Biology in Soil is the Immune System for Plants – Don’t Remove It

Just like humans or animals will get sick without their immune systems, so will plants. Therefore, it’s critical that cannabis growers ensure their plants have healthy immune systems. But that creates a problem for many growers who believe that in a controlled environment, you have to use sterile grow media. The truth is inert media doesn’t include the biology your plants need to defend against pest and pathogens.

No biology in the soil means no immune system for your plants. It’s that simple.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should introduce compost or any other unclean grow media into a controlled environment grow facility. We would never recommend that!

What it means is that you should bring clean, wide spectrum beneficial biology to your plants by using a grow media that makes it possible through biomimicry. This is the only way to ensure your cannabis plants have a healthy immune system without introducing disease risks.

Research Shows the Crucial Relationship between Plants, Soil and Immune Systems

Numerous research studies have shown the direct link between the microbes in soil and plant health as well as crop yields. As far back as 1931, A.W. Henry discovered that soil microbes keep pathogens away from plants.

Fast forward to 2016, and groundbreaking research published in the Journal of Science by plant scientist Dr. Mark Mazzola (at the time, a plant pathologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture) and Dr. Jos M. Raaijmakers of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology directly linked a plant’s immune system to the microbes in soil. The research team also discovered a plant’s immunity that comes from plant microbes is similar to human beings’ immune systems in terms of having two responses – one to defend against all invaders and a second to defend against specific invaders.

What does that mean for today’s cannabis growers? When you remove the beneficial biology from your growing media, you remove your plants’ immune system, and it instantly becomes infinitely harder for your plants to protect themselves against pests and pathogens.

As Mazzola and Raaijmakers found, “Soils are loaded with microbes. It’s hard for a lethal blight or other pathogen to gain a foothold. Some may manage to survive, but they don’t flourish or wreak havoc on plants.”

The microbes in soil also help your plants fight against specific pathogen attacks. Science has shown that when pathogens attack a plant, the plant releases chemicals into the soil that attract microbes, which respond by releasing compounds to kill the pathogen.

This type of plant signaling happens in nature, and to get the best results from your plants and crops, it should happen in your grow facility as well. That means your plants must have access to biology in your grow media.

Cornell plant scientist Jenny Kao-Kniffin studies the interaction and relationships between soil microbes and plants, and in 2019, she discovered that soil with a diverse microbial community supports plant growth – exactly the opposite of what happens in soil with a more homogeneous microbial makeup or no beneficial biology at all (i.e., inert grow media).

She explains that soil microbes play a role in determining the nutrient content of food, which could have significant implications in the cannabis industry in the future as growers learn to leverage microbes to achieve specific outcomes through breeding.

One year later, in 2020, Heribert Hirt’s research about how the beneficial microbes in soil, food, and the human gut are interconnected brought even more details about the relationship between plant health and beneficial biology from soil into perspective.

Hirt wrote, “Soil is the ultimate source from which plants recruit beneficial microbes for the rhizosphere and phyllosphere, that is the root and shoot surfaces, but also for the inner plant organs (endosphere), including fruits and seeds. Plant rhizo-, phyllo-, and endosphere microbes not only increase nutrient efficiency and thereby crop yield, they are also involved in enhancing resistance against herbivores, insects, bacterial and fungal pathogens, and even nematodes or viral infections.”

There are so many scientific studies that explain the importance of plant signaling and the beneficial biology in soil, but until growers can move past the “biology is bad” way of thinking, which leaves plants immunocompromised, the better.

The reality is, clean wide-spectrum biology created in a sterile environment for controlled environment growing solves the problem by giving plants the biology they need without introducing pests or pathogens.

Diverse Microbial Communities are Essential to Plant Health and Development

There’s an old saying, “It takes a village…” and that saying is extremely fitting when you’re talking about biology, soil, and plant health and immunity. In the world of plant and soil science, microbial communities are essential while single microbes may not helpful at all.

Drs. Mazzola and Raaijmakers wrote in their 2016 research results, ‘The complexity of soil microbiome-plant interactions argues for new strategies that go beyond ‘one-microbe-at-a-time’ approaches and take a community perspective. This includes the design and applications of mixtures of microbial species.”

Taking that concept a step further, researchers for a study published in Science Direct in 2022, The Impact of Microbes in Plant Immunity and Priming Induced Inheritance: A Sustainable Approach for Crop Protection, found, “Growing in soil, the roots of plants closely interact with the plethora of microorganisms. The elaborate interactions between the roots and their associated microbiomes are crucial plant fitness determinants. These microorganisms will interact with the physiology of the plant and can influence plant immune responses to pathogens.”

Bottom-line, wide-spectrum biology in your grow media is essential to your plants’ immune systems and health. For plants, biology isn’t just good, it’s critical.

Inert Soil is Immunocompromised Soil

In controlled environment agriculture, it’s a known fact that you can’t bring compost in because pests and pathogens can spin out of control quickly. Not only is there a risk of catastrophic crop loss at worst, but at best, there is increased disease pressure in the grow room, which you, your team, and your plants will have to continually fight against.

As a result, most growers think the best way to keep pests and pathogens out is to use the most sterile media. Unfortunately, changing to a sterile media is probably the easiest fix, but it’s not the best solution – not even close.

As you learned above, your plants need the beneficial biology in soil or they won’t have an immune system to fight pests and pathogens. The solution is to use a clean living soil like bio365’s grow media, which includes millions and millions of beneficial microbes without introducing pests and pathogens.

In addition, it’s important to remember that grow media is really the fourth most common way that pests and pathogens enter a grow facility behind people bringing in contaminants on their hands, clothes, etc.; clone material that you bring from outside or that you’ve used for a long time; and imperfectly sealed controlled environments (i.e., people and tools moving between rooms, HVAC system, external environment, closed doors rather than properly sealed doors, etc.).

With that said, unclean grow media can certainly be a source of pests and pathogens and inert soil removes that risk. However, inert soil also removes the good, beneficial biology that your plants need to grow to their full potential. Using an inert soil actually reduces plant health and crop yield because plants aren’t getting what they need – biology.

Sterile soil is immunocompromised soil. When you use it, you’re stripping away plants’ immune systems, and you’re rendering your plants defenseless to disease.

As Drs. Mazzola and Raaijmakers concluded in their 2016 study, “Mechanistic understanding of specific plant metabolites and pathogen effectors that trigger, like vaccines in animals, the adaptive immune response of soils may provide practical means to engineer the indigenous soil microbiome for enhancing plant health and securing future crop yields.”

That’s exactly what the soil scientists at bio365 have done with our proprietary clean living soil that includes millions and millions of beneficial microbes that mimic the natural world. There is no better solution to protect your plants’ immune systems so you can improve plant health and boost crop yield in controlled environments.

Bottom-line, biology was dangerous for controlled environments before bio365 invented its clean wide spectrum grow media. Today, cannabis growers can get the best of both worlds – a sterile soil with beneficial biology. Contact us to learn how you can bring beneficial biology to your controlled environment so your plants can thrive.