…2/6

“Plants get synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – the N, P, and K – and they’re like,

‘Wow. Let’s see. I could put more energy into growth or big leaves, big fruit, big vegetables. But in order to do that, I’m going to cut back on my exudates [soil comms], because I’ve gotten all this nitrogen from this other source. I don’t really need to make exudates, I can put the energy I would’ve put into making exudates into bigger plant, bigger growth’…

…3/6

“When a plant starts making these exchanges – they’re trade-offs, making fewer exudates to be able to take advantage of the big pile of nutrients right in front of them – it shorts the soil microbiome of nutrients, the things that it needs.

So the fetching fungi and the nitrogen nabbers, and these whole communities of microorganisms, they get starved. They’re malnourished when crops are primarily fed a diet of N, P, and K, because the plant’s not providing as much in the way of exudates…

…4/6

“And what this means is with these microorganisms being malnourished and lower in numbers and community structure perturbed, the plant’s not getting all these other compounds that are also important for its health.

Plants themselves make a huge variety of what are called phytochemicals. So all that means is plant made chemical. It’s everything from say, beta-keratin in our squashes to anthocyanins in our berries…

…5/6

“There are thousands if not tens of thousands of phytochemicals. This is how plants survive their sitting duck lifestyle.

Insect herbivores, mammalian herbivores come at these plants, they consume a little bit of it. In a robust, healthy plant that is having a great conversation with its microbiome, the microbiome can help the plant interpret signals for making more phytochemicals that push back on pathogens, that push back on herbivores…

…6/6

“And these phytochemicals that are important for plant health, they’re in our diet, but these crops need to have a certain level of challenge, if you will.

We don't want couch potato crops. Okay, that’s really bad. It’s bad because they then don’t have a good defensive system. And that defensive system in part consists of a lot of phytochemicals and they benefit our health as well.”

Transcript excerpt ends.

…I paraphrased ‘exudates’ above as ‘soil comms’. I hope that’s a decent metaphor in the following sense:

- Plants emanate chemical signals from their roots into the soil to ‘advertise’ what they need.
- What Anne and David call ‘fetching fungi’ coordinate the gathering of those resources and convey it to the plant.
- They do this because of a symbiosis.

As Anne puts it:

“[The fungi] are getting nutrition that their bodies need from the plant when they drop the goods off at the doorstep.”