Gbiota overview
Colin Austin © 5th July 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.
Gbiota overview
Food not pills
Pick and eat plants grown in living soil - that is the way to feed your gut-brain which controls your appetite and how much fat your body stores.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
This article is an overview of how the Gbiota system works. This is not an instruction manual, just to give you a general overview.
Gbiota is a community benefit organisation, (not some mega-corporation). It is run by activists who want to see future generations have access to healthy food. This does require active participation from members either in producing Gbiota boxes or being a customer and buying Gbiota boxes - the power of your wallet is supporting the movement.
Eco-balance
The underlying principle of the Gbiota system is to create an Eco-balance by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil and creating the conditions where the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete potential harmful microbes.
Beneficial microbes need a combination of nutrients, water and air.
In the Gbiota system, this is achieved by a combination of flood and drain and recycling.
The base of the bed is flooded which expels all the stale air, the bed is then allowed to drain and as the water drains it sucks in fresh air so the soil is breathing.
The fluid that is drained is full of nutrients and living creatures so this is recycled back into the bed - we call this fluid soil blood as it does the same job as our blood.
Wickimix and Gbiota beds.
The first step is to produce Wickimix, a growing media (or soil) full of beneficial microbes, living creatures and nutrients.
This is done in a Gbiota bed.
If you don’t have a garden or want to mess about producing your own Wickimix then find a local grower who can supply you with either Wickimix or Gbiota boxes.
These are raised beds about 300mm high and are free-standing eg with no side wall.
Start by laying ag pipes, these must be level so either the bed must be flat or the pipe(s) laid along a contour line.
The bed is then covered to a depth of 100mm with organic waste. Grass cuttings make a good base, then covered with food or other organic waste.
This is then covered with a nutrient layer, typically a mix of manure, volcanic rock dust, dolomite (to balance pH) and trace minerals (found in blood and bone).
If just starting this is then covered with a third layer of soil plus inoculants (microbes and soil creatures) but one started this layer will be old Wickimix from boxes that are being regenerated.
The inlet to the ag pipe is raised for filling.
The exit is raised, sitting on a leaky dam. When the pipe is filled the incoming flow is much higher than the outlet flow from the leaky dam so the base is flooded, but when the inlet flow is stopped the base of the dam drains.
The drainage from the leaky dam is normally caught in a sump, with a pump, so the soil blood is automatically recirculated but a simple alternative is to replace the sump with a lower bed which catches the soil blood and is used to grow water-loving plants. Not ideal but practical.
Feeding the life stock
Gbiota beds are full of living creatures from the larger creatures like the worms right to the microscopic bacteria, fungi and viruses.
These feed on the organic waste and nutrients in the bed, but also plants which are growing in the soil exude nutrients from the roots.
Each species of plant exudes different nutrients to attract different species so a broad spectrum of plants are grown.
These can simply be used as green manure or consumed or sold.
Experienced home gardeners can quite happily make their own Gbiota beds but commercial growers can run a viable business selling Gbiota boxes to customers with no growing experience and who live in apartments.
Gbiota Boxes
Growers are most likely to sell Gbiota boxes with plants ready to start harvesting, but they may also supply clean skins, boxes ready to plant or even just supply the Wickimix which is a vital part of the Gbiota process.
These boxes work on the same principle as Gbiota beds using the flood and drain and recycling system but in a different way.
The box is fitted with a swivel tube which allows the bed to be flooded and drained and the soil blood to be circulated.
As with a bed, there is a length of ag pipe running along the base, and the box is initially loaded with three layers, grass clippings and organic waste, a nutrient layer and the top layer of mature Wickimix.
A compost tube is also used for customers who want to recycle their organic waste.
Seeding and germination
Seeds are sprinkled on the surface and covered with either Vermiculite (which is very light and holds water) or another layer of Wickimix.
Some seed varieties germinate best if they are totally flooded while others germinate best with light watering.
The compost tube goes down to the base of the box and is used to water the plants from underneath with the water wicking up to the root zone.
Regular watering
The compost tube can be filled with household waste so when water is poured into the tube the compost leachate is flushed into the base of the box.
The swivel tube is put into the up position and water (or the soil blood) is simply poured into the compost tube until the soil blood reaches the top of the swivel tube.
A container will be placed under the swivel tube to catch an overflow. The swivel tube will be turned to the down position to drain the box and the soil blood captured for the next irrigation.
Tipping
Plants are often grown on the cut-and-come-again principle in which just the tips of the leaves are harvested and the plant regrows. This gives a much longer harvesting period but at some point, the box will need reseeding.
Some customers may like to reseed themselves while others will just order a replacement box with plants ready to harvest.
In the past we had a very healthy gut-brain but died young from infectious diseases.
Feed your gut bugs, they are your friends, your mates. They look after you, digest your food, house much of your immune system, and make all sorts of complex chemicals your body needs.
They just need plants, eaten fresh and grown in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients.
But if you don’t feed them they get grumpy, just like a human mate would and they send out hormones that make food cravings so you overeat and get fat and sick, you may get diabetes and have a leg chopped off, die from a heart attack, or worst of all get dementia.
Our gut contains trillions of cells which communicate with each other - just like in a computer.
If we want to be fit and healthy then we need to feed out gut brain so it works properly. This is not a total guarantee, our genetics play a part but if we don’t feed our gut-brain then the odds of living a long and healthy life are remote.
The heartless massacre of ordinary people by powerful militia and the possibility of World War 3 cannot go unnoticed.
If that is not crazy I don’t know what is. Actually, I do - a food system which is making us fat and sick while we are a major food exporter.
Nice to think that our Governments are coming to save us, but it is not looking good. They are struggling as much as us to come to terms with the new world order as the over-exploitation of our natural resources begins to bite.
But how. Well, look at climate change. For decades scientists were telling us that things were going to get bad, but the delaying tactics of the fossil fuel industry and the lack of public pressure meant that Governments learned the ancient art of procrastination.
Then along came a school girl with Asperger syndrome, a grotty cardboard sign and determination and it totally tipped the balance. Now let us be clear, she did not change the world by herself, what she did was convince a few people that uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels was not the greatest idea, and they convinced the next tier who in turn convinced the next tier.
Now we need a food tribe. A tribe that understands that we need more than energy food, we need a food system that both makes us healthy and is sustainable.
We simply cannot be healthy without a healthy gut-brain and that means feeding it gut-brain food.
Our next job is to form a tribe with people who understand the importance of the gut-brain and want to live a long and healthy life and growers who can grow gut-brain food and see that this is providing both a community service but also an ethical and profitable business opportunity for those with a pioneering spirit.
I sat down to eat my breakfast, a bowl of muesli and there was a cute little mouse on the table watching me. Actually, a virtual mouse rather than a real mouse, but still cute.
I am very fond of this little mouse, it is what I do, working out how to grow food that will make us healthy. That is a bit different to knowing what food will make us healthy. Take that wonder vegetable that some people swoon over, Kale.
Kale can actually be what the trendies call a super-food but if you don’t grow it the right way in the right soil it is pretty useless.
I know from Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene that I, like everyone else want to keep our human Genes going long after we die and that needs males and females doing what they do - a bit of the good old hanky-panky.
Females have a problem with lack of iron but they can’t just go down to the local scrap yard and start munching on a wrecked car, apart from breaking their teeth that iron is not what we like to call bio-available which means it can get into her bloodstream.
Now that is my day job, finding some microscopic bugs which can convert the iron in a wrecked car to make it bio-available so it can go into a plant which she can eat, or maybe an animal that she can eat, so she gets a good dose of iron into her blood.
Males have a different problem, zinc. One good night of hanky-panky and there goes his supply of zinc. Again no use munching into a pile of zinc-coated roofing sheets, instead find some rock that contains zinc and the appropriate bugs, create some soil with bio-available zinc, grow some plants and bingo he is ready for another night of hanky-panky.
All good fun and I am really quite happy messing around with what some people may think is just yukky soil full of rotting stuff to feed a few bugs and grow healthy food and telling people stories about what I learn.
But then I went to go outside and there was this huge elephant, a really big one that was just too big to come inside so could not be the elephant in the room but is seemed quite happy to be the elephant just outside the room.
It has a big label on its trunk saying ‘Modern food system’.
Anyone with experience with elephants knows they are vegetarian which means they shit a lot, big steamy piles, so I was concerned that this elephant, although virtual, might still dump piles of shit in my patio.
And my fears were justified which is the point of this story.
Just in case you think I am making this all up just to spin a yarn can I recommend a couple of really good books.
Eating the Earth by Justyn Walsh
Food for Life The New Science of Eating Well by Tim Spector
Of course, the elephant is just an avatar for our food system but what a magnificent creature.
Let us look at it in reality.
We can go to the supermarket which is stacked high with foods from all over the world.
It may be a national pass time moaning about the cost of living, but that is because the increase in wealth from our ever-developing technologies goes into the pockets of a few ultra-rich people.
Compared with times past food is incredibly cheap and is a much smaller fraction of our weekly budget than not so long ago.
Households now spend only around a tenth of their disposable income on food compared to a third before 1950.
Food needs to be cheap or else we would not be able to afford tickets to the world’s favourite billionaire songstress, Taylor Swift. Let’s get our priorities right (or wrong).
But are we on the edge of a Titanic moment, nothing can go wrong until it does.
People who predict disaster with our food system do not have a good record.
Malthus the one-time predictor of food disaster became the butt of jokes. Paul Ehrlich did not do much better. So it seems that the best way of predicting the future is just to wait until it happens.
But predictions would make a really good disaster film with millions of starving people, hungry and angry (they even invented a word for it hangry) crossing the globe causing mayhem and disaster.
We can say that that won’t happen with the same assurance that people said the Titanic was unsinkable.
So forget about predicting the future, it is too unpredictable, and instead, look at what is happening right now and look for the trends. A lot safer.
There is a very nice phrase, overfed and undernourished and if you want to see that in action just go to your local shopping centre and count the number of overweight people with wobbly bums and tums and the people in wheelchairs or hobbling about on crutches with a leg chopped off.
It is what the experts like to call an epidemic of chronic diseases but to me that does not seem a good term, these are not infectious diseases they are a condition.
You can’t cure being overweight but as sure anything is in this world you can change your diet and not be overweight. But not by eating less and exercising more, we have been trying that for decades and it has not worked so we try eating even less and exercising more and it still doesn’t work.
Reminds me of the story of the farmer who was training his donkey to eat less. He got it down to one bean a day when the darned animal died.
This is where the current paradigm on weight is just so wrong. The common paradigm is that we get fat and sick because we are little piggies and overeat and that is just not the way it works.
Our bodies are smart and detect there is a deficiency in our diet, either of beneficial microbes or critical nutrients. The captain, the man on the ships bridge bangs his bell shouting emergency, emergency store any food you can lay your paws on.
Then the man on the bridge bangs his bell again and tells the gut down below to make up some of those hormones that make us hungry and squirt them out into our bloodstream so we end up just craving food, then the other crewmen pick up all this food that is streaming in and poke it neatly away in our bums and tums so we end up looking like a circus doll.
The number of people who claim to be religious has dropped but there is one religion that is doing extremely well.
This religion says that the free market will solve all the world’s problems and we don’t have to do anything, the invisible hand of the free market will fix everything, just go out and spend money on whatever we fancy (and if we can’t afford it then just borrow).
That may have been a workable religion many years ago when people lived in villages with a Saturday market and the power of the buyers and sellers was balanced and there was a good range of both suppliers and customers and there was no internet to spread disinformation.
But that is not the way the modern food system works. The food industry is riddled with Neo-monopolies.
Let us just talk about what a Neo-monopoly actually is. Governments don’t like monopolies, they are so clearly bad that they get spurred into action and do something about it.
In nature species become extinct (it could happen to us). But nature is smart so a new creature may evolve which is pretty much the same as before but does not get killed off.
That is exactly how Neo-monopolies evolved. Instead of one single company becoming a genuine monopoly which would attract the attention of the Government a new system has evolved.
Several companies maybe with one or possibly two lead companies with a handful of followers so they escape the actions of the marauding Government out to kill off monopolies but this little group know the rules.
There is no need for clandestine meetings in dark parks after night or popping secret messages into holes in the wall like in spy films, just follow the well-understood but unpublished rules, and watch the money pour in.
Sounds bad? Well, it is nothing compared to the damage done to the soils which are degenerating to little more than dirt to hold up the plants which are fed chemical input.
Whoops, I almost left out climate change. Sorry Greta. What a combination, climate change and destruction of our soils. Is there something wrong with our species that we have a death wish?
How is it that there are such amazing people like Zomi Frankcom, who worked for World Central Kitchen, risked her life, and was killed, trying to get food to starving people in Gaza, yet we have such atrocities as the deception in the Tobacco industry, copied by the oil and food industries.
The executives at these mega food companies, on their multi-million dollars-a-year salaries, and whose decision lead to 8 million people a year having a limb amputated from diabetes are regarded as pillars of the community.
Why are we so fixated with money? It is obvious that on a finite planet, we cannot continue to grow at an exponential rate and that at some point in time we must move from exploitation to recycling, a clever creature like us humans should be able to understand that simple message.
All these terrible things and people don’t even seem to care.
I care, I care about the life my two great-granddaughters will have, and all the terrible things I talk about that will happen in their lifetime, yet I get classified as a woke green nutter.
There have been times in my life when I have been poor and others rich. I have no delusions that being rich is more pleasant but money should not so dominate our thinking that we do things that make people fat, sick and have their legs chopped off from diabetes.
I can’t quite find the word, at least a polite word to describe that but there is no word for destroying the planet on which human life depends just for the sake of money.
What is wrong with us as a species, how are some people so dedicated to helping society while other seems intent on destroying us as a species? If you know the answer please email me 
But it gets worse, this reliance on chemicals results in food which is deficient in the beneficial microbes needed to replenish our gut biome and critical trace elements that are essential for our bodies but not essential for plants to grow into what looks like but isn’t healthy food.
The net result is the epidemic of non-infectious diseases which are here right now.
But what happens when we have used up all those minerals that power modern industrial agriculture? We only have some fifty years of phosphorous left.
Let me give you my version.
Human beings are not physically well equipped for life in the wild, being a bit challenged in the claw, teeth and beak departments.
True an adult human can survive in the wild for several episodes of Alone, cheered on by a television crew with a backup helicopter and support vehicles.
Within any particular society, there is generally a feeling that this society cannot fail.
Yet the facts show otherwise. Just look at the history of civilisations. European societies think they were the pioneers of civilisation but for some reason I don’t understand, civilisations sprung up across the globe in Asia, India and the Americas at roughly the same time.
Some of these had a long history. Another really good book is Farmers of Forty Centuries which examined why civilisations in China, Korea and Japan had been stable for over four thousand years while so many other civilisations collapsed.
The picture is clear, the civilisations that had long-term survival were based on recycling their waste to provide nutrients in their soils.
The civilisations that failed did it in two stages. They degraded their soils (and sometimes water systems) which weakened their civilisations but did not lead to their final collapse. That happened when they were overrun by other military-aggressive nations.
On one side of the war is the mega-corporations. Large well resourced and ruthless for short-term profit and on the other side the community is placid, looking for a quiet life and a bit naive.
The mega-corporations are willing to use the power of the disinformation age to convince us their food is healthy for us when in reality it lacks critical components which make us fat and sick and run the risk of having a leg chopped off from diabetes.
But worse, it is destroying the planet on which we all depend, exploiting the finite natural resources which will eventually lead to the collapse of the food system and civilised society as we know it.
This is a war the community must win, but right now we are in the battle of the gut-brain which is the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly what and how much we eat.
This is a battle we must win or we will lose the war - but how?
There are eight billion warriors on our side and we have the ultimate weapon, the power of the wallet, (well lots of wallets) but we are disorganised and therefore ineffective.
A few gallant individuals will fight on, growing some of their own food and we need them, they are the commandos in this war paving the war for the bigger battle to follow.
But we need the full power of the community to win this battle.
That is what the Gbiota club is all about, it brings together the local growers, who have the capacity to grow gut-brain food with the community as a whole who have the numbers.
And how can it work? The growers can produce Wickimix, that magical growing medium teaming with beneficial life and critical nutrients which feed the plants which we eat to feed our gut.
They can supply this in boxes, as clean skins, ready for the more adventurous members of the community who want to take charge of growing some of their own food or they can supply boxes, with plants ready to be picked and eaten genuinely fresh before the beneficial microbes die.
This is not because we have turned into little piggies and overeat, it is because our modern chemical industrial food system is deficient in phytonutrients and beneficial microbes.
Our gut has trillions of cells, the number of different species that we know about seems to increase with every scientific paper but the current number is close to ten thousand species. Again we have no idea what each individual species does but we do know they work as an integrated system and are vital to health.
Our gut-brain, our intelligent control system that regulates our bodies, senses this deficiency and sends out signals creating food cravings so we overeat and then we get fat and sick.
But the question everyone wants to know is if it really possible that growing a few vegetables on your patio can really resolve those chronic diseases.
Well let’s clear up a few points, the bulk of the food we eat is simply used by our bodies as fuel. Our modern food system is highly efficient in producing enough energy food to feed the eight billion people on earth.
People are all different, some people appear to be totally resistant to chronic disease and remain fit and healthy throughout their lives while other people are highly sensitive and it appears there is nothing we can do to help them.
Let us take the case of a person who is in the very early stages of diabetes. They may not even be aware of what is happening to their bodies but fat is starting to build up in their muscles so it is more difficult for the essential sugars, which are the fuel for the muscles, to enter.
However, at some point, fat starts to build up in the pancreas, which makes it more difficult to produce insulin.
Gbiota.com is our technical web site which shows how to feed our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil, which is used to grow plants which, if eaten fresh, before the microbes die, will feed out gut brain.
I drill a hole in the side as low as I can, then use a rubber grommet and connector to make a swivel tube outlet.
I cut a piece of slotted ag pipe to fit neatly into the base.
I used to just bend the ag pipe to make a filler, but now I either cut the pipe at 45° (and do the same with the vertical pipe) or just drill a large hole in the base pipe.
Either way allows me to view the water level in the base of the box, which is an important part of managing the system.
I then fill the base of the box to about a third of the height (about 100 mm) with organic waste. Grass clippings are great, but use whatever you can lay your hands on.
On top of this I add a nutrient mix containing minerals, manure and trace minerals (typically available in blood and bone), and of course worms to process the organic waste.
In the ideal situation I will then fill the box with soil created in a Gbiota bed (Wickimix), but if that’s not available, any good soil or potting mix can be used as a starter.
I wet the box from above and then seed as normal.
Nothing much new here – it is the way we operate the box that is important.
I set the swivel tube to the vertical (up) position and fill the box to the top of the swivel tube through the filler pipe.
This has to fit around normal living, so I typically do this over the weekend.
After the seeds have germinated and put down roots, I water from underneath.
I leave the swivel tube in the up position and allow the water (soil blood) to wick up to the roots of the growing plants. I do not top-water, but if the boxes are outside and it rains, the surface will be wetted.
By mid-week – which is the maximum length of time I want the soil blood to be stagnant – I twist the swivel tube down and catch the soil blood in a suitable container (e.g. a recycled milk bottle) for reuse on the next cycle.
Most of the soil blood will drain out, but there will still be some left in the base. I wait until that has all been used up before refilling. This is why I like to be able to view the water level through the filler pipe (or now, via the compost tube system).
There does not seem to be much of a problem with making the boxes. They are just boxes you can buy from a hardware store. They do need a few holes drilled, but that does not appear to be a major issue.
You can simply put out some bird seeds and the local birds will offer a free delivery service of fresh manure loaded with beneficial microbes. So simple no one believes me, but it works great.
Next, Wickimix needs minerals. A home grower may buy in bulk and store them, but an apartment dweller can still buy packets, and supplements like blood and bone can be readily purchased.
There doesn’t seem much alternative to buying these, mixing them up and putting them into a box that can be easily stored – no problem.
In addition, of course, we need worms, which are an integral part of the Gbiota system.
The real problem for the apartment dweller is how to handle the pongy food waste.
With a garden this is no problem – a couple of compost bins or rotating bins work fine – but having compost bins in an apartment is very not OK.
The smell problem can be solved by sealed containers, but those pesky flies still seem able to smell out a delicious meal – at least in sunny Queensland where I live.
So I tried two experiments.
In the first, I used two boxes. One contains the nutrient mix and the other is for the waste. When I have some waste, I put it into the second box and cover it with the nutrient and worm mix from the first box.
In the second experiment, I went back to an older system – the compost tube.
This is a pipe (about 100 mm diameter) that goes right down to the base of the box. This gives two input pipes: one for the water (or more correctly, soil blood) and one for the organic waste.
When I put any organic waste into the compost tube, I cover it with the nutrient mix and also flush with water. This takes any decomposed material to the bottom of the box where friendly worms kindly distribute it throughout the box.