Put More Bacteria in Dirt and Save Lives

Right now, we have a rising population and land that is getting harder to farm.  Could the solution to this food crisis be an overhaul of the composition of dirt?

I live in the East Bay in California, and we've been in a severe drought. I went back to visit my family in Washington, DC and it rained practically every day.

I loved the warm rain and the drama of the thunderstorms, but was definitely caught off guard to experience such different weather from the place where I grew up.


Places that were wet are becoming wetter, and places that were dry are becoming drier, generally. Still, these patterns are wildly unpredictable. The effects of more greenhouse gases in the environment are not immediately felt, and are not uniform across spaces. As the concentrations of CO2 and other gases increase, weather patterns can shift dramatically. Our climate is changing, but it is difficult to know how it will settle.

Remember the Corn Belt Disaster last year?

A Dirty Solution



Farmers in Southern California have been told they will receive between 25-40% of their regular allotment of water this growing season because of the drought.

Biotech corporations like Monsanto have responded to these droughts by creating genetically modified (GMO) crops that require less water. However, these crops will do poorly in wet environments, forcing farmers to divine the weather when choosing seeds.



There may be an invisible solution to these uncertainties. Farming has always been a collaboration between farmer and the soil – a vast community of microbes- to create new life. Scientists have only recently been able to understand the microbial community, called the “agribiome,” with low-cost DNA sequencing and other advances. They are finding that microbes are instrumental in the health of every plant. Changing the location of these microbes could allow crops to adapt to climate change.

Scientists have been studying the microbes that allow other plants to survive in extreme conditions. There is an amazing pair of organisms that can survive in high and low temperature extremes, salinity, and drought around the thermal pools of Yellowstone. When the fungus (Curvularia protuberata) is infected with a heat-tolerant virus and grows together with symbiotic plants such as panic grass, they can survive temperatures of 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

There are many other types of microbes that allow for healthier plants. These microbes could be isolated and given to farmers around the world to help food survive.

Potential Risks/Benefits

Plants already depend on a complex system of microbes to survive. With this solution, we are changing the external environment rather than the internal genetic structure, so this solution is arguably less invasive than GMOs.

Still, like GMOs, its ultimate consequences are unknown. Generally, there are problems of introducing new organisms into an ecosystem; the new microbes may out-compete the other microbes in the agribiome and take over, reducing biodiversity overall. However, this may end up benefiting wild plants, which could also better survive the inconsistent conditions of climate change.  Microbial gel needs to be thoroughly tested in different places to demonstrate long-term and cumulative effects.

While I normally do not support "green" products or technology that goes against natural systems, I believe that the problem that these microbes can solve is dire enough to warrant its use.

The potential benefit of introducing microbes cannot be underestimated. Human population continues to expand, and it is estimated that climate change will cause hundreds of millions of people to become water stressed by the year 2030. The most impoverished people will suffer the most, and it is a tragedy. It is a tragedy that people are dying and will die of starvation because of the extremely skewed distribution of wealth and a lack of compassion for low-income people. If poor farmers around the world gained access to these microbes,  it could save lives.

Unfortunately, spreading these microbes has been reliant on the shitty distribution of scientists, a group of people who seem to be more concerned about one-upping each other “advances” than actually spreading them. Furthermore, many of the fungal/bacterial gels on the market are not regulated and are not effective. Educating farmers around the world about how to use these microbes and which ones are effective is a monumental challenge- but the pay-off could not be higher.