What's Living Under Your Lawn — And Why It's Making You Sick

Ocyrus Erickson is the founder of Terra Preta LLC, a soil health consulting and functional landscaping company based in Palm Harbor. In this episode, we dig into the invisible world beneath your lawn — and why what's happening underground affects everything from your plants to your family's health.

What You'll Learn:

• Why synthetic fertilizers are creating dependent, pest-prone plants — and what to do instead
• How weeds are actually diagnostic tools that tell you exactly what's wrong with your soil
• What functional landscaping is and how it can reduce your maintenance costs and chemical exposure
• The surprising link between residential lawn chemicals and serious health conditions like Parkinson's
• Simple first steps for improving soil health in a raised bed or existing yard

About Ocyrus Erickson: Ocyrus is a Palm Harbor native and founder of Terra Preta LLC, a soil health consulting and functional landscaping company. His work is grounded in the science of soil microbiology — the billions of organisms living beneath our feet that determine how healthy our plants, properties, and communities can be. He also creates microscopic art photography to show people the invisible world he talks about every day.

• 🌐 Website: terrapretallc.com
• 🎨 Microscopic art: Microscopic Marvels US on Etsy
• 📍 Palm Harbor Library gallery — check for current exhibit

📬 Join the Palm Harbor Local newsletter: palmharborlocal.com

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Transcript

Soil Is The Hidden Engine

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So Terra Prada originally came from the realization of if you truly want to isolate yourself, you have to understand how to not starve to death, how to produce food, how to know that if you're gonna be away from a grocery store, you have to have the groceries yourself. One of the number one things I always love to say is environment dictates expression. And by changing the environment, you change what it is that those plants express. If you don't have the microorganisms or the fungi or the paramecium, it is a food chain. It's how we exist to eat anything. A single teaspoon of healthy soil can contain upwards to a billion different microorganisms, eight kilometers of fungal hyphae, and probably about a few hundred thousand species. We don't realize like we're our planet is called Earth. Everywhere is soil. We're ingesting the things that we are spraying.

Osiris Erickson And Terra Prada

SPEAKER_00 0:49

We're exposed on so many different levels. Welcome to Palm Marvel Local, the show about the active outdoor and healthy lifestyle that defines life here on Florida's Gulf Coast. I'm your host, Donnie Hathaway, and today we are joined by Osiris Erickson, who is the owner and founder of Terra Prada, which is a soil health consulting and functional landscaping company. And we're having a real conversation about conservation, wellness, and our connection to the soil, why it matters more than most people realize, and how the health of our landscapes shapes life here in Palm Harbor. Let's jump in. So your company, Terra Prada, Terra Prada LLC. Why don't we start there and just tell me a little about who you are? Okay. And uh and then like where this idea came from.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Yeah. So my name is Osiris, uh, Osiris Erickson to be full. Um I'm a Palm Harbor native pretty much for almost all my life. I've been here born in Largo. I lived in a few different places. I was a Rotary Youth Exchange student over in Hungary for about a year when I was in high school. So I technically was a high school dropout just to actually go and live a year abroad and study for a year, and but came back and finished all of my normal classes and everything. From there, I went and worked from 14 years old. I was over in Idaho for a few months and I was trying to basically just I was a busboy to start there and move back. And then over after a few more years, it was up in Kentucky. But almost all my life was over in Florida and always exposed to the nature here, the gardens here. But I'm dipping out to different places of the world to actually see like what else it looks like.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Yeah, yeah, that's important, right? To to broaden your horizons and experience different different cultures, different necessary, I think.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

That's what a lot of people lack nowadays.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yes, for sure. So so where did this business idea come from? And then like, what do you what do you guys focus on? What are you guys doing?

Microbes Fungi And Plant Expression

SPEAKER_01 2:37

So Terra Prada originally came from the idea of really my own personal experimentation and a necessity. It was after I was trying to go and purchase property and to get a homestead up in the middle of Appalachia when I was living in Kentucky. That was sort of the plan, looking for property, trying to see what we wanted. And the realization of if you truly want to isolate yourself, you have to understand how to not starve to death, how to produce food, how to know that if you're gonna be away from a grocery store, you have to have the groceries yourself. And so I was researching because I I've always had my own garden. I've always been landscaping. And my first job was honestly at 10. I was helping my grandmother uh redo their entire front half uh front half of her property to essentially more than three or four times a year, we'd like to tear everything up, do different designs, and essentially the child labor for that. My goal, my my pay was to be able to experiment in the backyard consistently. And so I always had garden beds growing up. But it was out of a sudden interest and realization where I found a channel that was showing me uh symbiotic microbes on YouTube of essentially there is this connection because everything I've learned in school was plants get their energy from the sun, the roots get essentially water from the ground, and that's about it. But it is significantly more complex than that. And there's actually millions and millions of little species and species uh sorry, of fungi, paramecium, bacteria, all these little tiny organisms that are the worker bees and the partnering force that actually provide the nutrients in the soil to the plants. And realizing that was sort of this massive epiphany of like, holy cow, I didn't even realize that there was this much of a network. And you always look at it as something that was isolated. And from there, I bought a microscope, started trying to pluck little reeds. I was doing jar cultures of different types of sands or soils and seeing what bacteria or what paramecium I would find, I would inoculate with different species to go in my different. I had arugula, flowers, lettuces, strawberries. Like I was taking as many different garden plants and flowers as I could and seeing how do these microbes, how do these fungi affect them? And within just a period of months, I was seeing double the germination rate. I had arugula leaves that were from normally three to four inches in size, they were about a foot and a half in length. All the flowers were much darker, vibrant green for their leaves, but the colors just blew up with the yellows and the pinks and everything that we're looking for. And taking all of those notes, taking from the studies and the information that I found, I created a pattern recognition of a system that you could treat and change the soil to essentially change the outlook of a plant. And that's where uh one of the number one things I always love to say is environment dictates expression. And by changing the environment, you change what it is that those plants express. And they have something that we don't where they quite literally will alter their genetic expression based on what it is that they're able to be exposed to or not. And so it's not like you're creating a new plant, but you're seeing a part of that plant that never would have been alive until you gave it what it needed.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

And so it it was blowing my mind the results that I was seeing, and it seems silly not to start a company.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

And were you expecting? I guess you weren't probably weren't expecting to see those results. Like I mean, I mean, testing all that. Not at all.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yeah. I was reading books and finding studies, and because a lot of it is a lot of different countries around the world are very, very progressive at a lot of this right now. And the United States is sort of catching up right now because there's so much of the chemical infrastructure that stops the biological approach for studies. But so I'd hear about this study in Pakistan or Iran or in India or South America of all these people applying different soil amendments or a different species of microorganism, or they make sure that each of these roots are connected with a fungi that is supposed to increase your phosphorus uptake or reduce the amount of water that you would have, and it'd be 300% more water absorption in the soil versus not. And it almost seemed too good to be true. Yeah. And so that's where I had to do it myself. I had to take what I was seeing in these books and in these studies and try to see what I can do myself. And it was all there. And it was too much to not say no to. And so it just ultimately, like I never looked back after realizing that there is some form of underground universe. I find it beautiful. I do a lot of microscopic art photography. Cool. And it's to just through my microscope show people what it is that I talk about of this invisible, complex world that's beneath our feet. And no one really knows about it. No one asks those questions, no one is aware of what it could be and the way that we have stunted it from how we've been doing things too.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah. Well, I mean, most people, it's like out of sight, out of mind, like you don't even see it, right? So most people don't experience like what it actually looks like, like you have down on a in the soil and stuff. But yeah, like going back to in the United States, like when I don't know when it was, like, but obviously we've used chemicals for the longest time to kind of create the outcomes that for many years.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Yeah. Yeah. It hasn't always been that. I actually wrote a few articles and stuff talking about the the history of fertilizer, and so it's uh bat shit crazy, I think if you've heard the term, yeah, actually originated from the South American war over guano. And it was kings and queens trying to go and invade each other's territories so that they could literally harvest the guano to fertilize their own fields and feed their people. And so the term bat shit crazy became a thing out of the necessity of fertilizer. And that actually only lasted for maybe two decades. And then there were all these islands that we would harvest, layer cake is what they called it as the fancy term to market. And after 20-something years, we completely used up all the world's supply of guano at the rate at which we could supply it at a market, and then we switched to bison bones, buffalo. And right around the time of the 1800s, 1900 American period, we had all of the boom of what it was the market hunting for buffalo and bison. And there was an excess of the bones that no one really used. And so they ground all of those up. And again, after about two more decades, we used up hundreds of millions of bison bones for fertilization.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

And then came the Haber Bosch process, which was the birth of chemical fixation for synthetic agriculture, which was a German scientist that had figured out how to essentially take what was a natural process of microorganisms in the soil, fixating nitrogen in the atmosphere to being below the soil, because our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. We breathe it in, we get it for free, but many people pay for it today. And they had figured out how to artificially produce that cycle so that they could make what was always plant-available nitrogen to quickly disperse to all these people that now had no form of an organic fertilizer. And it's it was around after the time when the bison bones dwindled up that manure also became a practice, and that's why we keep it a lot because a lot of our livestock are easily producing that. Yeah. And so it's become a staple. And that also has plenty of nitrogen, plenty of available nutrients, but it's it's coming with many other factors too.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

So we've always used like some sort of fertilizer to for plants and stuff. Like that's the way we've we've grown grown crops and and stuff, but it's also been it's in the past, it was natural. In many ways. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

And that's where I I didn't really talk about it before when you first asked the question, but terrada, the name of the company, is actually from a very specific soil in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

SPEAKER_02 10:29

Okay.

From Guano To Terra Preta

SPEAKER_01 10:29

And I don't know if you've ever heard about it, but Terra Prada is this anthropogenic soil, is what it's referred to as a fancy name. Essentially, it means ancient man-made soil. And it was from thousands to hundreds of years ago. These tribes in the middle of the Amazon, they theorized it could have been burn pits or potential trash or whatever it is that had an accumulation of all this biomaterial, plant matter, even smash pots and whatnot for terracotta and clays. But the Amazon rainforest is some of the worst soil on the world, as funny as it seems, because of how green it is, but it is incredibly washed away from all the currents from coming down from the mountains, and also from the other side from the coast is bringing salt water. So almost all of it is no density, no nutrients, no unideal pHs. Yeah. But Terra Preta is these pockets that these tribes created thousands of years ago when they were living inside the Amazon rainforest and never needs fertilization, still to this day outperforms all of the other surrounding regions of the farms that have other types of soils, and no one really knows necessarily how to recreate it. And so part of what I was doing when I was studying and going through all my experimentation was trying to research because I heard about this magic soil in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and I thought it would be like a flare gun to anyone who knew the name that would talk about the company. But essentially, it is that I saw no study talking about the life within the soil. Everything that I had found of different universities or archaeologists or biologists that also went out there was only a material composition. They weren't looking at what it was of a genetic biodiversity, of the life inside that is actually what maintains a nutrient-rich soil. If you don't have the microorganisms or the fungi or the paramecium, it is a food chain. It's how we exist to eat anything, how anything stays alive. And even below the ground at that small scale of a level, it is very much a food chain too. And if you break that, if you reduce the amount of some type of organism, the entire chain breaks.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

And that's what we've done with many of our synthetic approaches in the chemical way, is we replaced a job of those nitrate fixing uh microbes. We throw down uh salt on the fields because every single fertilizer that we have that's synthetic is actually paired with salt. And if you've ever heard of the term salting one's field, it's not really a good thing to do to anywhere you're trying to grow something. And we created what I like to see as junky plants because they don't have the support system. It's like when you go to AA or something of like how to get into recovery, what's the first thing they do is they surround you with all your friends and your family. And it's like, this is this intermission. Like you're alone, you're just doing all these drugs, and it's like, that's what all of our plants are doing is they're getting this chemical, quick fix drug. They're not making any of their friends. They actually are able to detect the quantity of nutrients around them, but if it's in this always readily available form, they don't form the connections with the other microbes that actually need a job to do. Plants collect sun to get sugar to use as a currency. I like to refer of root networks for a plant as a stock exchange, is honestly like the best metaphor to be using because you have, say, for example, we have uh a sunflower. That's pretty simple. One big old platform bringing straight down to the ground. There are many, many different species that are all trying to do a particular task. One's getting nitrogen, one's getting phosphorus, one's getting molybdenum or magnesium, another one's acting as a bodyguard and actually holding along the root tips or trying to fix in the crevices so that a pathogen can't get in there and make that plant sick.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

And all of them want to get paid for work, and they don't get access to the sun below the ground. The plants figured that out, and they evolved to produce the currency of sugar to get everything below the soil to work for them. And that is what I sort of uncovered at Terra Prada to try to utilize that system. We don't fertilize our forests, we don't have to irrigate our forests. They have a system that sustains themselves. Yeah. And it existed long before we started doing stuff. Yeah.

Functional Landscaping That Reduces Sprays

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Before we continue with today's episode, I want to take a quick moment to thank Valley Bank for supporting Palm Harbor Local. I recently moved my business banking over to Valley, and what stood out to me right away was how relationship-driven their approach is. You're not calling a hotline, you're working with real people who understand local businesses and make decisions locally. This episode is supported by Chad Britz, the first vice president at Valley Bank's countryside branch, who works closely with individuals and business owners throughout our entire community. If this kind of local relationship-driven banking matters to you, you can learn more at www.valley.com or email Chad directly at C B R I T T S at Valley.com. Yeah, I mean it is interesting, right? And we we've I'm just thinking about like landscaping and all the different neighborhoods and communities and stuff. And a lot of them have gotten away from just the the native Florida plants and stuff, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:44

It's it's nothing that is native to a lot of them do use natives for sure, but the issue is that we've created an environment where even those are growing at a stunted scale. So they will grow. Really, any plant will always try to grow in its environment. It's just whether or not it's going to be at the best of its ability.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

So what is I I think you'd mentioned this in in your in your notes, but like functional landscaping, like what like give me an example of that and like what that looks like in in in real life.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

So when I define a landscape or when I'm designing a landscape, typically I ask people, do you want something that will grow good, smell good, or taste good? And those are what I'm trying to provide. And essentially a functional landscape is something that doesn't just look pretty or serve as a space filler, but actually provide something for the homeowner or the property owner, whether or not that's going to be a reduction in costs, providing food or attracting beneficial pollinators or insects, or something that we also do a natural pest shield is essentially one of our number one most functional ways of designing a landscape. And it's creating a system in which we can have host plants or deterrent types of species of plants to make sure that there is the worker bees, the bats, the spiders, the lace wings. We create an environment in which you're not needing to spray, you're not needing to kill, because they have already done that. And all we have to do is try to figure out well, what are the problems? What are the pests? How can we fit a plant or a bat box or an owl box or something in here so that we create an environment that makes it so you don't have to do something, it's doing it for you. And that's sort of the core is that it can provide while also look pretty. And we just have a lot of pretty things that aren't really they're just costing money and taking space.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, I mean, just listening to you explain all that. I'm I'm just thinking that's probably why we've gotten to where we've gotten because there's a there's a lot that goes into that, and every in every house is probably a little bit different in the way, you know. So it's there's it's not just like I can't just create this one landscape and then plug it into you know this entire community. Not it's different for each each home.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

It is, but a lot of it is also it's more so the conditions of the soil are different and varying. Like I was just doing one property test this morning where just along maybe like 50, 60 feet of a spanning space, they had radical differences on some of their uh soil results, and it was showing the results on the growth as well. The middle area of their yard was completely bare and patchy, the other side of the left was having a little bit more grass, and then all the way to the right was like 20 different species of weeds. And that's uh weeds are an amazing, amazing thing that I feel like most people don't really appreciate, and they tell you what's wrong. And that's why instead of killing them, we write them down. We analyze what species they're growing and where, and then we match that with the test data that we find. And that actually is just another piece of evidence that allows us to determine a plan for actually fixing the soil. Weeds are indicators for essentially a particular type of soil problem because they only grow in very specific conditions. So each weed is telling you, I'm over here trying to fight compaction, I'm over here dealing with too much water, I'm over there having a little bit too much phosphorus, I'm not happy. And then you can literally take these down, ride them around, go and do the correlated testings, and then provide an entire plan that is stopping those weeds from growing because they're actually trying to fix the problem. We've created a condition in which only the weeds are thriving. And that is because most of them are soils that cannot support stronger, more complex life. Some of our flowers are perennials and annuals, and that's why they'll do pretty well, but that's what weeds are as well. But if you're trying to grow crops, if you're trying to get citrus trees, or you're trying to get some sort of larger, more ornamental growth, you have to actually prep a soil environment to be able to sustain that. And a lot of people just slap stuff in the ground, they replace it in another six months. Like I talk with different people of larger landowners like Sylvan Abbey, and every couple of months they're going around and just like, oh, we got another acre and a half of sod delay here, all these plants died. We got to fill up our pond with a bunch of herbicides because they're surrounded by weeds. And so they don't realize that there is a way to stop these cyclical problems.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

How do you define weeds? Are they um are they non-invasive plants or or a weed is a part of like our natural environment?

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Very much so. Yeah. Like there's a weed is a marketing term, man. And so that's where they want you to think of them as something derogatory, but realistically, they're your partners, they're your friends. We've just created like the way in which most people want to design their environment or their landscape, where they're compacting it down to construct the area, they're laying weed tarps, they're laying rocks down on top of that. You're destroying your soil environment. It can't breathe, it can't actually transpirate any water, it's not having any root activity because nothing's growing through it. But the only thing that that environment is trying to grow is more and more complex life. And the weeds are always there. There's a seed bank pretty much everywhere of weeds that have existed for hundreds of years, and they're just a plant as a as a definition. I would say a weed is just a plant that's growing in a place you don't want. But there's nothing wrong. A lot of weeds flower, a lot of weeds look pretty, and like I do, like they tell me what's wrong. I I like weeds, and we can get rid of them, but it's you have to get rid of the reason that they're there. And it's not just the weed itself, because then you'll consistently spray all these horrible pesticides or herbicides and try to get them all cleared, and they're back again in a week. But you're always dealing with that chemical, you're always dealing with the exposure of that. You can't go and lay down in your lawn after you get an irrigation because you're gonna wake up with horrible rashes on your leg the next day. It's a real thing, and it doesn't have to be that way.

Lawns Weeds And Organic Pest Controls

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Yeah. I have so many questions. I'm just thinking about my yard and and So many different, you know, we've been there for like eight years, and so we have a lot of weeds, you know, and and like you were saying before, there's certain pockets where they flourish and grow a lot, and then others they they don't. So I definitely want to have you out and and you know that's what I do, man. I'd love to chat with you about that because that's that's very interesting. So what about grasses, right? So St. Augustine, the most common Yeah, not native.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

All grasses are actually horrible for our environment, and that's why they require a bunch of work to keep. That's why you're always having to go out and fertilize, that's why you're always having to irrigate, that's why you're always having to go out and thatch. Like one of the number one things that I do for a lot of people that I honestly try to use it as a reason to get them, tell them to get rid of their lawn, yeah, is just dethatch. Grass has a suicidal growth behavior where it is constantly trying to outcompete parts of itself. And eventually they will just grow over one another and form this horrific thatch layer that stops all new growth. And it's they're not native, they're not fit for our heat, they're not fit for our salinity. There's a few tolerance and species that people will say and market for you, but even still, they're not really ideal for if you can create an environment, because like think of a botanical garden. You can create any environment anywhere. It depends on the amount of work that you want to put into it. And so you could have a grass lawn in Florida if you want to prepare your soil to actually support that. If you want to try to adjust your pH, reduce your sand content, try to get a little bit more of the right bacteria. Like there's things that you could do, but it requires work and it's not going to stay like that because it's not what the environment itself is trying to do.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Yeah. So there's no way of maintaining the grasses without using the fertilizers or anything like that to maintain them the way they we do it like organically with fertilizers.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Like we can still treat and use inoculations where we actually try to put the microorganisms onto the soil. We try to add biochar, we try to adjust the topsoil, the areas so that essentially whatever might still be within the soil that would be functioning could start turning alive and actually provide to the grasses. Like we we fertilize and we treat, but we don't use any chemicals or anything at all. We have all organic methods of doing so, even for like pest controls and other stuff. Like we fight cinch bugs using nematodes, and we don't fight them with any horrible poison. We put a predator down and we cultivate essentially a colony throughout that lawn that goes and seeks out all the little tiny larvae of those cinch bugs, gets them dead. Yeah. And no chemicals, no harms, it's it's quick.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Yeah. It's interesting, right? Because there's there's all these organic solutions that are just the way that the environment works, right? It's not like yeah, so it's like, why did we ever get away from that in the first place? That's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Yeah. I would say a lot of marketing, a lot of keeping up with the Joneses. Yeah. A big thing for lawns is actually from like the 17th century of royals. And it was a sign for the rich and the elite to prove that they didn't need to use their own land. And so they grew a non-productive crop. And grass was a sign of I got my stuff from somewhere else. I don't grow my own food. And people wanted to emulate wealth or exactly because land was wealth and still is. That's the true form of wealth is owning land and producing from that land as well. But if you produce on someone else's farm, then you get to keep yours all nice and clean. And everyone wanted to create that image for themselves. And it became easier once we figured out how to create all these different artificial nitrogens and all these fertilizers and ways that we could keep a grass lawn like that. Yeah. But it's it's not fitting and doesn't do anything for you. It's more so just maintaining an image.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Yeah, it's interesting. So what about? I mean, I think you've kind of already spoken to this, right? But the the fertilizers and how they're causing long-term damage or how they have caused long-term damage for the yard.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah. Fertilizers, among many other things. So I can redefine that as industrial agriculture or land maintenance using either synthetics or large mechanical interventions, trying to go through and manually till to destroy to alter an environment. Fertilizers themselves, as synthetics, are doing a few different things. I already said how they have the salt, they're raising your pH, but they're also confusing your plants. They're trying to make it to where they do not reach out. There are studies to where if you create different quantities of nutrients inside a scale environment, the plant will either reach out and form further root connections or it won't. And by applying all of the quick release fertilizers, they never actually try to produce further connections, even though they have all the support they need next to them. There are monocropping, which is honestly a huge one, is reducing biodiversity. It's an ecosystem. Soil is alive. If a single teaspoon of healthy soil can contain upwards to a billion different microorganisms, eight kilometers of fungal hyphae, and probably about a few hundred thousand species. It is the most complex environment that we have. We've only even identified maybe one to two percent of soil organisms. It is the next frontier, it is right beneath our feet. And it is being replaced and being stunted because it's difficult to work with nature at times. It doesn't always want to move. Um, it there is weather conditions, there are site conditions, like you could be in a farm that just naturally doesn't have as the right amount of composition that you have. And rather than trying to do the hard work of slowly adjusting that soil to where it could work for you, people just want to till it up, they move some soil on the top of it, or they consistently spray and apply everything that they need. The monocropping is an entirely different issue because of disease pressure. It's essentially like if you're a thief trying to break into a neighborhood, it's it easier if they have all different lock and keys or all the same exact key? Which would you prefer as a thief?

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Yeah, the same.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

The same. And so they only have to figure out one of those, and then suddenly hundreds of thousands of acres are susceptible for damage. We're seeing that right now with the oranges. I don't know if you're aware of citrus greening, but in the past 10 years, the Florida orange production has dropped 92%.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

We are almost not from because of disease, from disease and monocropping and specifically citrus greening. And we're trying to figure out what it is that we can do about it. But the only conditions that we're further or the only solutions that we're further creating are more isolation. Yeah, they've created tents around all these fields so that we don't have exposure to anything. And you need the biodiversity, you need the different pieces of the puzzle to trick a pathogen. It's an organism that's trying to figure things out as well, and it's an active arms race. The soil is horrific for their perspective. They're all eating each other and fighting each other and trying to get on top of one another. It's it's a battlefield. Yeah. And we created an obstacle course with only one obstacle, and they are just jumping right through that.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

They're like, We'll take it. Yeah. The so the I think the first the first time I kind of heard about soil health and stuff was through like regenerative farming practices, right? I think that that became more desired and stuff as we thought about our food and what we were ingesting and stuff, right? So it only makes sense that it we're looking at like every single in soil environment, right, in our home, which is which I think leads me back to like when we first had that conversation and I realized like what you were doing. I'm like, well, why haven't why hasn't this come up before? You know, because it's not really food, probably, right? Because it's not impacted us in some way.

Soil Chemistry And Human Health Risks

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Not that we've seen, right? And that's where that's why I'm talking with healthcare providers right now. That's why I'm trying to go be a healthcare vendor at like these Palm Harbor events and stuff, is because it it is affecting us. It's just not to the way that we've really connected the dots on yet.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

We are the sickest nation in the world, pretty much at this point, but we have a very long lifespan. So over the course of the past couple decades since we've switched to the synthetic agriculture, we have produced more abundant food. We have produced a longer lifespan, but the rise of illness has significantly associated or has significantly increased. The rise of Alzheimer's dementia, we have uh it's called the Parkinson's belt that's developing up in the north central United States where we have the larger breadbasket, most of our agricultural providers. There are entire segments of towns that are being diagnosed with Parkinson's due to the level of exposure that they have over time. And even down beneath here, it's our it's our waterways, it's our homes, it's our bodies. We have the golf courses all around here. I was talking this morning and it was a study showing how within a mile of living within a golf course, you had it was something like 128% increase of getting Parkinson's compared to someone that lived six miles away from a golf course. And it's everywhere to the point that we don't really see it as a problem anymore. It's just so apparent. And we are used to looking at it from a symptom or for another thing, but we don't realize like we're our planet is called Earth. Everywhere is soil, we're we're ingesting the things that we are spraying, we're exposed on so many different levels. And it's it's how can we reduce that? How can we get back to a system that it wasn't necessary before? Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

And yeah, that's what's interesting, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:55

And it's the the constant pest pressure, the constant disease, but we've created an environment where nothing wants to be supported, where nothing wants to be healthy, and even quite literally are attracting pests to lawns. One of the most amazing discoveries I had pretty early on was when I discovered of a compound called ethylene that plants produce. And it is essentially like a suicide kill-me now chemical for plants. And in a stressed condition, they start to produce this, and it's a massive flare gun for every single pest because they're driven by an olfactory smell sense. And of all the different smells that a bug is able to detect, this one spikes for them. And it quite literally draws them all onto a property because they realize that this one plant doesn't want to be alive anymore. We don't compete with the pests, they're not trying to eat our healthy food or our crops, they eat the sick ones. And there's a reason that we constantly have these pests on our property because they're unhealthy. If you raise the soil to support them, they no longer produce those signs or those signals. Or you create something that can mask them. And that's why a lot of the natural pest shields that I use are very herbaceous, strong-smelling scents. If you don't want to go and replace all of the soil to stop the ethylene cycle, you can at least put things that block the ethylene itself and make it so that you have these pockets of an invisible paradise where the plants at least don't even or the insects don't even at least notice those plants.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

So go to your neighbor. Yeah, can't yeah. Can you can you I guess create that sort of like uh shield from I guess the unwanted pests or I mean the the weeds and stuff would be your your soil and stuff, but let's say, I mean, your neighbor let's say has terrible soil, terrible, you know, gardening practices or whatever, they're gonna attract all the pests and stuff. Can you create the shield from like your neighbor right next door?

SPEAKER_01 33:53

Yeah, and you could protect the side of your property and try to make it so that at least yours is as healthy as possible so that they don't have any reason to even want to go. So if you see a bug, it might just be crawling over to your neighbor's yard. Yeah, but it's it's 100% possible. Like a lot of the things that we'll use for different designs to line the sides are chrysanthemum or petunia. And that's because the petals themselves actually contain like little natural insecticides. They are toxic to ants, beetles, mites, all these little things. And so they will smell that and not want to cross over that barrier.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

There are more direct methods that you could do too if you want to get like diatomaceous earth, is from typically like pool filters will use it, but is a small microorganism called a diatome that has a hard silica shell that very, very, very tiny, but it's this white powder that you can line around. It doesn't really do anything to us, but for hard shell insects, it's like running through barbed wire. And so it's fine for your pets, your dogs, your kids, and stuff, and you can line that around. And it's a physical barrier that doesn't really wash away nearly as well as like an herbicide would or a pesticide would. Um, but there's there's plenty that you can do.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

So that makes this earth that'll prevent will that prevent ants from okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

Like they will not cross over diatomaceous earth because they will shred their shell apart. They wouldn't be able to if they tried. They're like physically not gonna cross that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

So there's I have there's like this ant colony in my neighbor's yard, and so we always get these little black ants. And every so often, well, sometimes it's like you know, I'll go out there at night and I'll see them crawling along the fence, crawling up into the in on the side of my house and stuff, and like this huge line of them.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

That's where nematodes would come in handy too, is honestly they would go down and start burrowing, they would attack the ant babies and all of those. It like it essentially stops the reproductive cycle for pests, to where like they uh the adults will still be there, but as long as you keep a nematode population alive for a long enough time, they're not gonna be able to, like an insect only lives for a week.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

And so you just got to keep that alive to stop the reproductive cycle, and then that colony disappears.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

Yeah, yeah. So talk to me about like the soil testing in that process and how you go about doing that.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

So we do quite a lot of different things, and uh really it's first starting looking at the site. We'll look above the ground first because it's obviously there's a reason you called us. There's something wrong. There is either a plant that's really, really sad. I had one that was one of my favorite cases. It was the case of the missing jasmine, is what I called it. And so this person had along their entire backyard some Asiatic jasmine that was growing, and it was beautiful up until this one corner of their yard, and it was just like dead, like nothing was getting there. Yeah. And so what I did was take three samples going further along into the area, and we're trying to see, well, we have our ideal, our sort of okay, and then the problem. And knowing what the stats of an Asiatic jasmine are ideally growing in, knowing what could be considered problematic as far as a pH, a fungal to bacterial ratio, EC, these are electrical composition. Essentially, it is a series of different things that we can test and analyze to see if those conditions match what favors that plant. And what was the problem was they had an incredibly high pH and a few different heavy metals that were way too high for that area. And so the pH at a higher level makes the heavy metals much more available. And every time it rained, they became soluble minerals, and that plant absorbed all of that up and killed it. And so we saw the track of those heavy metals getting higher and higher and higher until it got to that point where it was not able to sustain life. And so I tell them, well, you gotta amend it with some organic matter, we got to get something in there to lower your pH, probably get some more fungal in there to break down the heavy metals and let it be.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Yeah. Are you testing the soil yourself? Or you send that out? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

I do that. So we we do a few different types. So I'll send out because like the UF will do lab tests that are really good. And I I honestly, it's it's it's cheap and easy, and they do it well. So that's I'll I'll leave for the pH and a few micro and macronutrients. I send a UF because it's just really easy to work with them on that. EC is electrical composition, which is essentially a heartbeat or a measure of how much microbial activity is in a soil. Single-celled microorganism as it's generating ETP to stay alive. There's a cycle called the Krebs cycle. And a byproduct of generating ATP is a positively charged ion. Meaning if you have a lot of microbes in a soil, you can generate an electrical charge in the soil.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

Got it.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Stabbing an electrical conductivity meter into the soil, I'm able to measure that charge and it gives me a rough meeting on the level of microbial activity that's going on in there. You have certain ranges that are too high, too low, certain plants like too high or too low, and that's just one. Then we have the fungal to bacterial ratio. And that's one where different plants will want more fungal or more bacterial partners. A lot of trees actually want your fungal partners. That's where they're going to be providing the carbon, they're providing the phosphorus, they're actually helping. They're great root supporters, fungi. They increase water absorbing, water absorption, water holding capacity. They will burrow into the roots and inside the cells of the tree and actually form these sites in which they will transfer minerals directly and also clogs the pores for any pathogen that wants to get into. So any woody material, bush, perennials, like essentially anything that's going to be growing year after year after year, fungi are really their friends. And that's where you can go through like a forest and you'll map out the mycelium, and you'll find documentaries where people are going and connecting different trees from one to another, and they can realize by tapping the mycelium in one spot, they can signal it in another. And it's all this wonderful little connected single. For bacteria, that's where you're wanting a lot of the nutrient fixating functions. And that's where mostly your flowers, your garden plants, a lot of your crops, they want a little more bacterial dominant, but it's also the right bacteria. And so there are plant growth promoting microbes that scientists have figured out, isolated these different species, done these studies, and figured out that, oh, well, if I have a bacillus therogenesis in here, then I can get a 28% extra nitrogen. If I can get a Pseudomonas down in here, I get a little bit less disease. And then suddenly you realize you can find the inoculants, get the plant what they need, realize your deficiencies, and then match it to a species that does that job.

SPEAKER_00 40:27

Yeah. So there's, like you said, like we talked about before, like there's a lot of moving parts and stuff that goes into that. So, I mean, let's talk about something that I think is, let's say, like practical that somebody can can implement today and stuff. And if you have, let's say you want to go crops and and some if for your for um food and and vegetables and stuff in your yard, and you have a raised garden bed, it's empty. Like, what should you fill it with? What's the best best way to have it, you know, vermicompost?

SPEAKER_01 40:55

Vermicompost is black gold. I love that stuff. Worm poop. That is something that in even the smallest of quantities, if you want to just get like cheap topsoil from Home Depot or something, a little bit of vermicompost will go a long way. But biochar, vermicompost, uh essentially any form of a micronutrient. Most things are like when you go to get a fertilizer from Home Depot, they'll have an NPK level on the bag, nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. Those are the top three that most people are using. But there is what's called the law of minimum for plants, and is that they will only biologically function at the rate of the lowest available nutrient. Okay. And typically that's something like boron, copper, chlorine, molybdenum, stuff you're not buying at the store. And so getting a micronutrient fertilizer that would be a slow release that would stay within the fertilizer or that would stay within the soil or the garden bed, so that in the event, because you're always going to have NPK, especially if you have life, it's honestly very easy to get those naturally. It's the micronutrients that you would want to potentially add a little bit in if you're trying to start a bed. Logs, it's a wonderful thing, depending on how raised of a bed you want to use. There's something called Hugel culture. And it exists other, I think it's in Germany or Iceland, one of those places. Okay. But they created a method in which that you can, and it's because they want a rich mycelium bed in the middle to have long-term support for growth. And they create essentially like a little pyramid going along the middle of your bed, or you can just stack some logs on the bottom. But it's to have rich sources of carbon below that soil. So you would have a bunch of firewood or logs or stuff, maybe a foot or so of that, and then another foot or so of topsoil along the top of there. And that's where your plants would root down into. And that actually is able to support quite a lot more microbial life as well, because you need a level of carbon that a lot of people don't have.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

We're made of carbon. So when I'm talking about, oh, you're really low in organic matter, you're low on carbon. And that's what microbes need. That's what is fuel for them in many ways. That's what sugars are, are carbons that they just form into different ways. And that itself is a wonderful thing. There is a tool that you can measure, and it's another test that we do called BRICS. And it is an arborist and brewer, brewery tool to measure the sugar content of a liquid. And refractometer, it looks sort of like a lightsaber. And you put a little drop of the plant sap or whatever liquid you're trying to measure, look into the light, and then based on the refraction, based on the sugar content, the crystals, the structure inside that liquid, it tells you a numerical reading on the level of sugar. For plants, that's telling you how well it's photosynthesizing, how well it's producing enough currency for itself. And the wonderful trick with this is that if you can raise the sugar content of a plant to a high enough level, it becomes its own insecticide. The sugars go from a double. Carbon to a triple carbon bond, making it impossible for every single pest that would eat that plant material to actually digest down. And then that sugar turns into a fermented alcohol and kills them.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

So you can create a naturally insecticide property with a healthy and supportive enough soil environment. And that is why in a healthy forest environment, you don't see roaches and pests just eating everything.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:27

Because they can't. They only attack what is v available and weak. They only attack what attracts them.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

Right. What's dying.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

What's dying. Yeah. Yeah. And we have a lot of dying and sad stuff around our landscapes.

How To Learn More And Connect

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yeah. It's very interesting, right? Um, I'm I'm fascinated by everything that you're you're putting together here. So I'm I'm excited to kind of watch you grow and and have you out to my house, obviously, to take a look at our soil. I'd love to go on. So what's the best way for people to to to get a hold of you and just kind of learn more about you know what you're doing or how they can implement some of the things that you're doing in their own environment?

SPEAKER_01 45:02

Probably the website at this point. It's uh TerraPrada LLC, pretty much just the name of the company. Uh just got that up maybe like a month or so ago. Like we've been moving and grooving and cooking, like it's been a wonderful, magical year. And like I it's meeting people like you and only more and more things to do. Like it's it's great. But Terra Preda LLC, I tried to design that to be a website that not only lets you, if you want to come in and console with me or something, but to educate yourself. I made sure to apply the studies that I have, the information, the philosophy that I have. Like it's very much a website you can explore and spend a lot of time on. And I encourage people to do so because that's what really lets you understand the value of what we're doing is a clear philosophical change on how it is we are viewing and maintaining a landscape. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:50

Yeah. And so when people reach out to you, you come out, you do a consultation, you say, all right, here's what, here's the plan, here's what we can do to kind of fix everything, improve everything.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

Pretty much, yeah. And so, like, I because I can do the work, or some people like a lot of home gardeners, are very passionate about doing it themselves. So, like, I'll just do a soil test, I'll give them a treatment plan that goes along with it, and then they can they can do it themselves. Yeah, like I make sure everything is not because and that's especially where like from UF, if people just want to go and get some random soil tests, they don't break down the information for you. Right, it's just some statistics that you gotta understand. Right, and most people don't, and so I turn it into like layman sense actionable items that people can actually go through and improve if it's me doing it or if it's you, and that's I'm happy just doing the test and doing the analysis. Like that's it's so complex and amazing and everything. Yeah, and I also do uh microscopic art photography as well, and so I have an Etsy store that's uh microscopic Marvels US, I think is the name. Okay, and just to try to show people what I see, the the beauty that I see because it's it's so alien, so amazing, so unique, and that's why it's it's even worthy sitting on a wall somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

Yeah, how are you how are you photographing that like through the microscope? Okay, yep. So it's quite literally a camera that attaches to that, or I use my camera.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

So I'm trying to upgrade so I can actually right now I'm limited at the size that I can print due to the resolution I can capture. Yeah, but I'm gonna get an upgraded camera some point soon. I just got accepted to an art gallery over at the Palm Harbor Library, actually. And so, like, go and see it for sure, man. But eventually, once I can get a better zoom in there, like I'm right now, I'm only getting maybe 400x magnification, which sounds cool. It's really it's a lot, but the stuff at 2000 is pretty fucking cool too. Yeah, and that's where you can show people stuff that they're definitely never heard of, right? And that's where it's like an animal documentary of some weird blobule thing that you've never even seen before, and I love it. Yeah, that's awesome, man.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

Well, I'm I'm happy for you. I'm I'm glad you started this right here in Palm Harbor. So thank you. So thank you. And uh, if everyone's interested in in Terra Preta, go check them out.

SPEAKER_01 48:01

Thank you. Thanks, thank you, thank you.