An engineering brain.

Having been a stress-test engineer for submarines, I am used to working in the most precise of environments.  So it came as a huge shock to me when I started trying to grow trees on my nursery project and 50% of the trees failed. I thought I was just getting it wrong. But many foresters told me that it’s normal to experience high failure rates in the industry. So, my engineering brain started to whirr. It was then I realised that physics and chemistry had become the problem, over-engineered environments with synthetic chemicals to raise living things. What was missing? Biology!

In natural systems, important relationships have evolved over millions of years between plants and the microbiome in the soil.

We now know that fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms live both around and even within the roots of plants and trees. They help to share nutrition and provide resilience to disease and other abiotic stressors. Yet, as our tree production systems have become more mechanised and our growing media increasingly sterile, we have stripped the plant of these ancient allies and left it to fend for itself. The tree might be ok whilst given synthetic help within the confines of a nursery, but, once we plant the trees outside, no wonder we see such high levels of transplant shock and failure. The saplings don’t have the biological support they need to face these tough external conditions.

That’s where the idea came from to start the Woodland Grow range of products for the forestry sector. If we could find a way to develop inputs for foresters which gave trees a more natural start in life, inoculating their growing media with a healthy microbiome, we hoped that we could improve transplanting success rates from nursery to forest.

From the seed of an idea

From this seed of an idea, we have now grown a business which sells growing media, as well as fertilizers, ellepots and seed coatings, all using the philosophy ‘don’t forget the biology’.

And we’ve realised that the same story that we discovered in forestry holds true in horticulture and agriculture and too. This is why we have expanded the business and given it a new name – Re-Genus – to cater to agriculture too. Industrialised processes have simply forgotten the biology. Even worse, the use of chemical fertilizers actively killed the biology off. If the plants aren’t relying on the microbes for their nutrients, then the plants stop working with the microbes. Once the plants’ natural role is taken away, the microbes are no longer fed and they die. This leads to a vicious cycle, where the soil becomes sterile and more and more chemical inputs are required, not just for nutrition but also to make up for lack of disease resilience and health provided by the natural microbiome.

The exciting thing about biology is that we are just at the start of a revolution in our knowledge of everything it can do.

We have started with the philosophy that “Nature knows best”

We make the most microbially diverse growing media and fertilizers that we can so that the plants can ‘choose’ who to ‘get on with’. This has given us some great base products to work with. But in the future, we envisage using more DNA and RNA based techniques to explore what mixes of fungi and other microbes are working best in which crops, helping us to identify specific fungi to add to the mix. For example, if there are particular diseases of concern, we could produce  products with fungi to help plants resist those diseases.

I still go back to my engineering roots occasionally, as we address all important questions around scale-up, processing and environmentally-friendly packaging and shipping. But for now, I’m focused on the realisation that nature has been working on solutions for healthy and sustainable growth for hundreds of millions of years. If we learn to work with and harness biology, rather than trying to dominate it with physics and chemistry, then we can create the kind of economic prosperity that also regenerates and revives our living planet.