Cereals, and the seed-coating problem

Cereals of one type or another are grown in every part of the world, and traditionally their success rests on ammonium nitrate — some 70 kg per hectare on average for each crop grown. Very little is grown organically, because there is comparatively little manure to be had.

The side-effects of chemical nitrate are well documented: run-off, mass acceleration of biota, then respiration and the loss of the organic component of the soil. The situation has been serious enough for the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome to predict the end of conventional agriculture within the next fifty years.

Two products bear directly on restoring affected soils. One is vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhiza, the basis of AridGrow, which after a few weeks takes over the husbandry of the plant — supplying dissolved nutrients and water in return for sugar — and leaves behind glomalin, a glyco-protein that itself builds soil organic matter. The other is Zander Humate, which regulates the formation of amino acids and protein in the plant so that optimal parameters are reached.

Also noticeable in those trials was the length and sturdiness of the straw.

The mechanisation problem, and its solution

A subsistence farmer in East Africa can apply humate and mycorrhiza by hand. A commercial European operation does everything by machine, and that creates a genuine difficulty: it is no good steeping seed before sowing, because the seed responds by starting to germinate. The mycorrhizal spore has to reach the seed surface without ever meeting water.

Zander's answer is a PVA microfilm laid around the seed with the spores embedded in it. The spore stays dry and dormant until the seed is in the ground. Shelf life of the treated seed is about six months — enough for a season's planting, and it means cereal seed can be sown by ordinary tractor-drawn machinery with no change of practice at all.