Unks and ununks

Colin Austin © 17th April 2023

This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be freely copied or republished without further permission – the only provision is the Standard Creative commons requirement that the source Colin Austin www.gbiota.com should be acknowledged.

Tumultuous meting

Hopefully you would have read about John and Sue tumultuous meeting. (read here) Now they are in a passionate, but heated relationship.

John is still claiming that the modern supermarket food system is providing a reliable and abundant food supply with hygienic and energy packed food from all over the world regardless of season.

Sue is arguing that the food is just packed with sugars and fats and lacking key nutrients and minerals and is deliberately made addictive and is the cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases.

But they have reached common ground that the food is inert lacking the life which supports our gut brain, which among other functions controls our appetite.

Even if we were surrounded by tempting food our gut brain should simply generate the hormones that would make us feel full so we would just stop eating.

Unks and ununks (knowns and unknowns)

John says look at the incredible improvements in food production since the days of Norman Borlaug.

Sue agrees is it was an incredible piece of research but at that time we had no knowledge of the importance of gut biology - it was an unknown unknown.

We conducted a real time experiment on the worlds population and we ended up with a food system that has led to a major health epidemic of non -infectious diseases. The results were clear - an epidemic which dwarfs Covid (read here and here).

We now know that our gut is a real brain which controls many body functions but at this moment we have no real idea of the coding that makes it take decisions so we should be very careful in thinking we can change our gut biology by breeding microbes under laboratory conditions.

Sue is very strong on this - our intelligent control system is made up of trillions of cells of thousands of different species - we need to recognise what we know and what we don’t know and look for solutions that have been tested in a natural environment over thousands of years.

Grow your own

So they have agreed to grow enough of their own food to feed their gut brain. But they have adopted a very different approach to poor Mary (read here) who just buys boxes with plants ready to harvest from George (read here and here and here) who gets his mate to deliver the boxes to her door and take away the old box and the bag of organic waste she leaves out for him.

She only grows a few species, mainly micro-greens like broccoli, alfalfa, lettuce, and the ever faithful flax and is quite happy to leave all the soil regeneration to George.

Mary's thinking

Mary and Sue are opposite ends of the spectrum. Mary, to be honest does not care about the state of the world, her mum only just made it through her Covid and now has long Covid which is in a way worse. Mary learned that people with a strong immune system from eating food that feeds the gut are far less likely to suffer a sever attack so Mary is just interested in her and her kids Immune system.

Sue’s thinking

Sue, to be honest is a bit of an extremest, she sees that the way humans are destroying the natural functions of the earth is leading to an inevitable collapse of the ecological system. May be not the end of humanity but mass hardship and with a food crisis leading to mass migration of desperate starving people.

She says we see what is happening in autocratic countries but how much better are we? Large corporation have immense power, including power over our Governments - it is profits over people.

If we want peoples needs to take priority over profits for the mega corporations it is up to us ordinary people to take action.

You can be like me and become an activist or you can be like Mary and quietly work away growing food that will feed your gut brain. It may not lead to a dramatic change but it will influence people around you.

Gut health is all about diversity

Sue want to be much more adventurous, she knows there are literally thousands of edible plants she can grow from seed, which she cannot buy from the regular shops and she is well aware of the health benefits of the many herbs and spicies she could grow.

But she is well aware that although you can buy bags of potting mix which are full of nutrients this is not not the same as living soil, full of all those creatures from worms down to the microbes and fungi which George can supply in Wickimix.

She also understands the importance of the growing medium being both hydrophilic (easy wetting) and having a high water holding capacity.

Natural soil contains a huge range of micro organism in the main families of fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes and viruses which can only be seen with a high powered microscope. But it also contains many small creatures which can be just seen with a magnifying glass and then there are the large creatures like worms and soldier flies which have guts not that different to ours where microscopic organism breed.

Sue says that soil is complex and so is our gut - we must recognised that we are just at the beginning of long learning experience and not be over confident of our understanding.

Types of Wicking boxes

She also knows that there are a number of different styles of Gbiota Wicking boxes she can choose from, each with their own benefits and limitations. This is very different to Mary who just uses a box with a single drainage hole in the side.

Mary's box is supplied by George and is just a standard box with a hole drilled in the side, he fills the box with Wickimix and just pokes a pointed stick through the side hole to make what he calls a mole hole, to ensure proper drainage.

Apart from watering, Mary does not need to touch her box until it is swapped for a new one after the crop is finished.

Sue may well decide to go for the common design with a swivel joint on the outside of the box so she can regulate the water depth and drain when needed and with an ag pipe running along the base then up to the surface.

This means she can surface water while the seeds are germinating then swap over to water at the base and relying on wicking action to take the water up to the root zone.

The amount of water stored is limited by the void space in the soil and how far the water will wick, which depends on the characteristics of the soil. Read water to see how Wicking beds actually work.

She has an alternative of using the twin box approach. Wicks hang down from the top box and into liquid water in the bottom box. This means that 100% of the space is available for water storage and the bottom box can be made large to hold as much water as needed so giving a long time between irrigations.

While this system works quite well it is limited by the capacity of the wick to suck water up to the top box. With thirsty plants in a hot dry climate this can mean they just cannot supply water fast enough.

While cotton makes an excellent material for wicking it is prone to rotting with the intense microbial activity.

But Gbiota Wicking boxes are about breeding beneficial microbes rather than just watering the plants.

For Mary this is no problem as she gets new Wicking mix every time her box is swapped but for Sue she want to extend the time between refreshing the Wickimix.

The creatures in the soil, from the worms, through the microbes and right down to the minute viruses, are all living creatures which need to be fed and watered. They have short lives so they must have the conditions where they can breed, which they will do profusely if the conditions are right.

That is the topic of my next article.

Upgraded beds - Introduction

The information paradox

The world is changing at an incredible rate, climate change, the virus and the polarisation of the political system are immense problems, new technologies like artificial intelligence may seem beneficial but whatever the benefits increase inequality between the haves and have nots.

Innovators, like me, ask how can we develop technologies to help mitigate these problems and often that it is the easy bit, a bigger problems in how to make that technology widely available with the relevant documentation.

It is tempting to focus on the new developments but at times an overview is needed to keep things in perspective. This is such a time so I start with an overview.

The birth of Wicking beds

It is approaching thirty years since I was invited to go to Ethiopia to see if there was anything I could do to help feed people in one of those terrible droughts.

I could see the two issues were lack of water and nutrients. Nutrients were the easy bit, weeds may be a pain but they are incredibly effective at extracting the last bit of nutrients from the soil and they can then be used as fertiliser.

Water was a bigger problem but I had travelled extensively in the Australian deserts and seen the natural phenomenon of water being collected in clay basins, flowing down to the lowest point then wicking up to feed luxuriant vegetation in the middle of a dry desert.

That was the birth of what I named Wicking beds - dig a trench, line with a water proof layer, clay or plastic film, load the base with weeds then back fill with soil.

There was no question of the weeds going putrid by soaking in stagnant water - this was in the middle of a sever drought.

Publicity v technology

On my return to Australia I wrote about this and the idea caught on, but some bright spark they could improve on this by replacing the weeds with stones and having a cloth layer to prevent the soil and roots entering the water zone.

This actually works fine - as self watering beds - but does little to improve the nutrients or soil biology.

But we live in an era where skills in publicity are far more important than being technically correct so Wicking beds, with stones, caught the public imagination.

Sponge beds

I had yet another idea, the sponge bed. This was even simpler that a Wicking bed, take off the top soil and level the ground. Fill with any organic material that is available then replace the top soil.

This give three layers, the underlying earth, a layer of soft spongy material with very high water holding capacity and a layer of regular soil on top.

Plants could be germinated in the top layer then put down their roots into the moist nutrient rich layer below.

There was no attempt to contain the water, they just relied on surface tension in the sponge to hold the water in place.

Have no doubt - though this was a great system but it just did not catch peoples imagination and it went the way of many other good innovations, just a dot in the history books.

The bugs arrive

We seem to have suddenly discovered microbes - well that is not true at all, bugs (or more politely microbes) arrived well before any other living creature, they were the first and they made all other life forms possible by making soil and nutrients available so plants could grow.

It is just that humans thought that bugs were bad and had to be killed off. But then in a flash of inspiration we suddenly realised that there were good bugs and bad bugs and that our very lives depended on the good bugs.

We spent a lot of time and money trying to work out how to kill of the bad bugs without killing of the good bugs but without much success. Then in another flash of inspiration we worked out that if we managed the conditions in favour of the good bugs that they would simply out breed the bad bugs.

And that is what Gbiota beds are all about, creating the conditions where the good bugs out compete and out breed the bad bugs - a concept worked out by nature a few millions years ago. But we got there in the end.

Flood and drain

Plants need nutrients, water and air.  We can get this with flood and drain.  The basic principle has been known for years.

Lower a container into water which will expel all the stale air.

Let the water drain out and it will suck in fresh air into the soil.  This cycle of flood and drain means the soil is actually breathing, expelling stale air and sucking in fresh air.

Making it work in practise

But of course we cannot just raise and lower a complete paddock so we have to use a different way, using a pump to flood the base of the bed purging out the air then let the water drain away to suck in the fresh air.

This work well but a snag appeared.

KISS Keep It Simple Stupid

I have been writing articles about breeding beneficial microbes in Gbiota beds and people tell me it all sounds too complicated so I have been experimenting to find the simplest possible way.

So I now try and make it simple, with the help of a few made up characters, which as they say in the films are purely fictitious and any similarity to actual people is purely coincidental. So welcome George and Mary.

The crux is for George to grow Wickimix, the soil that goes into Gbiota Wicking boxes. But there is more to it than that. He is certainly willing to make and sell Wickimix which helps extend his retirement funds but he is also happy to help Mary by giving advice and encouragement on what to grow in the various seasons.

Read the full article here

Welcome

Look at the news - fires, floods, draughts, refugees, political extremes, deliberate misinformation, the world is changing really fast - all sounds terrible so what to do?

The biggest problem we face, long term, is food - how are we going to feed the eight billion, and growing, people with food that will not just keep them alive but keep them healthy. That means food that will feed our intelligent control system that manages our bodies, our gut and head brain.

Our modern food system provides ample food to keep us alive but if we want to live a long and healthy life, reduce the current epidemic of non infectious disease, (like diabetes which results in a person have a limb amputated every eight second) and be fit and healthy into our old age we need to make changes to our food system so we feed our intelligent control system - our gut brain.

But making change is never easy.

Neither Elon Musk, Bill Gate or Donald Trump are going to save the day - no one person can solve all these problems so we fall back on what has made us the dominant creature on earth - we are intelligent and naturally cooperative working together to solve the problem of the day.

That is what the Gbiota project is about developing the technology of how to grow food that will feed our gut brain and so keep us healthy for a long time (which is the easy bit) and then make this technology widely available so people can benefit from it. (which is the difficult bit, changing paradigm against powerful vested interests.)

On this site there are many articles in the food section which describes how food works to keep us healthy and in the growing section more article on how to grow food which act as natural pre and pro biotics to feed and strengthen our gut brain.

We have the technology and we know what needs to be done the issue is how do we make that happen.

Since we have adopted intensive farming the supply side has switched and we now have an abundant supply of energy food but are low in nutrients for body replacements but the critical area is the lack of brain food for our intelligent control system.

This is bad but what puts food into the number one crisis position is the threat from climate change and degradation of our soils.

Let us not get depressed - we have the technology to solve these problems, technology is not the problem which is how to change the system to apply the technology we already have. We need to fall back on the twin strengths of human nature, intelligence and cooperation which has made us the dominant creature on earth.

We have the technology of growing plants so they act as pre and pro biotics but as microbes have a short life span this means creating local food systems where people, even if living in apartments in large cities, can have fresh food growing in their homes.

We need to understand what we mean by fresh, this is has come to mean not gone rotten, but when it come to feeding our gut brain it means that the plants are picked and eaten before the beneficial microbes die.

This is what the Gbiota movement it all about - developing a system to have food growing at home. This is not going to just happen. It requires a team with the sort of dedication efforts we have seen in the recent fires and floods where individual have got into their boats to rescue their neighbours from floods or risked their lives to fight fires to protect their communities.

The web www.gbiota.com explains how we can do this. The section Gbiota News tells the stories of how nominally fictitious people, like George, Mary and Sue can pool their skills and knowledge so everyone can be eating food that will make them healthy.

The section on food looks at how food actually works to make us healthy. These are all free to access under the Creative Commons system which means the can be copied and shared without permission.

The section of growing get down to the nitty gritty of how to grow plants to act as pre and pro biotics. This is a subscription area to help fund this project, even projects with the highest social objectives need money to fund the never ending research and experimentation.

The menu item community takes you to another separate web site www.gbiota.club which is a social media site where people can find similar minded people in their area using geolocation. The story of Mary mini shows how.

I hate bugging people with emails so I only send emails when essential but I have a section in gbiota club New posts showing the latest posts. It is probably best just to check this on a regular basis but you can register on gbiota.com and click on the notify me of new posts icon at the bottom of every post.

The social media site gbiota.club site has far more members but sad to say in this troubled world attracts many spammers. While it is easy to join the club members who are not actively participating in the project by logging in and contributing are automatically removed from the site.