Marcario, former CEO of Patagonia).
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Welcome on board on this spaceship which actually won't take you up to space but to the magical world underneath our feet. Everything, literally everything starts with the relationship between fungus and plants and thus mycorrhizal networks and we hardly ever talk about them. Earth wouldn't have been colonized, bad word I know, by plants without their little helpers, fungi. So what does it mean for farmers and investors and why is this exciting now? Joining us today is the Jane Goodall of fungi. Not my words, but of a previous guest, Rose. So take a seat, take a cup of coffee and enjoy this ride. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume. And it's that we as investors, big and small, and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community. And so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you, and if you have the means, and only if you have the means, consider joining us. Find out more on gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. That is gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. Or find the link below. Welcome to another episode, Today with Toby Keers. We're going to go deep, very deep, in mycelium, fungi, and the wonderful world, literally underground. I'm so happy to do this in person. You might hear some interesting background noise. We're in a bit of an echoey room, but I'm very happy to do this in person and to go digging. Welcome to the podcast, Toby.
SPEAKER_01:It's wonderful to be here. Thanks,
SPEAKER_00:Koen. So nice that you can join us in person because I know you're traveling a lot. Just to kick it off, let's start with what is SPUN and then let's see how you rolled into that space or what led you to this wonderful network you're building and the research you're doing. But it's been relatively recent, so what led you to the wonderful world under our feet?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so SPUN stands for the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks. This
SPEAKER_00:has nothing to do with pipes and boring company and subway systems.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. When we talk about networks, we mean mycorrhizal networks. So mycorrhizal networks are a type of symbiotic fungi that colonize roots of the majority of plant species on Earth. So between 70 and 90% of plant species are colonized by these mycorrhizal fungi. And we founded SPUN as a science initiative to map the biodiversity of the Earth's mycorrhizal networks and advocate for their protection. So the society is a organization organization of scientists, but also local collaborators all around the world that is interested in understanding the underground systems that I think have been largely neglected up to now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because when you say mapping, it suggests that it's not been mapped before, because otherwise why would you do that? Is that really that mapping, and we can talk about the colonization term as well there, but like the first maps we Western people started making about the world and when we started sailing like is that the stage we're in like we really we know stuff is out there but we don't really know the size or what it does or how far it goes and if it's flat or can we go around if there's another continent somewhere like what is the current status of this research and like how much did we map already or how much do we still need to map
SPEAKER_01:yeah all good questions so right now we are working on mapping the biodiversity so really trying to understand the sequences, the DNA sequences of mycorrhizal fungi and how these communities differ across all the different ecosystems of the world. So everything from pristine forests, which I think a lot of people associate with mycorrhizal fungi, but also ecosystems that I think would surprise you, desert ecosystems, dryland ecosystems, places where you don't normally think of fungi, and pristine habitats, but also managed ecosystems ecosystem. So we're really interested in mycorrhizal communities in agricultural systems, in forestry systems, trying to get baseline understanding of who is there and what they're doing. And so right now we're working very closely with two organizations, Global Fungi and the Crowther Lab, which is at ETH Zurich, to make the first high resolution predictions of biodiversity underground for these microisland networks. So right now we're working with about 10,000 samples of DNA sequences from all around the world. And we use machine learning algorithms, which allow us to add in different ecosystem changes in the habitat. For example, how the habitats are different on different places on Earth. If you put those maps, all of these layers of environmental data together with the samples that have been taken, we can start making predictions predictions about what these underground systems look like. So that's where we are right now is sort of building the first, what we call V1, version one of these biodiversity maps for the Earth.
SPEAKER_00:And that would allow you to not necessarily have to sample everywhere. Basically, if you do enough samples, you can start predicting and then of course you start checking, which means the machine learning gets better and better. And over time, you might not have to sample everywhere. You can put in a certain spot in a certain ecosystem in a certain status of the managed forest or the wild forest or the managed land, and you would sort of safely assume what is happening underground, what is living and what they're doing underground. That would save a lot of time from sampling every single field you can possibly imagine.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly, exactly. So it's a really iterative process. And the machine learning predictions get better and better the more data that we feed into the predictions. But you also mentioned something really important, and that's this idea of uncertainty. So how certain are we of our predictions on every pixel on Earth? So there's about 150 million pixels of Earth. And for each one of those, we might have a biodiversity prediction for these mycorrhizal networks. What we also want to do is get an uncertainty prediction, which tells us, OK, how confident are we in this prediction for every pixel on Earth? So one of the things that we do at Spun is we have these expeditions where we go out and try to ground truth our machine learning algorithms. algorithms. So that means actually going to a physical place on Earth and testing, extracting, taking a soil sample, extracting the fungal DNA, and then looking at the community profiling and say, okay, does this match our predictions or not? And that's what's exciting is whenever you go out and sample, you're ground-truthing predictions made by these computer algorithms and trying to figure out, okay, well, how close are we getting? How can these data be refined? How can the predictions be refined? And ultimately, we want to be able to use these predictions in, let's say, conservation agendas to say, okay, this is a biodiversity hotspot. This is a place on Earth that has very unique fungal communities. This is a place that we should prioritize in terms of conservation.
SPEAKER_00:And just as an example, how does it work? Where have you been recently that you can talk about, obviously, and how does an expedition like that work? Do you take a shovel? There's an amazing video, by the way, following you which I will definitely put in the show notes below but how does that practically and take us on a trip visually obviously as we're in an audio format what should we imagine on a fungi research trip or collection
SPEAKER_01:trip everyone is very different I can tell you about the two most recent ones so last April we traveled to Chile and we were working with Juliana Forci who's the foundress of the Fungi Foundation and Merlin Sheldra and his brother Cosmo Sheldrake to go and explore some of these ecosystems in northern Patagonia. And when you go on one of these expeditions, the equipment that you need is not so intense. I mean, usually what we're really relying on is a soil core and a mallet. Those are very important, probably the most basic pieces of equipment you need. And a GPS device, because every sample we take has to be geolocated, obviously, so that we can coordinate it with where we are exactly on Earth, what pixel that we're actually testing. And then you go out and you make a grid with a tape measure, a 30 by 30 grid, 30 meter by 30 meter. And in that grid, you have nine points where you're extracting soils. You take the mallet and you dig down with the core. And you pool all of those nine points into one sample, mix the sample very well, and then take a tiny bit a tiny bit of that, about 30 to 40 mils, and you put it in what we call a falcon tube with some silica gel to keep it dry, and that's your sample of the Earth. And it really depends where you are on an expedition because we work with local researchers in every country where we go to ground truth these predictions, and these researchers may have different questions that they want to ask or data that they want to gather or even rituals, for example, In Chile, it was suggested that we do some offering every time we take a soil sample. And music was suggested that we make an offering of music. And so there we are out in the woods, in the middle of the woods, sampling soil for this scientific expedition. And Cosmo Sheldrake had a little penny whistle, and he would play that before we would sample the soil. So it really differs where we are on Earth. But we collect these samples. I think the... The thing that people don't really understand is that because we're following a GPS device to ground truth these predictions, you can go places where there's no paths. And the computer, this algorithm can take you to some ecosystems and to some places that you would never normally go on your own. So we would try to get to a certain habitat, let's say a location that we really wanted to sample, and there would be a waterfall in our way, or a bridge that had fallen down, or all kinds of things that sort of prevent you from going exactly to the pixel of Earth that you want to get to. So that makes it fun, but it also makes it really challenging because you're not just driving along a road and taking soil samples. You're going pretty deep into nature.
SPEAKER_00:And the other one you said too recently.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so this summer we also did a really wonderful expedition in Italy in the Appennini and the Apuani and parts of the Alps. And there we're really interested in trying to understand what's happening to soil systems under these extreme droughts that Europe is facing now. I think in Italy, it's the worst drought this summer that they've had in 70 years. So extremely, extremely low water and fires. So one of the places that we were sampling was actually had burned just two days before and the wood was still smoldering. It was still quite an intense place to go to sample for soil fungi.
SPEAKER_00:Were they still alive? Were they, I mean... they manage through a fire or how does it work?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's the idea. So we go and we sample the soil and we see which of the fungi, the DNA has not been denatured. That's a big word for the DNA breaking apart. But we're trying to see how down, how low in the soil are the fungi and are they able to survive these forest fires. And then the idea obviously is to come back in a year or two and see what communities recover. So that was, you know, we hadn't planned on sampling the forest fires fire before we left for Italy. Our plan was to go and look at even just the grasslands to try to understand the drought that had been affecting the grasslands. But as soon as we saw we had this opportunity to sample right after a fire, then we took it. And now we're going to follow up. So this is a collaboration with scientists at University of Torino. And so they'll be able to go back and sample as well. But people are even, I think, you know, people in the ag space are interested in well, and interested as well in trying to understand, okay, yeah, what fungi are very good at helping plants survive these extreme droughts, right? And so to go into some of these untouched grasslands in the high Apennini, you can start to get at that question. Okay, what are the fungal communities that are able to support plants during really extreme water shortages? And eventually we hope to be able to use that knowledge in regen ag.
UNKNOWN:you
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're going to go there because I want to unpack. Some of you mentioned actually before, but first of all, how did you end up founding or being part of Spun and what led you to this wonderful underground world?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Where did you get bitten by the bug?
SPEAKER_01:Bitten by the bug? That's, yeah, not a bug. I mean, really, soils, for me, have sort of always held this mystery. They have narratives, right? Soils are really interesting. I never wanted to go to space, right? I always wanted to go down. I wanted to be like an underground astronaut, you know? It seemed like there was just as much sort of mystery in galaxies down below as above. And so it's actually quite a funny story that when I was in university, so I was what, 17, 18, I really loved field biology and I knew I wanted to be a field biologist. So I thought I'll just quit university I'll leave the schooling and I'll go out and I'll become a biologist and actually live in the field with other biologists. So I did. I quit school and I moved to, I was offered a position with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute called STRI, which has a small research station in the middle of the Panama Canal in Panama. And they said, you can come and be here for a year. And so I went to this very small
SPEAKER_00:island. I know, I know. ask, how do you do that? Because going from leaving school to I'm going to be a field biologist in the field and getting offered a place in the middle of the Panama Canal, there is a story between.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, at the time I was going to school in Maine at Bowdoin College. And what's amazing about going to a very small university is that they tell you that, yeah, OK, well, what do you actually want to do and how can you achieve it? Right. And so I was just really sort of motivated. I thought, OK, well, I'm not going to just leave school and not do anything. So I wrote to scientists at the Smithsonian and said, okay, I'm willing to come free for a year if you'll take me and live on this island. And I found a scientist, right? I think people are nervous about writing scientists, but scientists love it when people write to them and say, I'm interested in this and can I come work with you? So I had a great, I had really amazing mentors, sort of was adopted by the whole community community once I was on the island because I was a lot younger than the other scientists. And when I was there, everybody was studying the diversity above ground, right? It was people studying bats and primates and trees and everything in a tropical forest. And I remember being under a fig tree. You know fig trees, right? They have these huge buttresses, they call them. Like the roots come up over your head. They're so enormous and you feel so tiny when you're under a fig tree. And I remember thinking, okay, this is what it's like when you're underground. Like it just felt, you felt tiny and the whole rest of this above ground ecosystem just felt so massive. And the scientists that I was working with had been studying plants and they said, okay, well, if you're that interested in what's happening underground, why don't you start digging and figure it out, right? And so that's how it started when I was 19. And I started looking at mycorrhizal fungi at that time. I started taking So back then it was so different, right? We didn't really even have DNA sequencing. It was just the start of looking at DNA and being able to do it in a high throughput way. And so you would just dig up roots and you would clear them, you know, with acid and all kinds of things. And then you could see the fungal network that had penetrated into the cell. You'd stain it blue. And I can even remember the first time I saw this, the structures that were growing inside root cells, right? right? This mycorrhizal fungi, they penetrate into the cell of a root and they form these structures called arbuscules, which they look like mini trees inside a cell. They're so beautiful and intricate. And that's the spot where the trading takes place. So I haven't even said what this symbiotic fungi do, but plants feed carbon in the form of sugars and fats, right? What an amazing meal. The plant is feeding the fungus sugars and fats. And And in return, the fungus is foraging in the soil, and it's looking for phosphorus and nitrogen that it trades in this reciprocal exchange with the plant. And so that's what the arbuscule is. It's the site of nutrient exchange.
SPEAKER_00:But it's in the root.
SPEAKER_01:It's in the root. It penetrates into the root, yeah. And the plant is feeding the carbon to the mycorrhizae, and the mycorrhizae are giving phosphorus and nitrogen and zinc and all kinds. I mean, we should start getting into the benefits. all the things that the fungi provide. But you can see it, right? If you have a microscope and you stain it, you can see it. And so that's what we started doing was we would do these experiments where we would take, we would grow up seedlings and then we would inoculate them with soils from under all kinds of different trees, as well as trees of the same species. And we tried to understand how common these communities were and did a tree do better with A mycorrhizal community was all the soil, right? Now we understand there's so much also going on. But does it do better with soils from under its own trees of its own species or other species? So again, this is just so long ago. But yeah, we thought, I mean, specificity, that's a big word. But we did find that there was certain combinations that did better with inoculum from under their same species and
SPEAKER_00:so what does this mean for let's say the ag world that obviously I would say relatively recently discovered that soil isn't a dead medium where you put something in and a lot of input very bluntly but that there is a whole life there or there could be at least in theory a whole life support system or actually an essential trading economy system life form under that keeps plants, first of all, alive and probably also thriving, or actually without it, they won't be thriving. What does it mean for farmers? And then we're going to talk about the investor side of things that this research is, was there already 10 plus years ago, but it's really coming out now and you're able to see much more, much faster. What does it mean for them? What should they know? If you're talking to like a room full, we're in a nice space here, but like it's a room full of farmers, what would you tell them what they should absolutely know when they walk out of that room today?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, God, that's a fantastic question and one that I spend a lot of time thinking about because of all of the different things that these microesophagi do. What is it most important that we make clear why they're important? And I think you actually have to go back in time, like way back in time to like 450 million years ago back in time because that's when people plants first started associating with these fungal symbionts and it was these mycorrhizal that you know the the ancestors of these mycorrhizal fungi that actually allowed plants to first colonize land 450 million years ago and how that happened is that these these first proto plants um were were um you know harsh conditions of land those nutrients were very hard to get to right they're all they're all uh they're all sequestered in in rock fungi are good at eating rock Fungi can break apart those complex molecules and feed them to plants in a usable form. And so it's because of that symbiosis that plants were actually able to first colonize land. And in return, of course, it's quite hard for fungi to get carbon. And so as plants were photosynthesizing and making carbon, they were feeding it to the fungal network. And what you have coming out of that is the basis of all ecosystems. the basis of all of life on earth as we see it today is because of that partnership with fungi. And so when I'm talking to farmers, I think it's really important that they understand that history and just how keystone these mycorrhizal communities are in plant nutrition. And so anywhere from 80% of the phosphorus that comes through a plant, it first passes through a fungal network. So all of that phosphorus that people assume are just going straight from soils into plants, that's coming through a fungal network. And so that means that even the backbone of our DNA, that phosphorus that makes up the backbone of us first pass through a mycorrhizal network. So to me, it's so fundamental to the way that people farm and the way that people take care of land and soils that I really think that as going forward, we need to be much more cognizant of what those communities are and what they're doing and how to take care of them. Because having a healthy fungal network in a farming system will bring benefits for generations to come.
SPEAKER_00:And is it safe to say that, let's say, the current farming, extractive farming system, very high chemical input, is not doing that, is not taking care of these fungal networks? How are they suffering from your typical monoculture, high NPK input system? What does it do to our friends underground?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's probably the worst possible conditions for our friends underground, unfortunately, and that's for several reasons. The first is fungicide, right? I mean, the name says it all. So fungicides are really, really bad for fungal networks, for mycorrhizal networks, and And so we can talk more about that, but that really depresses not only the abundance, but the diversity of mycorrhizal communities. Tillage. Let's talk about tillage, right? Tillage is also quite hard on a network because it can break it up into small pieces. We've started to do work in the lab to sort of understand those processes and ask how fast can individual hyphae, how fast can they heal? How fast can they reconnect? And they're resilient, right? The good news is, is that they're resilient. And so it's not like as soon as you, you know, cut a mycorrhizal network that it's not going to regenerate, right? They're very, very scrappy and they're good at reconnecting. But tillage again and again and again and again, not only can decrease the connectivity of the network, but it can select, it can be an evolutionary force that selects for a weedy type of fungus that's really good at making spores, let's say, but not so good at moving lots of nutrients. So it can be a selection pressure that favors fast growing networks that aren't quite as good at providing nutrients. And then nutrients themselves, right? Let's think about what happens when you add all of these external fertilizers, phosphorus and nitrogen. If the nutrient content is high enough in the soil, the plant is not going to give carbon to access those nutrient resources. And so it becomes almost redundant and the plants just start to have this higher dependence on just taking up the nutrients directly, not feeding carbon to the network. That really decreases the amount of carbon that's stored in the network, and those populations start to disappear. So we're actually seeing, what's worrying is that we're actually seeing this in natural communities as well, is just nitrogen deposition. How much nitrogen there is in the air in Europe, for example, is really hurting the survival of these networks, even in pristine environments where there's no tillage and no fungicide. We're putting so much nutrients in the atmosphere, that we're seeing a really severe decrease in the functioning of these networks, even in natural habitats.
SPEAKER_00:And so, maybe they're all difficult questions, but what to do, I mean, of course, there are the regenerative practices to start implementing, but if you had to pick, of course, maybe one, just stop with the fungicides, but what has been, let's rephrase, what has been the most surprising thing you've seen, let's say, on agricultural land, of the sampling you've done or the research expeditions you've done. I don't know how many of them were on, let's say, managed land, but what has surprised you the most on the good and the bad?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll let you know. We've got a really exciting study that's being done in collaboration with local scientists in Ecuador and a PhD student that's in my lab, Justin Stewart, who went out and was the sampling in smallholder farms in Ecuador, both in the farms themselves and then also in nearby natural areas, basically trying to understand, okay, well, how do these natural areas offer a refuge? How do buffer strips offer refuge for fungal communities to keep supplementing and increasing the diversity and survival of fungi in agricultural ecosystems? So those data are being sequenced right now. to check back in. But in terms of what farmers can do, I think What it comes down to is a worldview where you're taking the soil seriously and you're taking fungal communities seriously, trying to understand who's there and how you can enhance their functioning. And so, yeah, I think the scariest things are really if we're adding all of those high inputs that that can be very dangerous for fungal communities. But we're also seeing really hopeful data. There's some amazing work coming out of Marcel van der Heijden's lab, who's in Switzerland, who has been sampling communities of mycorrhizae of fungi in both cropped, very high intensity cropping systems and managed pastures and grasslands. And then taking those communities into the lab and adding what we call a phosphorus tracer. So this is amazing, right? What you can do is you can add this type of phosphorus that has a tracer so you can know exactly how much phosphorus is moving through the fungal network and into the plant. And their lab, they found some really encouraging numbers about these communities from grasslands that they're able to take up over 60% more phosphorus than the ones from cropping systems. So the good fungi, they're out there. And in pasture systems, I think there's evidence that even the processes that we're doing right now, the communities are surviving. and they're thriving in some cases. And so trying to understand what communities are there and what kind of management goes with those communities is really the next step.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, at first, the first step seems to be to map, but then of course, figure out, okay, what management practices influences their, or droughts, et cetera, but let's say something we can control, what influences their survival or thriving. And so what would you tell to, I mean, we talked, we, we, unpacked a bit, what would you tell to farmers? And the answer might be the same. Take very seriously what's underneath your feet. But what would you tell to investors? If we had a room full of investors, we would do this. I mean, we're doing it in person, but there's a room full of investors. What would you tell them? Not as investment advice, obviously, but to walk home with, to apply or to go and dig or to go and look for the next day?
SPEAKER_01:I'm not an investor. I'm a scientist. We're
SPEAKER_00:going to We're going to get to the investment questions later. All
SPEAKER_01:right. Okay. Okay. But I think for me, the thing that's really exciting, really cutting edge on this right now is, okay, there's two paths that I think are very cutting edge. When we talk about mycorrhizal communities and DNA sequencing, we're talking about looking at long read sequences. So that means long pieces of DNA. And when you're working in those systems, you can start to get at at function, just a bit, right? So it's not saying we're going to, it's not doing the whole genome of a particular strain of fungus, right? That's what we, science can do that, but it's really labor intensive. It can be quite hard. But there are techniques where you're able to sort of piece out, they call it poor man sequencing, where you're allowed to, where there's techniques to actually try to get at function of these mycorrhizal networks just from their DNA sequencing.
SPEAKER_00:So you know what they do.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. So are they good at carbon sequestration. Are they good at nitrogen? It would be nice to know. It would be really nice to know which ones are good at what functions. So that's one thing I would say is on the global scale is really trying to get more at how can we take these long read sequences and get at function and then start mapping those functions. So we're looking at correlations between certain fungal communities and what's happening above ground. And again, that's where work with global fungi and the Crowther lab is really valuable because we're able able to correlate diversity patterns with ecosystem attributes, like how much carbon sequestration is happening on that pixel of Earth. What are the nutrients? What are the temperatures? And you can start to make these correlations between who is there and what they're doing. But I think the work that is really exciting looking forward, if we're in this big room of investors, is really trying to develop new techniques to make the invisible visible. And there's lots of ways of doing that. And I'm not sure I want to give all the advice about how to do that. Instead, I really want to stimulate innovation in that area because I think that's going to make life much easier for farmers if they can understand and visually understand what's happening underground. And some of the stuff sounds kind of sci-fi at this point, right? But technology is moving pretty fast. So, for example, what we are doing in my lab here in Amsterdam is that we can You take a species, a strain of mycorrhizae, and grow it on a root system in the lab. And it's just about as thin, thinner than a thread of hair. You can hold it up to the light and you can just barely see it right there. They're very quite, they're very, very fine. But then we're starting to look at the flows inside those living systems, and it is incredible. So what we're doing is we use these high resolution microscopy, and we can, so imagine you've got this network, very fine network. It looks like a road system, right? They're all crossing each other. There's intersections. When there's intersections, they fuse. And the architecture of that network really determines its function, how good it's going to be at moving carbon, how good it's gonna be at taking up phosphorus. And so we can locate coordinates on that network itself at the microscopic scale and then hone in and start taking video of what the fungus is doing in that point, in that space and in that time. And so what you can do, What you can do in that time is actually start quantifying those flows and try to understand what changes those flows, what makes them go faster, what makes them go slower, what makes them change direction. And so again, it's trying to make things that we've just assumed are invisible. Oh, there's all this stuff going on underground. We have no idea what's going on underground. It's just a black box and making it visible. So that's sort of one of the things that really excites us now is trying to to visualize that system? How do we move that now from the lab into nature, right? How do we start visualizing these things that have been really constricted to laboratory conditions and start to visualize these systems, whether they be in ag fields or in forests, and try to understand what's happening? And again, this is where the sci-fi part happens, but it's actually not that far away trying to visualize, you know, with underground cameras, for example, what's happening in these systems. in
SPEAKER_00:real time. In real time. Which would really show like the impact of a deep plow or the impact of a diverse cover crop mix a few months after it was sowed or proper grazing or et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And would it be safe to say then that you should almost take the fungi networks as a start of what a landscape, and we're gonna say wants to be because that goes far. But it could be, if you look at a landscape from like what, in an ideal circumstance, the ideal circumstances when you're on a blank slate, you can design anything you want. Would you actually start with that and say, okay, the most diverse fungi network we can possibly imagine leads to everything that happens above ground after, which is diverse, probably with some, with quite a bit perennials, a bit annual, like what kind of mix you see, but the mix depends on actually what in this climate grows really well underground determines what can actually grow above ground. Is that the starting point should actually be not like, oh, I really like trees or in this, we think that in this system oak trees do really well or chestnuts or we always do grazing in olives. No, actually you should see what grows really well underground and that determines what comes above. And thus, as an investor, you should actually do that sort of due diligence before you even, like, does it make sense to grow it here? It's It's a question we should ask more often in general, but does it make sense to grow this here based on what should grow or what could grow and thrive underground?
SPEAKER_01:So what you're describing is a total mind shift, right? And I think that's one of the things that Spaniard is trying to accomplish is to bring that mind shift into everyday conversations. And that mind shift involves us viewing above ground ecosystems as consequences of what's happening below ground. And that's a really exciting viewpoint, right? It's a bold viewpoint. I mean, there's some scientists that would go as far to say, and again, this is bold, that fungi are farming plants, right? It's the fungal systems, right? They're capturing the carbon. They're using this photosynthetic partner above ground to get that carbon below ground, right? That's...
SPEAKER_00:And plants might be... I mean, there's arguments that we are just, I wouldn't say a slave of the say an employee of grain to carry grain around the world in certain species because we've been really good at that but actually we're not in control we were controlled by the plant and the plant is controlled by the fungi so we're all controlled by the fungi basically that's
SPEAKER_01:okay
SPEAKER_00:okay if you manage it to this level yeah it's an interesting like it starts a
SPEAKER_01:viewpoint it's a viewpoint exactly it's not so it's not saying okay though you know necessarily we're all slaves to fungi but fungi lie at the base of ecosystem health that's That's what I feel really comfortable saying. And to have that mind shift of saying, okay, well, let's think about these underground systems. It changes also the way that we approach conservation and climate agendas. It changes the way that, yeah, that we do science because... The priorities are not always on things that we can see. And the monitoring is not on always the things that we can monitor above ground. But maybe we need to develop new ways of monitoring the health of these networks underground. And what would that look like? And can that give us an early warning of things to come? So when we were in Chile, for example, we met a mushroom elder, Dantali, who grew up listening to the soil could actually hear whether it was going to be a good mushroom year or not, right? And Knowledge like that is incredibly important. The soils are basically a narrative of so much of what is happening. They're a blueprint for who was there and where they were and what they were doing. We just don't know how to read them. That's maybe also a bold statement, but there is a lot happening in the soils that if we had the right way of understanding them, they tell a story that can be used for us to help manage what happens above ground. Even when we watch the flows inside these networks, it's a language. It's a language of how nutrients are being moved. And it's beautiful language. I mean, it's hard to picture it, but imagine like a very thin tube and you have two streams. It's like a river, but you have them going in two different directions simultaneously in the same tube. I mean, we work with biophysicists at the Physics Institute AMOF in Amsterdam, and They don't even understand how it works. How is this organism moving two streams of nutrients in opposite directions simultaneously? And then you perturb the system, you increase the temperature, or you cut it. As we said, these ones are, it's really sad because we have to actually cut the fungal network and it's quite emotional. But it changes the way that those flows happen and you see it in real time. So imagine there's just a lot of information that is underground that I don't think that is currently being harnessed in the way that we protect and farm and forest the ecosystems that we care about.
SPEAKER_00:And on the topic of making the invisible visible, even if you look at... Because I think many people underestimate how degraded the landscapes we are surrounded by, depending where you live. But most of us, if you live in any kind of global north, your agriculture lands and also your national parks are relatively degraded. How could we use that, making the invisible visible, to show the potential of what life could be if managed better and if we manage for, let's say, the keystone species that's actually underground, and if we take our role as super keystone species a bit more seriously? Like what would be, and then you go into the sci-fi, into the future piece, like, okay, this looks like this now, but we know if you manage a forest differently, it could look, or it could sound, or it could feel, or it could, et cetera, et cetera. Like how would we... use that as sort of inspiration to push ourselves to not consider this pretty much lifeless agricultural land or forest in many cases without any birds and sounds as normal and that's okay because it always was like that, which of course is nonsense. How do we trigger that inspiration almost? Is that something that the life on the ground can help with?
SPEAKER_01:Well, again, one of the main impetuses of founding Spun was to try to make the invisible visible and get people people excited about protecting underground ecosystems. Not just protecting, I think. Not just protecting, but this is where I think what you just said was quite interesting, this idea of sounds. This is a great example of how you can go out into an ecosystem, and I think people are aware, of course, you can hear birds, and maybe it gives some indication of degradation of ecosystem communities, whether you hear complex bird songs or not, researchers are starting to do the same thing with soils and actually putting probes underground and getting acoustic landscapes of different soil communities, which also show different complexities. You know, and similar to whale song, when we first started hearing whale song, when you start listening to soils, it sort of, again, you feel the shift. You think, okay, there is this life, right? 25% of all species on earth live underground. And they are making noises. And there's all kinds of really interesting acoustics that are happening below ground. And this is where Cosmo Sheldrake, who came with us to Patagonia, was really sort of, yeah, a key player in this expedition to try to capture those sounds and trying to ask, OK, well, what does a biodiversity hotspot, how does it sound different than a degraded land? And how can we get a degraded land up to that level? And can just the simple monitoring of sounds for example, be a useful indicator of complexity underground. It's still so far in the making, but we have to allow ourselves to sort of, yeah, fantasize or dream that that kind of future is possible where you are monitoring things in real time, whether they're acoustic or flows or the things that we really think are important in building up these ecosystems and how can we use those data to bring back ecosystems. And so I think you made the really good point that, No, it's not just about protecting underground ecosystems. It's about trying to restore underground ecosystems. So two weeks ago, we were at a conference in Portugal on fungi and restoration. And people don't tend to think about how you can use fungal systems to restore ecosystems. But this is bringing together all these researchers that have been thinking about it for decades. How do we do that? Do we move? Do we use soil transplants the way that people use fecal transplants to re-inoculate soil systems How does that potentially hurt the ecosystems where we removed the soil to bring it into that system? And I think that the more people lean into this field, they'll see that there's good research being done. There's amazing research, for example, in the prairies in the Midwest US, looking at how you can generate really healthy, diverse mycorrhizal communities and sort of make your own inoculum rather than buying commercial inoculum, which again and again, we We keep seeing scientific papers that either there's no mycorrhizal fungi in it, or they've all died, or it's just one strain that is weedy and it will displace native communities. So we have to move away from that space and try to ask, okay, well, how can we regenerate soil systems and bring back these healthy fungal communities? What tools are out there? What is science showing us? And I think that's one way forward.
SPEAKER_00:And so are you, or scientists you know, working with these, I'd say pioneering, regen farmers, which is not the right term. Let's say farmers applying regen practices for a long time that are in that transition where land that they either recently bought or started working on 15, 20, whatever years ago, have gone through a massive transition. And we're now seeing that scientists start to follow that in terms of nutrient density of the food and that has been shifting over time and all that. And of course, the financial health of the farmer and maybe even the mental health. But what would be very interesting to see how fast that goes underground as well and then of course mapping it to the neighbors as always we have nice the field post or the sign post picture like left of this fence you see the severely degraded land and on the right it's been managed differently and everything is good and funny but nice would be to see underground as well like is that exciting for you as a scientist that there are these farmers that are taking almost a beyond actually a beyond conservation approach like okay I want to push my system as much as possible still make the yield and the profits I need to make but as much life as I can possibly generate or help facilitate is that like a hotspot for you as a scientist because there's stuff happening there and are you following them some of these hotspots over time not just the pristine ones in Patagonia which are super exciting I can
SPEAKER_01:imagine yeah exactly no there's an incredible amount of research that's coming out on transitions from conventional practices to more organic regen practices and then I can definitely link to some key papers in the show notes because I think that's where there's people will be surprised at how much research, how much good, solid peer reviewed research is going on in this space now. And what worries me is that it's not getting to the farmers. So how do we get that kind of research to the farmers? There's some really fascinating papers just on people who have who have, you know, again, peer reviewed that are doing work, taking natural fungal communities and starting to create their own inoculum by growing sorghum on top of soils. and then using that to inoculate plants and really trying to figure out, okay, how can we increase the diversity and functioning of these soils? So I feel like that research is out there. There's one initiative in particular that Spun is quite interested in called Dig Up Dirt, and that's happening in Australia. And I think we have to have something similar in other countries. But what Dig Up Dirt is, again, it's through a university, but it's asking farmers farmers who are using all different kinds of practices for farming to take a geolocated sample and send it into a university and fill out a form about what kind of practices they've been having for the last couple of years. And then again, the DNA is sequenced and that goes back to the farmers. And it's just the first tiniest little step in terms of trying to understand what farmers themselves can do to regenerate these networks. And so obviously those data are incredibly valuable from an academic, a research point of view. But how do we make that data in a form? How do we make it useful for farmers themselves? Is it that they have to do it once a year? Is that frequent enough? Or are there seasonal changes in fungal communities that you'd have to do it four times a year? There's so many open questions about how farmers can better monitor and enhance their fungal communities. And so I can put some resources down below. But I think the fact that even farmers are just talking about this space and saying, OK, we know the soils are important. You know, these networks, they're like the sticky substance that holds that soil together. I mean, you lose these networks, the soils just wash away. And I think it's quite interesting, especially if you have these diverse communities, because then you have different species that are good at different niches of like some might be good at moving nitrogen, where others are good at phosphorus and others are good at getting that really hard to get at organic nitrogen that can be difficult to break down. There are some species we know that are quite, they all have different traits, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And so the more diverse communities you have, the more niches you can have in underground ecosystems to provide benefits to your crop plants. And I think what's surprising also is that it's not even just the soil systems themselves, but the benefits that having a diverse and healthy my the mycorrhizal network can have on plants above ground as well. Simple things like, you wouldn't necessarily connect with fungi, like pollination, right? There's this beautiful work showing that mycorrhizal fungi can increase the size of flowers and the sweetness of nectar. Well, what does that mean? That means that the bee populations are happier, right? That you've got more bees, you've got bigger flowers, more nectar. And again, without those mycorrhizal fungi, the flowers become smaller and more bitter They're good at protecting against pathogens. There's some incredible work looking at how they upregulate. When a plant associates with a mycorrhizal fungi, they, what we call, upregulate their defense against certain pathogens. So they have a higher natural immunity against certain pathogens. Things like heavy metals, that they're good at protecting plants against heavy metals. So again, if we can get the research to the farmers, then I think that's our job. That's what we need to be doing, is making this research more accessible so that people really take micro-island networks more seriously.
SPEAKER_00:It's a natural bridge to the magic wand question I like to ask. What would you, if you had a magic wand, change one thing, let's say, land management, could be sea management as well. Let's say, what would you change if you had the power to do only one thing, but still anything you can possibly imagine?
SPEAKER_01:So if I could, does it have to be managed? Yeah, I just want farmers to get paid as much as lawyers. Like I want this to matter. The amount of skills that you need to have to be a farmer just blows away any sort of skill that you have to have. I just want it to be more fair and so that people can make the livelihood that they need and deserve based on taking care of living systems. It's that simple. It's like, I just think that there should be a fair wage for people that are innovative and are protecting ecosystems that have so much ramifications for our global survival. So again, yeah, changing the way that the economic system is, is I think the first thing I would choose to do.
SPEAKER_00:And would it be, like, would we pay more for our food? Would it be ecosystem service payments? What would be the angle you would choose?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I knew you were going to ask me that. Yeah, this is like an investment podcast, right? And I'm like, I'm a scientist. Yeah, I see where you're getting at. It's hard, and I don't want to give prescriptive advice. But I do like the idea of farmers getting paid for ecosystem services. That word is always a bit weird for me. me because I don't necessarily see fungal systems as a natural resource, right? I think they need to be protected the way that we protect air and water, but it's just quite hard for me to call them a resource per se. But they provide so much of an ecosystem service that I do think that whether it's biodiversity credits or carbon credits, but some way of acknowledging that you have, that the soil systems are giving benefits that go far beyond beyond just that farmer's field. That needs to be recognized and that needs to be compensated.
SPEAKER_00:And I know you're not an investor, but what would you do if you had a billion euros to invest? Could be very, very long-term patient investments, but definitely investments. What would you, where would you put it to work or how would you put it to work? I'm not asking for the dollar amount. I'm asking, how would you prioritize? What would you focus on? Because I think that's, especially from non-investors, very, very interesting to see, okay, where would you Would you go to the tech side or would you go to purchasing a lot of land and protecting it? Or would you do something completely different?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I would, if I had a billion. It's a billion? Okay. This might take two billion. But if I had a billion, I think I would make a NASA for the underground. Like, I would make, I would put all of the energy that they put into going to space to exploring underground ecosystems. Like, when When NASA was founded, JFK basically gave permission for people to start innovating to explore space. It was like, we're doing this thing. We're going to go to the moon. And it just gave inventors and scientists and even the public sort of this idea that you could innovate something that would allow for this global goal. And I think that's what I would do with a billion dollars is I would try to develop a system that allows people people to innovate for underground systems, whether it be exploration or mapping or the people identify hotspots that then need to be conserved. I just feel like you could use that money in a way where everybody was collaborating towards this common goal of exploring and protecting underground ecosystems.
SPEAKER_00:So we come back to the underground astronaut.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:How would it be called? Underground NASA or something. Yeah. It's funny because how much we probably spend way more money of figuring out the surface of the moon or Mars or something compared to our home planet. Is that frustrating?
SPEAKER_01:It's really frustrating. I mean, even just, right, I mean, again, we get into this whole ecosystem services thing and can you put a number, can you put a value on the services of different ecosystems? But I do know the literature, right? And the literature suggests that it's about$5 trillion a year in system And in ecosystem services, whether it's nutrient cycling or climate regulation of soils, it's so massive. And yet we're just not investing in soil systems like it counts. And I find that so frustrating, especially as a scientist. We're good at doing particular studies and testing ideas. But what we need is to bring all of those ideas together under an umbrella that lets us really start valuing and exploring, I think, what's below our feet.
SPEAKER_00:Are you hopeful?
SPEAKER_01:I'm super hopeful. I'm super hopeful because I see it every day, right? I see these networks every day. And they, you know, we call them the coral reefs of the soil, right? They do bring hope. It's like the way if you're swimming in an ocean and you come across this, like, magnificent creature. I don't know, ocean systems scare me, but I can imagine what it's like to come across these amazing... I've seen them in a show on Geographic. Right, exactly. But that's what... what these fungal networks are like and we get to see them in the lab and we get to watch the flows and we get to see how complicated they grow and how fast they grow and how they regenerate and I mean just we have an amazing master student Rachel Cargill who was doing an experiment with the fungal network and cutting it tried all different kinds of things cutting with lasers so they were very precise or with with scalpels and she went she went away for lunch and she came back and I get goosebumps thinking about it And it had just reconnected. It just reconnected itself, you know? It fused back together while she was at lunch and the flow started going, you know? I mean, they are, they're incredibly resilient. Now, she made it so that they could line up perfectly, right? So that's what you have to imagine. If you just went and made a big mess of it, it couldn't reconnect. But the potential for regeneration was just so intense and seeing that in real time, like we thought that would take days and we came back and it was a matter of hours. it just gives me hope. I see the carbon. We can label the carbon with fluorescent dyes. We can watch the carbon flowing through the network. We can see the way it's moving from a plant root down into the network. That gives me hope for the way that fungal networks are going to sequester carbon in the future. And yeah, so for me, I think it's an exciting time. So I'm hopeful.
SPEAKER_00:And as a final question, why, investors always like to ask, okay, Why now? Like what's, you describe a lot of things that are possible now. It's a lot of this visual stuff and research and the DNA sequencing, like the poor man version, but still, is that all very recent? Like is that it couldn't have been done five or even, or 10 or even five years ago? Like how cutting edge are we now and how much of a snowball or wave are we starting to catch just to get people that are not in the space to look out for your hair and to just, like how exciting, how much at the edge or like the spearhead are we of science now and how much exciting stuff is happening now because it's only possible now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think we're really well positioned right now. And that's because we're able to work at two massively different scales. We're studying what's happening at the micron scale. We're studying how once the carbon is in the fungi, how they move it, how they use it. At the same time, there's so much research that's moving so fast at the global scale with remote sensing data that now the question is how you merge those two datasets to start making predictions about function and form and what's going to happen in the future. And I think that that's why now is that we never had the ability to sort of bring those two fields together. And when we talk about it, we were recently in a meeting at Caltech in California, and scientists are just starting to see this possibility of combining things at the micron scale. That's really tiny. with things at the global scale and sort of giving themselves permission to imagine what that would look like. And that's unique for this time period right now is these technological advancements and the motivation that people see and care about what's happening in soil systems. That's all converging in space and time right now. And I think that's why we're positioned perfectly to make big leaps in underground systems.
SPEAKER_00:So it's really that moment of deep science in and underground that wasn't possible before because of tech and connecting that to deep machine learning and global systems that are starting to be able to predict stuff which means you don't have to deploy all of that tech on every single pixel on this planet which would be physically impossible and then the will and need like somehow society starts to wake up to soil slowly very slowly but at least there is some funding out there there is some willingness there are thank god scientists is looking into this plus big, let's say, machine learning systems that are not cheap, but definitely usable for this, which is a very interesting conversion. So I want to thank you so much for your time today and making time in your very busy exposition calendar, which will take you out for probably the rest of the year, and to come on the podcast and share your journey with the investor community.
SPEAKER_01:Great. I had such a wonderful time. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks again and see you next time.
