Our strategy for helping farmers transition to regenerative agriculture revolves around a fundamental shift in how we view soil nutrition. Most traditional programs rely purely on what is immediately “available” in the soil, but we use a more comprehensive approach that we called the Biological Build-Up and Maintain Model.
The core premise is simple: we use biology to supply a much larger portion of your crop’s nutrition. By measuring the hidden reserves in your soil and using biology to unlock them, we can strategically reduce your input rates without sacrificing yield.
First, watch the video below from our Youtube channel Agresol (and make sure to subscribe!)
The Two Pools of Nutrition
To understand this model, we have to look at two distinct pools of minerals measured on our specialized soil tests:
The Total Nutrient Pool: This represents the geological basis of your soil, the total “bank account” of minerals present, even if they are currently “locked up.”
The Available Nutrient Pool: This is what is available to your plants that can be used access today.
Most standard soil tests only measure the available pool. However, we might find a soil with a high total pool of phosphorus (say 500 ppm) but a low available pool (only 20 ppm). Our goal is to develop a strategy that uses biological build up to move minerals from that massive total pool into the available pool.
Bridging the Gap: Biology vs. Inputs
The “Biological Build-Up” component relies on two factors working together: biology and strategic inputs.
Biology’s Job: Microbes and fungi take minerals from the total pool and supply them to the plant.
The Input’s Job: If your soil’s geological basis is truly deficient (for example, a total phosphorus pool of only 75 ppm), biology has nothing to draw from. In these cases, we use inputs to bridge the gap and prevent yield loss while the system builds inherent fertility.
How to Stimulate the Biological Engine
We don’t just wait for biology to show up; we actively stimulate it through three key levers:
1. Add Biological
Adding a biological either as a seed treatment or soil primer is one of the fastest ways to get nitrogen-fixing, phosphorus-solubilizing, and potassium-solubilizing bacteria (plus all other types of microbes) directly where they are needed. This ensures the plant is being fed from the total pool from day one.
2. Increasing Root Exudates
Plants “pay” biology with root exudates (sugars and compounds) to go and get minerals. To increase these exudates, we must maximize the plant’s photosynthetic ability. One effective way is to use foliar sprays to ensure the plant has the six essential minerals required for maximum photosynthesis: Iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Copper, Phosphorus, and Nitrogen. When the plant is photosynthesising at its peak, it feeds the biology more aggressively, which in turn unlocks more minerals from the total pool.
3. Increasing Diversity
Diversity is another way to increase the overall photosynthetic ability of the area as each species can fulfil an ecological niche. In addition to this, each species introduces and stimulants a different profile of soil microbes. This can be more difficult than the strategies above but cover cropping, crop rotation, intercropping and poly-crops are all effective ways at increasing diversity.
Maintaining the Momentum
Once we have built your available nutrients up to a critical stage, the goal shifts to maintenance. Whether we maintain this through a standard removal rate or by simply filling the gaps that biology can’t quite cover depends entirely on your specific goals and your soil’s total capacity.
If you want to start using biology to supply nutrition and start using your soil’s total mineral wealth to grow your crops, then sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with Agresol.
