The Role of Soil Microbiomes in Forage Growth

What if the secret to better beef starts underground? 

Kara Mastel is joined by Dr. Jonathan Bennett, associate professor of Plant Ecology at the University of Saskatchewan, to unearth the science behind soil microbiomes and their powerful impact on forage productivity and beef sustainability. 

Recorded following the Beef Research Showcase at Lakeland College, the conversation dives into how microbes influence plant health, how cultivar selection affects microbe interactions, and why breeding plants for better microbial relationships could revolutionize pasture management. 

From drought resilience to salinity tolerance, Dr. Bennett sheds light on how invisible organisms may hold the key to future-proofing our beef industry—all without a microscope 

Listen For:

04:47 – The Soil Microbiome’s Role in Forage Yields

09:05 – Optimizing Plant-Microbe Interactions

16:25 – Can Microbes Help Saline Pastures?

29:37 – Heritability and Breeding for Microbial Compatibility

35:32 – Giving Power Back to the Producer

GUEST: Dr. Jonathan Bennett

Website 

Dr. Jonathan Bennett is an Associate Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, specializing in plant ecology with a focus on plant-soil interactions and invasive species management. He holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and has conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Tartu and the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Dr. Bennett's research aims to enhance our understanding of ecological processes in grasslands, contributing to sustainable agricultural practices and ecosystem conservation.

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Chapters

• 4:47 The Soil Microbiome’s Role in Forage Yields
• 9:05 Optimizing Plant-Microbe Interactions
• 16:25 Can Microbes Help Saline Pastures?
• 29:37 Heritability and Breeding for Microbial Compatibility
• 35:32 Giving Power Back to the Producer

Transcript

Kara Mastel (00:15):

Hi. Hey, hello and welcome back to another episode of the Bovine Podcast, brought to you by Alberta Beef Producers. I'm your host, Kara Mastel, and as always, I'm happy to be here. Recently, A BP hosted the Beef Research Showcase at Lakeland College, Ian Vermilion, Alberta. This event highlighted the latest advancements in beef and forge research featuring presentations on topics such as soil microbiomes, herd health intercropping and pasture productivity, and of course, much more. Attendees had the opportunity to engage with experts, explore innovative research findings, and discuss practical applications for improving beef production and sustainability. Today we're going to dive into one of the research topics that was discussed, soil microbiomes with Dr. John Bennett, who's an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan. John is here with us today. John, first off, thanks for joining me on The Bovine. Rather than me dive into who you are and your background, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (01:14):

Hey, yeah, I'm John Bennett. I'm an associate professor of Plant Ecology at the University of Saskatchewan, working a lot on the ecology and management of rangeland, of forage systems. A lot of our work is on plant soil or plant soil and microbe interactions, and it kind of stems from the work I did started during my PhD at the University of Alberta where I worked on plant ecology and plant microbe interactions at Kinsella research. And since then I've done postdocs in both British Columbia and in Europe, kind of rounding out my skill sets in that area. And so

Kara Mastel (02:00):

Quite the resume of different places you've been to then.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (02:03):

Yeah, I did undergrad in Nova Scotia, a master's in Ontario, PhD in Alberta. So I've been coast to coast really in Canada here.

Kara Mastel (02:16):

So are you originally from the East coast or what brought you out west?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (02:20):

I am, yeah, born in Newfoundland, but I haven't been there for, well, I've been there, but I haven't lived there for more than 30 years.

Kara Mastel (02:28):

So now Western Canada's home,

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (02:30):

It is actually, my dad was with the RCMP and he got transferred to Prince Albert for high school for me, and so I left a little bit after that for some of my schooling. But yeah, I've, I've spent more time in Western Canada than anywhere else at this point. And actually I think of any city. I think I lived in Edmonton the August. I like Edmonton, so

Kara Mastel (02:56):

No, it's a good place. So what brought you on this career path? I am always curious what kind of got you there.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (03:05):

Yeah, sure. Yeah, so in my undergrad I actually had a passion for insects and so I wanted to work on insects and so I went and I did a master's degree on biological control of insects in tomato greenhouse production. What I realized when I was working on that is that I couldn't understand anything that was happening with the insects without understanding the plants. So then I did a master's in plant ecology and then kind of dabbled a little bit in plant microbes interactions there. And that's, it's a very complicated system and I kind of like complicated things. So I've been dabbling in it since.

Kara Mastel (03:52):

Yeah, it's amazing how much goes on that we can't see without a microscope and even then sometimes is very tricky.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (03:59):

Oh yeah, microscope doesn't even get as close to, I get motion sick if I use a microscope for too long. So we don't use them all that much in my lab. My students do sometimes, but for me it's mostly, yeah, we've moved mostly to DA based assessment for the microbial stuff and so because no real way to identify them all that confidently with a microscope.

Kara Mastel (04:25):

Wow. Okay. So you recently spoke at the Beef Research Showcase at Lakeland College. You spoke about soil microbiome and all the things that go along with that. Do you want to talk a bit about what your presentation was about and maybe go into why the soil microbiome is important for four yields?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (04:47):

And so one of the things, like I mentioned, we've been working on plant soil, plant microbe interactions and marine support systems for a while now. And I talked about at Lakeline was a bit of a summary of some of the work we're doing around trying to optimize plant microbe interactions. And some of these systems, particularly in port systems, it's a little bit more challenging to do in, obviously you're not going to go reseed a rangeland and so you have the number of levers you can pull are more difficult. We are working a little bit on some grazing related things, but not a lot you can really manipulate there otherwise. So we work a lot of that's around forage systems and there's two real ways that we've been trying to address optimizing plant microbe interactions and forage systems. That's about part of that's around inoculum development or at least trying to find ways to develop the oculus.

(05:52):

And the other is around trying to figure out what plants work best with the microbes so we can kind of maximize the benefit you get from that. And so I guess the complexity of it. And so we often think about microbes, well, we don't want to think about microbes, but when we do, there's lots of different things that they can do. Some of them are beneficial, some of them are antagonistic or negative, so things like pathogens and then there's some that just do their job and cycle nutrients through those systems. And so a lot of the work we do is really focused on that kind of, at least in the for systems is around maximizing the amount of or the benefit that plants get from those potentially beneficial microbes and minimizing the negative effects of pathogens. And so I think it can be an important way of leveraging something that's already there or something that we put into that system to kind of increase plant growth and maximize the benefits that we're getting from them. Four systems that is

Kara Mastel (07:09):

Absolutely. And you you're saying, okay, maybe we don't always think about microbes, but why should the general producer actually be paying attention to microbes and maybe looking at some of the research that's being done and is it all come down to maximizing that yield?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (07:26):

Well, there's lots of things microbes can do, but certainly from a producer's bottom line, I think maximizing the yield and minimizing inputs is probably the two biggest things financially might be beneficial for the average producer. If you can have a plant that uses an alfalfa plant, for example, that benefits more from certain microbes. So we work a lot on our muscular microrisal fungi, which are these fungi that live inside the roots of the plant host and they can't really live outside of those things. And basically they act oftentimes as an extension of the root system and they forage for nutrients in those soils and those nutrients get exchanged with the plant in terms so that they can't derive their own carbon or their own sugars or fats or anything like that. And so the plant gives them that. And the most common transaction anyway, or most common interaction is that they give phosphorus or some other micronutrients to the plant in exchange for those products of photosynthesis. So sugars in those fats. And so if you can manage the system to maximize those benefits, it really should really cut down fertilizer costs if you're actually able to use microbes to mine existing the kind of inaccessible stores of some less mobile nutrient phosphorus within that system.

Kara Mastel (09:05):

And how do you get your toes wet with that? How do you actually optimize these interactions and help them improve the plant soil interactions?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (09:12):

That's a fantastic question, and we have about a half dozen different projects trying to tackle it from different directions. From a producer perspective, it's a little challenging right now. I think we've done a lot, and especially as we bred a lot of crop plants and things like that, often we're breeding plants that are our most productive and kind of high input systems and that frequently selects for plants that aren't really capable of, they're more reliant on kind of nutrient like fertilizer inputs. Then they are being able to scavenge for nutrients in a less fertile environment. And so oftentimes that selects for plants that don't actually have these beneficial interactions with soil fungi. And one of the avenues that we are trying to take right now is just identifying existing varieties where that selection for or selection against, I guess beneficial microbes has been, well, that either hasn't happened or it's been less intense, and so you've still got varieties out there that can benefit from these things.

(10:30):

It's just I don't think we know which ones they are. And so I think the first step for us has really been trying to identify which of these varieties can leverage a microbiome in order to maximize their own growth. And so I think ideally within the next couple of years we've got recommendations we can make on that. We still, a lot of our work has been in greenhouse settings, and so we're really trying to, we're pushing now to take this stuff out into the field because obviously at plant growing in the greenhouse isn't exposed to the same stresses that a plant grown out in a pasture would be. Especially, you can't just turn on the tap out in the pasture. And so you don't know whether those conditions are far less regular amenable to plant production. And so we need to see whether or not principles that we're finding in our more controlled studies are still if we can leverage them under a field environment.

Kara Mastel (11:38):

Is there plans to do large scale research there?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (11:41):

We are. So not necessarily focused purely on my horizons, but we've got a few, we are trying to round up some money right now to do a few of these things. We've done a fair bit of greenhouse work, for example, on trying to identify alfalfa Ulta bars that do well with the microbiomes from old pasture soils. And so we inoculated 21 different seed sources with microbes from 36 different location spread across 12 pastures through all the soil zones of Saskatchewan. And some of those cultivars did relatively well. On average it probably increase their growth by 30% or more when inoculated with those soils from the old fields. And some of them, their growth dropped off by 20 30%. So you've got this huge range in responses to how they grow when you inoculate them with the microbes from those old fields. And so right now we're trying to get the money together to be able to take that out into the field.

(12:50):

And the plan is to basically find interested producers that might want us to come take some samples from their field and then grow a bunch of different stuff in that soil the year before and the next year come out and seed the best performing ones into fields to see which VARs or potentially other ports legging species are going to really respond positively to that particular field with the ultimate goal for us being able to develop some sort of either greenhouse assay or soil test that we could use to really improve cultivar selection for people, at least in the rejuvenation scenario. But I can't see why it wouldn't work under any other conditions as well. It's just not really been our focus. I think those old pastures that have historically had alfalfa are probably already have a lot of the same potential disease causing organisms within those soils. And so that's really where I think it's probably going to be more critical to success than if you seeded it to barley for a few years and then decide to turn it into perennial pasture. In that scenario, you might not have the same density about specific pathogens then you would in kind of like a rejuvenation or renovation or whatever you want to call it.

Kara Mastel (14:12):

Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. It's basic crop rotation almost

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (14:15):

In that way. Yeah, it's the same principle, but the problem with perennial pastures is you're not rotating them most of the time. Some people do mind you, but the average person probably wants to, ideally they'd seed a pasture and then not have to worry about receding it or anything

Kara Mastel (14:34):

For

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (14:35):

10, 20 years at least. And so if you can't, the problem is I think as well as what we frequently see is that the density of legumes and alfalfa in particular declines over time a lot of the systems. So you want to reintroduce that legume component to get that nitrogen fixation and increase the forage quality, and you could potentially just completely take it out of rotation as a pasture for a year and then seed it to annuals. And that kind of rotation certainly would work to beat down some of those alfalfa specific or legum specific pathogens in those systems. But if you've got alfalfa that's been growing there for eight years, it's not really the rotation frequency. If you consider lifecycle of a pathogen, depending on what it is the population size, the pathogen could double in a day. And that's not compared to the lifespan of a perennial pasture. It's really easy for those things that kind of grow and propagate and spread throughout the soil, and you're not going to be able to turn it over as quickly with peral plants, so, so the rotation just isn't necessarily as easy of an option in that scenario.

Kara Mastel (16:04):

No. And there's balancing what maybe is best for the soil itself and what's best for the operation are sometimes two different things.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (16:12):

For sure.

Kara Mastel (16:13):

So when we're talking about some of these areas as well that you're using innoculants in anything you've done with salinity tolerance, I know some of these pastures have huge amounts of saline areas.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (16:25):

So for the salinity, we did culture. So one of the things we've been focusing on for salinity are those microrisal fun I was talking about earlier, and we, at least my hypothesis going into a lot of this was that we got a lot of saline grasslands out there already that have species that are fairly risa dependent. And so that means that they interact strongly with those fungis, so they rely on those fungi to provide them nutrients. And so that environment should have microrisal fungi or other microbes as well potentially that are really well adapted to that particular environment and may be highly beneficial for plants in that particular environment. Not like saline grasslands have no plants unless it's really salty obviously. But most of the time you still have plants that are growing within these environments and natural conditions. And so what happens when you've repeatedly cultivated an area over time is a lot of these things, especially the microrisal funds, they tend to get lost from those systems.

(17:43):

And you can think of the fungi. It's basically a big network of small strands of pipe spread throughout the soil, right? They're located on the plant, but you think of it as almost like a really fine kind of spiderweb spread through the soil Bos gathering nutrients. And so obviously if you're tilling that or disturbing that soil, that could cause some pretty strong changes or disruption of those fungi. And also the same thing, they generally don't tend to do as well in high nutrient environments either. And so when you fertilize a lot, the plants don't need the fungus as much, and so there's not as much allocation to the fungus, and as a consequence, their populations can decline as well. And so for saline lands, especially seeded saline lands, our thought is that most of these microbes are probably lost from those systems, at least the beneficial microrisal fungi probably would be.

(18:47):

And so we figured, well, what if we culture the microbes from saline grass lines and then see whether or not they can improve salinity tolerance for a few different orange species? And so we did this for I think 31 different grasslands across Saskatchewan and Alberta where we went out and found saline and non-line areas within the same site and then collected soil and cultured those fungi in the greenhouse and then inoculated plants in the greenhouse again with those same fungi to see whether or not it could increase the limited tolerance. We did this with both barley and alfalfa with alfalfa. The inoculations didn't really have as much of an effect as we thought it might, but we could talk about this a bit later. But alfalfa really is super variable in terms of how different cultivars or genotypes interact with those fungi. And so we feel like we probably just picked a bad cultivar they use in that trial.

(20:01):

We weren't kind of, well, we knew there was some range, but we thought this one did okay, but it turns out it doesn't really, so anyway, the alfalfa didn't work all that well, but we found some pretty good results in the greenhouse anyway with parley. And so in our initial trial, we had close to a tripling of growth in saline soils for some barley, but some of the inoculants. And so we thought this is definitely something we're pursuing. And so we've really been focused on barley in that inoculation of saline, grassland microbiomes going forward, but there's been some challenges with it, but we're still optimistic and we still think it could be benefit. It's just we need to better define precisely when it's going to be beneficial and do a bit more work before we can really make specific recommendations on that.

Kara Mastel (21:04):

So I know it's not super black and white here and nothing in research ever is, but when we're looking at cultivars, would you say there's specific cultivars for a specific plant then when you were looking at the alfalfa versus the barley?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (21:21):

Yeah, I know cultivar, I think cultivar selection is huge, right? And it goes back to the same thing I was talking about. Certainly some plant species are more responsive. I was actually super surprised that Parley responded positively to inoculation because usually annual cool season grasses aren't exactly that. They don't benefit the most compared to other plants. Some of the warren season grasses seem to do a lot better with horizons, but for barley in particular, we didn't expect to see much there, but it did, obviously. And then with alfalfa, and I was talking about their rejuvenation stuff, some of them big increase, some of them big decrease. And so cultivar selection I think is huge with the barley. We've been working at three different cultivars all produced here at the University of Saskatchewan, CDC, Austin and Renegade and Maverick. And what we're finding is actually, at least for our field trials and for the greenhouse trials that we've run too, is that even these barley varieties are responding differently to different microbiomes. And so we're really trying to narrow in on why, and we're trying to do a bit more work to get more mechanistic around that particular response, but we don't quite know why the varieties are responding so differently. But they certainly are,

Kara Mastel (22:52):

When you're looking at the different fields you looked at specifically when you're looking across how much did the actual field measurements play into this when you're looking small scale, larger scale, or et cetera, et cetera. Does that make sense?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (23:04):

Yeah. And so there's two different ways. Stuff in the field obviously is super important. You've got microbes. The world for an individual microbe, it's world is really small compared to how we perceive the world. And so some small level fluctuations within a field like tops, bottoms of hills, hill slopes, things like that are going to be, that's a different planet basically for a microbe going from the top to the bottom of the hill L just because of all of the differences that you're getting in terms of moisture retention and things like that. And so field measurements are, when you're trying to evaluate these things, I think field measurements are incredibly important and we really need to do, I think we have a fair bit of work to do yet to kind of identify precisely when everything is going to work. But even from inoculum development or identifying where to pick the microbes, we're still, it's something that we're working on and hopefully we'll have an answer for that one sooner than everything else. But we know that some of the innoculants were more effective on average, and I think a lot of that probably has something to do with which plants were actually located within the fields where we collected the inoculates. And so we just haven't had a chance yet to really tease apart what's driving where you can find soils that would yield a good inoculate. And also we don't know quite where those inoculates are going to work best. Ideally, in an ideal world, you've got something that works everywhere, but it's not ideal out there.

Kara Mastel (24:53):

Conditions aren't even the same on the same field every single year. So it's very difficult.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (24:59):

It's super, you could say all you want about different cultivars even being better for rejuvenation, but if it doesn't rain, it doesn't matter. And it's the same thing. Microbes are just as responsive or probably even more responsive to a variation in precipitation.

Kara Mastel (25:19):

Have you done any work with low nutrient or drought conditions?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (25:23):

We have actually. So one of the other avenues that we're pursuing with a lot of this is we are trying to identify alfalfa breeding populations or cult bars, and also with sandpoint as well, trying to identify, we're working with a local forage breeder here using some of his breeding populations for these species to try and identify breeding populations that do really benefit from micro rises. And so we went out to one of a couple of his fields where he had a population of alfalfa, a breeding trial for alfalfa and another breeding trial for sandpoint. And we collected plants from those fields that varied in size and then brought 'em back to the greenhouses and then transplanted them into pots in the greenhouse and let them establish. And so what we were curious about is whether or not those plants that were really heavily colonized in the field, whether or not they'd be more or less responsive to drought.

(26:33):

So when we brought them back, we dug the soil out from underneath them and repotted them in the exact same soil that they were growing in before. Like I said, we let them establish and then we set them into three treatments. One was just good growing conditions in a greenhouse. They were fertilized and watered regularly. And then a second treatment was a drought treatment, and then another was a low nutrients treatment where we didn't actually fertilize them at all after we put them in the pot. So just whatever nutrients already happened to be in the soil they were in. And so what we found with that actually for both alfalfa sandpoint, is that those plants that were more heavily colonized in the field did a lot better under drought actually than those plants that weren't

Kara Mastel (27:30):

Interesting.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (27:31):

And so we found a pretty strong positive response. And I think, I can't remember which species was which, but for one of 'em, it just grew a lot better under the drought conditions. And the other one, it actually was able to reduce the amount that it died back. And so less of the chutes that it produced died back under drought conditions. So it was able to just kind of maintain its biomass green and from a cow per perspective, nutritious rather than dry straw. And so the drought really, we saw a very strong response from heavily colonized plants there. So suggesting that at least for those, what we think is that those cult of ours or those breeding populations that really do get heavily colonized are actually capable of better surviving drought conditions than those that are not. And we do know from some additional work we've done kind of like breeding heavily colonized plants together or crossing them at least heavily colonized plants and then seeding them out into the field again, we do know that heavily colonized plants generally tend to produce heavily colonized offspring.

(28:45):

So we think it is heritable. We haven't done enough work in that area to say whether or not it's something we can easily select for in a breeding population of either of these forage legumes, but it certainly shows some sign of heritability. And so we think that could be important is selecting those particular forage legumes that might interact strongly with micross, therefore be much more tolerant of a fluctuating environment. We saw similar benefits, so a low nutrient, but not kind of to the same extent. And so again, I'm having trouble remembering precisely which species it was, but for one of the species anyway, we did see similar benefits under low nutrient conditions, but not for the other, but certainly drought. It was consistent across four seconds,

Kara Mastel (29:37):

Which is definitely a positive news story because that's exactly, our conditions seem to be changing more and more every year, and drought seems to be happening more and more often than it may be used to

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (29:50):

For sure.

Kara Mastel (29:51):

So anything we can do to keep those pastures growing absolutely is a positive. How far are we off from being able to use some of these innoculants in the field?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (30:04):

Yeah, the innoculants I think are maybe a little bit further off than some of the other things that we're working on in particular just because they've shown such site to site variability. And I know there's lots of the ENT companies out there that sell a single inoculant for one crop and they say, this is the inoculate for this crop, just use it. And then 50% of the time it doesn't even establish. And so I don't ever want to be the person that promotes something as going to be super ask somebody to go out and buy something that I don't know is going to work. And so I think we really, from the inoculum perspective, I think it's more, I'd liken it more to more, it would be more successful if it's more boutique. And so for a specific set of conditions, this inoculate works. It makes it a lot more difficult to mass produce these things, obviously.

(31:07):

And so I do think that's a little bit further off unless maybe we can find, we're doing a lot of a going to postdoc who's really keen and he's doing a lot of, or he is planning on doing a lot of genomic work to kind of look to see on what the molecular interactions are within the barley roots. Assuming again, we can find financing for it. But I think once, if we can unlock that kind of a detailed understanding of what's going on, maybe it'd be a little less trial and error and you could select more varieties that we know are going to be responsive to specific inoculates, but developing a universal inoculate that's going to work for every situation is probably, maybe it will, maybe you can do it, but I think ultimately those are going to be a lot more complex than the innocuous that are currently on the market because you're going to need microbes that are adapted to kind of like dryer conditions, wetter conditions, saltier conditions, less salty conditions. And so getting things to that point is more challenging. I think there's lots of those that people can do still, even if it's not purely inoculate.

(32:25):

Even for example, the, we collected the soil out of that breeding nursery where we collected those same plants, we cultured the microbes from that breeding nursery as well, and then we use that to inoculate compliance. And actually Marley did pretty good with that particular with the lichen breeding nursery inoculate, as long as it wasn't saline, it did quite poorly that particular inocular in their saline conditions. But I think what this says though is that if people can manage the land to kind of increase the abundance of these beneficial microorganisms, inoculums might not even be necessary in the long run. It's just about kind of conscious management of plant micro interactions in those systems,

Kara Mastel (33:22):

Understanding that there's a lot more going on underneath the surface than you realize.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (33:28):

Yeah, or knowing that, for example, when we culture the micro rises in the greenhouse, we use either sorghum, Sudan grass or big blue stem, both of which are grasses that can grow in the field Here.

(33:44):

Big blue stem might be a little bit more challenging in the super dry environments. It tends to be more of a kind of tall grass prairie species, but for people with a little bit more precipitation like sorghum, Sudan, grass grows, grows, okay, requires it does produce some, if you harvest it the wrong time, it's not the best, but it produces some compounds that can negatively impact cattle. But as long as you manage it correctly, it can be actually quite productive, nutritious storage. But just putting some of that into the system, maybe that increases it. We haven't done the work specifically to do it, but I know other people in other systems have been managing try to plant what they call essentially nurse plants within those systems. And those are plant species that are able to culture the right microbes to enable other species to come in and colonize and do better. And so there are little things that may very well work that might be a simpler solution than developing an inoculum. But that being said, inoculum is for barley grain producer or somebody developing feed barley. You probably aren't in those scenarios, kind of like you don't want a complex forage mix. And so your options were a little bit more limited there.

Kara Mastel (35:11):

Yeah, absolutely. And I know this is going to be a huge question here, but you're working on tons of stuff right now. Is there anything you would like to, before we wrap up here today, anything you'd like to highlight on some of the work you're doing or I guess any messages you would like to send to producers?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (35:32):

I don't know if I've got anything. I really think we are taking some really initial steps on trying to identify ways that we can manage forage systems to improve microbiomes. And so I think we're coming up with some good ideas right now. And I do think that ultimately what I want to see is for us to be able to put the power back in the producer's hands to give them tools to be able to manage their own land effectively. Whether or not they're buying anything from anybody. I know that's probably not going to be popular, at least not with people that sell things,

(36:17):

But lots of things I think people can do right away. Right now we're trying to do some work on increasing what happens when you increase genetic diversity within alfalfa if if you see different cultivars at the same time, ones that are maybe with complimentary microbiomes. I think there's lots of ideas out there that wouldn't necessarily increase the cost for producers. They're just kind of change a little bit of even just how they're selecting seed. And so I think these things are coming. I think obviously when you work in a perennial plant system, it takes a few years for really be able to make any concrete conclusions. And I think we've really only taken the initial steps in my group, but we should be able to come up with, we do, I should have looked this up before I talked to you today, but we do know what a lineage was of the alfalfas that did well with myis.

(37:25):

We might be able to identify from that commercially available cultivars that are closely related to those ones. And so I think there's some very short steps, and hopefully we'll have an answer for that within a year. But other things, especially around in ulu development, that takes a fair bit of time. And when you start talking about actually breeding micro dependent or micro isa exploitative forage species, I think that, and it just takes quite some time to be able to breed forage cultivar. So I think breeders have their work added them for that one, but I think we probably have options that they're existing. It's just about doing the work to figure out which ones they are

Kara Mastel (38:10):

And if producers are feeling really keen, is this research available publicly?

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (38:15):

So the initial cult of our inoculation should be a report and also a quick fact sheet put out by A-B-C-R-C. The Beef Cattle Research Council on that one, and the Alberta Beef Producers have gotten reports from me on some of the inoculation work and selecting or specific alfalfa and sampling cults or genotypes that are micro as dependent. And I'm honestly not sure where those reports end up or if they're publicly available.

Kara Mastel (38:49):

They are publicly available on our websites, so yeah, absolutely that's one place they can go.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (38:55):

But most of this is not published yet, so it's not in the scientific literature quite yet. Some of it will be soon, but we are working towards trying to get that out there. But I think the lovely funding agencies like the Alberta Beef Producers, Saskatchewan Cattlemen's Association, the Saskatchewan Agricultural Development Fund, and the Beef Cattle Research Council who have been financing a lot of our work and our new partners through Western Grains Research Foundation, SA Barley, and the Manitoba Crop Alliance, who've been out supporting some of our barley work. We report to them annually with the results of what we've been finding. And so even in its preliminary stage of things, some of those things might be available out there through funding agencies, which are often producer groups. And so they are producer groups, so they probably answer to the producers at least I'd hope they do. And so the producers are really the people financing a lot of this research, and so a lot of it should be available through those agencies.

Kara Mastel (40:11):

Absolutely. Okay. Well, I appreciate all your information here today. It's been really fascinating learning all about microbes and everything going on below the surface of the soil.

Dr. Jonathan Bennett (40:21):

Thanks, Kara.

Kara Mastel (40:34):

Thanks again for tuning into another episode of the Bovine podcast. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, don't hesitate to reach out either through ABPs social channels or you can reach me on my email karam@albertabeef.org. Until next time, stay safe. Enjoy some sunshine and don't forget to check in on your neighbors. Bye for now.