We spend a lot of money looking at what is above the ground.
Leaf colour. Growth. Yield. Protein. Disease. Moisture stress. Fertiliser response. But the crop is telling you what happened underneath it weeks or months earlier. And right around every active root is where much of the real work is going on.
Not centimetres away. Millimetres. There is a living zone around roots called the rhizosphere, and once you understand what happens there, a lot of modern farming starts to look very different. A plant root is not just sitting in dirt waiting for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to arrive.
The plant is actively changing the soil around itself. It releases sugars, amino acids, organic acids and other carbon compounds through its roots. It also produces a slippery gel called mucilage.
That gel helps roots push through soil, keeps contact between the root and soil particles, holds moisture around the root and provides a place where microorganisms can live. Then the biology moves in.
Bacteria colonise the root surface and the material surrounding it. Fungi extend threads through the soil. Microbes produce their own sticky compounds. Fine soil particles become bound around roots. What develops is a living root zone. And that is where nutrient cycling really starts to make sense.
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The plant is feeding biology for a reason.
A plant spends a lot of energy collecting carbon through photosynthesis. Then it deliberately sends some of that carbon underground and releases it around its roots. That is not waste.
The plant is feeding organisms that can help it operate in the soil. Those microorganisms are involved in breaking down organic material, cycling nitrogen, releasing phosphorus, interacting with minerals, building soil aggregates and changing the chemical environment immediately around the root.
Some fungi extend far beyond the root itself and explore tiny spaces a root could never reach. So when we talk about feeding a crop, there is another workforce sitting between the fertiliser bag and the plant. Soil biology.
If that workforce is weak, damaged or missing, you can keep adding inputs and still have a system that does not work particularly well. Hungry soil is starving plants no matter how much 'fert' you use.
That is one of the reasons paddocks can contain plenty of nutrient on paper while plants continue to show deficiencies. The nutrient may be there. That does not mean the plant can get it.
There is a film around the root.
Researchers have spent years looking at what happens right on the surface of growing roots. One of the interesting findings is that plant mucilage and microbial biofilms can work together around the root.
A biofilm is simply a community of microorganisms living together in a sticky, hydrated matrix. You can picture it as a microscopic living film.
The plant produces part of the habitat through its mucilage and root exudates. The microorganisms produce their own extracellular substances. Soil particles, water and nutrients become part of that environment.
The plant and the microbes are not operating as two completely separate things. They are working in the same very small piece of ground. That matters enormously when conditions get tough.
Have you ever pulled up a plant and had soil hanging onto the roots?
That can tell you something. Researchers call the soil tightly attached to roots the rhizosheath. It forms through the combined action of fine roots, root hairs, mucilage, microorganisms, microbial polymers, soil particles and water.
In a well-developed rhizosheath, soil does not simply fall away from the root. There is structure around it. Research has found that rhizosheath soil can contain more water, more organic carbon and different microbial activity than the soil immediately beyond it.
That is worth thinking about in a dry paddock. A plant does not have the luxury of sending someone out with a watering can every afternoon. It has to keep the root connected to moisture for as long as possible. That is it's job. The physical and biological structure around that root matters.
This is why soil structure and biology cannot really be separated
Farmers know the feel of good soil. You can see when it crumbles properly. You can see when water goes into it instead of running across it. You can see the difference between a root system travelling down through the profile and one fighting its way through a hard layer. Biology is part of that.
Microorganisms produce sticky compounds that help bind tiny soil particles into aggregates. Fungi physically extend through soil. Roots create channels. Organic matter feeds the process. Carbon becomes part of the system. Water and air move through the spaces created between aggregates. None of this means biology works independently of soil chemistry, machinery, rainfall, compaction or management. Of course it doesn't.
But treating the soil as chemistry alone misses half of what is going on.
This is also why simply adding more fertiliser eventually runs into a wall.
Modern agriculture became very good at supplying soluble nutrients. And those nutrients certainly grow crops. But there is an important difference between supplying nutrients and having a soil system capable of cycling nutrients. When marketing of product talk about this the product has no science to prove it - it is simply talk. Earthfood has in fact got these results and TDN* are high.
Nature does not manufacture a bag of NPK every season. Nutrients move through biological, chemical and physical processes. Microorganisms decompose material. They transform nitrogen compounds. They mobilise phosphorus. They interact with minerals. They cycle sulfur. They alter conditions around roots.
Plants release compounds specifically into that environment. The whole thing is moving all the time.
"If the biological side of that system is functioning poorly, simply increasing the amount going in from the top does not necessarily fix what is happening around the root".
Bronwyn Holm, Founder Earthfood
Sometimes it just increases the bill, on the last bill. $15k for product and the results the same or even less right.
This is exactly why Earthfood exists.
Earthfood was never developed to become another fertiliser. There are thousands of fertilisers already. It was developed because the missing part of many farming systems is not another source of NPK.
It is living, functional soil biology. Earthfood Life contains a broad living soil-borne microbial system designed to establish in the root zone and participate in the processes plants evolved with.
Nutrient cycling. Mineral interaction. Soil aggregation. Carbon cycling. Rhizosphere activity. Root-zone function. That is a very different job from supplying a nutrient.
And it is why comparing Earthfood with a liquid fertiliser, seaweed product, fish product, humic product or microbial stimulant misses the point.
Those products may each supply something. Earthfood supplies the living organisms that do the work.
Water is the carrier. Soil is the home.
This is one of the simplest ways we can explain Earthfood. We dilute it in water because we need a way to spread the organisms across the paddock, and Hydrogen (H2O) wake them from their patented suspension/sleep.
But they are not intended to live their lives in the spray tank. Their home is the soil. Their working area is the root zone. Once there, their job is to establish within a system already being driven by the plant.
The crop supplies carbon. Roots release exudates. Microorganisms respond. Soil particles interact. Nutrients cycle. Roots explore. That is the system we are trying to rebuild.
And no, this is not about throwing microbes on bad soil and hoping for a miracle
The biology still needs somewhere to live. Compaction matters. Waterlogging matters. Extreme salinity matters. Chemical residues matter. Organic carbon matters. Moisture matters. Plant cover matters. Management matters. That is farming.
But there is an enormous difference between managing those conditions with a functioning biological workforce in the soil and managing them without one.
We see it repeatedly in the field. When biology begins working again, the soil starts behaving differently. Water infiltration changes. Aggregation develops. Roots move differently through the profile. Nutrients that were present but poorly available begin moving through biological pathways. Plant performance follows what is happening underneath.
Farmers already know more about this than they think.
Pull up a good plant. Then pull up a poor one. Don't look at the leaves first. Look at the roots. How many fine roots are there?
How deep have they travelled? Does soil cling around them? Is the ground crumbly or massive? Are there earthworms? Does water disappear into the soil or sit on top? Does the soil smell alive? Are the roots white and actively growing, or brown, restricted and sparse?
That is the paddock talking to you. A laboratory can give us numbers. Numbers are valuable. But a shovel still tells you things a spreadsheet cannot.
The crop above ground is the result. The root zone is where much of the story begins.
Agriculture has spent decades concentrating on what we can add to a crop. More nitrogen. More phosphorus. More potassium. More trace elements. More products.
But plants were working with microorganisms hundreds of millions of years before anyone invented a fertiliser spreader. Around every active root there is still a biological system trying to operate.
The question is whether we are helping it, ignoring it or continually knocking it backwards.
Earthfood exists because we decided to work with that system. Not around it.
And once you understand what is happening within those few millimetres around a root, you begin to understand why.
*TDN=Total density nutrition.
Research behind this article
Nazari et al. (2022), Biogels in Soils: Plant Mucilage as a Biofilm Matrix That Shapes the Rhizosphere Microbial Habitat, Frontiers in Plant Science.
Philippot et al. (2013), Going back to the roots: the microbial ecology of the rhizosphere, Nature Reviews Microbiology.
Danhorn & Fuqua (2007), Biofilm Formation by Plant-Associated Bacteria, Annual Review of Microbiology.
Bonfante & Anca (2009), Plants, Mycorrhizal Fungi, and Bacteria: A Network of Interactions, Annual Review of Microbiology.
Aslam et al. (2022), Rhizosheath: An adaptive root trait to improve plant tolerance to phosphorus and water deficits?, Plant, Cell & Environment.
Geoderma (2023), Rhizosheath: Distinct features and environmental functions.
Bronwyn Holm, Founder, Earthfood®
Farmers' Friend • Gardeners' Guide • Soil Advocate • Growers' Voice