[Terrapreta] Testing if microbes decompose soil minerals

[adkarve]

There were some suggestions for experiments to test if the soil micro-organisms can really degrade soil minerals into their component ions. I welcome them, but before we proceed, let me make it clear that the experiments would have to be conducted with real soil and not with sand. Please note that in all my postings I always talked of soil minerals and not minerals in rocks or sand. Soil is derived from rocks by natural processes that we call weathering. Soil differs from sand not only in its physical characteristics but also in its mineral constituents. 

One can wash the soil to remove the water soluble salts and ions. Lyophilization of the soil would be a more sophisticated way because it would not remove the soil microflora from the soil. Chemical analysis of such soil would show it to be deficient in all the mineral elements that plants need, because soil analysis deals only with water soluble components of the soil.  But washing would not remove the organic macromolecules and organic colloides that are not water soluble. 

One way of removing all the organic matter would be to heat the soil in a muffle furnace, so that all the organic matter is burnt away. However this treatment would also kill the microorganisms. It would just be impossible to put them back into the soil, because we just do not know how many types of micro-organisms had originally existed in the soil, and in what numbers. 

In such situations, where experimenting is not easy or not possible, one resorts to surveying a large number of samples, so that one can draw statistically significant conclusions. Correlations between human diseases and dietary agents that cause them are derived in this manner. There is a sufficiently large number of farmers in India who apply to their fields no fertilizers of any kind, those who practice only organic farming, those who apply large doses of chemical fertilizers, and also those who practice the sugar-cowdung-cow urine method of farming. It is thus theoretically possible to get the yield data of all the different categories of farmers and to analyse it statistically. Unfortunately, I do not have the money to this. So here the matter rests for the time being.  

Yours

A.D.Karve 

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