GROUNDED Live - 2026: Alison Pouliot - On Common Ground: Exploring the Fungal Subterrain

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this presentation, ecologist and fungi expert Alison Pouliot invites us beneath the surface to discover the extraordinary role fungi play in healthy landscapes. Combining science, storytelling and a passion for the often-overlooked world beneath our feet, Alison reveals why understanding fungi can change the way we see ecosystems and the farms we manage. 

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

G'day there. I'm Matthew Evans, and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tents live on the day. It's unedited, and I hope you enjoy it. If you want to know about fungi, there's pretty much just one person in Australia you really need to talk to, and it's Alison Pollio. Alison did a fungi foray on Yan Yang Girl West Farm for Grounded 2026, where you got to go out and actually see what was growing and talk about what's there and why it's there and what its purpose is in the landscape. For this session, she's in the tent. We've tried to record it. She does walk around a lot, but I think she had the microphone with her most of the time. Anyway, this is called On Common Ground: Exploring the Fungal Subterrain with Alison Puglio. She's a legend performer.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Today we're so lucky to be joined by Alison Puglio. Alison is an ecologist, author, environmental photographer with a deep love and affinity for fungi. And her work spans both northern and southern hemispheres, which means she gets two autumns, so double the fungi. We're so excited that Alison's here to share her deep experience and knowledge with us. And just in case some of you don't already know just how vast that experience and knowledge is, I'll share some of Allison's stats with you. She's hosted over a thousand fungus workshops, seminars, and forays. She has authored seven, yes, seven books. And she's also an honorary fellow at ANU. And in reading one of Allison's books, The Allure of Fungi, I was really moved by a section where she talked about going and hosting a workshop for a group of farmers. And, you know, she diligently came in before and set up this beautiful display and had all of the name tags, both the colloquial name and the scientific name. And as she's standing back looking at this display, the beautiful lady from Landcare that had organized the workshop walks in and she goes, Oh, you've um you've given them all names, have you? Have you? And she goes, Oh yeah. Well, you know, I think people usually want to know the names. And she said, Oh no, these farmers don't care what they're called, they care what they do. And I thought that was such a beautiful framing for why Alison's here with us today and also probably speaks a little bit to her parallel affinity and love for farmers. So without further ado, please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Allison.

SPEAKER_06 2:39

Thank you so much, Sam. Hello, everybody. Are you having a fabulous festival? Seen some amazing talks, been challenged with your thinking and ideas, expanding your frameworks to how we understand the land, the landscape, the soil, I hope. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm absolutely honoured. I'm so chuffed to be here at this festival. I've just come from a mushroom festival and a psychedelic festival. I'm now at a farming festival. I'm going on to a food festival. So all these different audiences, all keen to hear about fungi. So huge thanks to the organizers. So much work goes on to bring a festival like this together. And I have to say, Ollie and Nadia and the team, the constant emails with all the details makes it so much easier for speakers to define where to go when and what to say. So enormous thanks to the team who's working behind the scenes. Also, all these volunteers. I'm sure you've all come across the volunteers helping you find your car park, helping you find the toilets, whatever it is. So the volunteers, the organizers, also all the stallholders who've set up here, but of course the audience. There is no festival without an audience. And also I wanted to say who organized this perfect weather. I certainly know it wasn't the fungi. It's not their weather, but how lucky are we to have this fantastic weather? I just wanted to do a very brief acknowledgement of our First Nations people, but I wanted to contextualize it within the fungi, in terms of recognising and acknowledging our First Nations people, not just of this region, but Australia-wide, as being among the oldest keepers of fungal law, law L O R E and knowledge worldwide. The actual scientific study of mycology or study of fungi, what we call mycology, it's actually a very young science. It's only really about 300 years old. If we take the Italian from Florence, Antonio Pierre McKelly, as the so-called godfather of mycology, as the beginning of systematic mycology. It was McKelly who worked out that fungi didn't just spontaneously generate out of the soil. There was something more going on. And he gave us, I guess, a more of a systematic approach, more than just anecdotal observation. So that's pretty much when the systematic study of fungi began. But in Australia, of course, it's much, much younger. It was only when we imported a Scottish plant pathologist called Daniel McAlpine in 1890, and we brought him to Australia to look at things like smuts and rusts and bunts and blasts. That'sn't a wonderful alliterative ring to those, which are all the micro fungi which plague our crops and fruit trees. Although back then, of course, we blamed fungus as the villain, mixing up the cause and effect rather than the ways we were farming. Although today I sometimes still think we like to put fungi as the bad guys. So I'm going to try and dispel that and fungally infect you all by the end of my session. Just be warned, once you're involved with the fungi, there's no going back. So I'm very excited that the fungi included. But I wanted to say that this knowledge is 300 years old, the scientific, Western scientific study of mycology. But Aboriginal knowledge goes back thousands or more likely tens of thousands of years. And First Nations people knew which ones were edible, which ones were medicinal. They knew which ones they could use to start fire, indeed, even to carry fire. They knew which ones could be used as an insecticide or as a sunscreen. And get this, ladies, the fellas knew which ones they could use to darken their greying whiskers with the black spores of a desert puffball. So there you go, all these different uses. But of course, with the 14 or 15 different First Nations groups I've worked with, we know that so much of that knowledge went when people were moved off country. And that's going to be a bit of a theme today in my talk. I want to talk about common ground and where knowledge comes from, how it transpires, how it's passed on in the context of common ground. Lovely to see some familiar faces in the audience. But for those of you I don't know, just very briefly to add to Sam's introduction, I've been working with fungi for about 30 years. So coming to it from ecology, but also as a professional scientific photographer. So my work sits very much at the intersections of ecology, the conservation of fungi, but also the aesthetics of fungi. And I think some of the most exciting things that are happening now within the fungal space are right at that nexus of the science and the arts. Sometimes as scientists, we have trouble getting the message across. We talk in language that isn't always, we tell people stuff in a language that isn't always publicly accessible. So I think the arts have a huge amount to do in terms of getting that message out there. So why fungi? Why are you here? Something I always like to do when I run a workshop is rather, yeah, rather than tell people stuff is to find out where do we meet? Where is the common ground? Who's here because maybe you are farming and you're curious about getting fungi back into ag soils? Is that something of interest? Wow, this is great news. I'm so pleased to hear this. We're going to talk specifically about that. Have we got any foragers in the room? That's good. I'm worried about that empty seat there. Hopefully they weren't a forager. And I'm guessing we might have a lot of forayers. You know the difference? Foragers, forayers. Foragers are looking for edible fungi that they can harvest and take home, pop in the pan. Forayers are the ones who have more of a scientific interest in fungi, so they might be doing a survey, recording what's out there, or they might have an aesthetic interest. Perhaps they're illustrating them, documenting them in some way. So forays and foragers, they don't always meet. And certainly our tradition of the field naturalists in Australia, they were very much there to document the fungi, to give them names to illustrate them. They weren't so keen on those foragers who were taking the fungi, the subject of their interests. And yet this seems to be peculiarly Australian because if you go out on a foray somewhere like Sweden or Switzerland or elsewhere in continental Europe, you'll see the mycologist there with one of those great big compartmentalized fishing boxes with a different specimen in each compartment and little name tag. And on the other arm, there's a basket brimming with chanterelles. So they don't see the dichotomy between foray and foraging. In fact, a lot of the early mycology in a lot of Europe came from foragers getting it wrong. So when they got those doppelganger, the toxic look-alike species, having serious consequences, including losing their lives. This stimulated some of the mycological research. And somewhere like, for example, in Switzerland, there's these wonderful people called the Pilzkontrolleur, the mushroom police. And they don't go around with a blue light and arrest you. They actually, there's these officers all over Switzerland. I mean, this is a country which is really not much bigger than half the size of Tassie. It's a little country. I mean, if you flattened it out, all those mountains would be a whole lot bigger, but it's a little country. And yet, there's 1,400 mushroom inspectors who you can take your basket of mushrooms to. They pluck out the poisonous ones and send you home with your edible mushrooms. I mean, isn't that a most fantastic service? And this didn't start last week, it's been going for over a century. So, I mean, you've got to remember Switzerland was a very poor country, really, until the Second World War. And so people were foraging for subsistence and sometimes getting it wrong. So this amazing service arose, 1,400 mushroom inspectors and 400 officers over the country. So hopefully one day we might have something like that here as well. So I've been looking at fungi for a while and I'm very interested in how knowledge transpires. And have you ever heard that sometimes the English-speaking nature nations tend to be a little bit mycophobic? Have you heard this term? Myco, the prefix myco, M Y-C-O means fungi, phobic fearing, whereas other language groups are more mycophilic or fungus-loving. Have you heard this expression that the Brits and the Irish and the Americans and Canadians and Kiwis and South Africans and Australians who've been a bit wary of fungi? And I've noticed if I pass around a basket to a group of multiple nations, the Aussies will sort of look back with a little bit of caution, whereas the Italians already dived in for those porcini and they're already sniffing them and tasting them and making sure we've got the right species. However, this concept of mycophobia, mycophilia was popularized by the American Gordon Wasson and his Russian wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, back in the 1950s, 1960s. But I think it's more complicated than that, of people being simply fungus fearing or fungus loving. I think it's a whole spectrum. But also, I think the more interesting part is why did we become fungus fearing? Why are we so far behind a lot of the world in terms of our knowledge of fungi? Why is it only in the last 10, 20 years that we're seeing books appear on fungi? I mean, we are in something of a mushroom moment, a fungal awakening, I think, and all sorts of people. You know, I used to see when people came to a workshop, they were either forayers or foragers. Now there's philosophers, now there's photographers, there are fashion designers who were trying to make textiles from mycelium, bioengineers making fire-retardant bricks, all kinds of artists, all kinds of science, lots and lots of farmers, horticulturalists, all kinds of people. So it seems there's all these new entry points for fungi. But just going back to my question, why were we mycophobic as a nation? And I've been trying to answer this question for a long time. And I think a lot of it goes back to the abolition of the commons. So going back to the UK, 16th century, when people walked across the land for season after season after season, through the generations. And they observed when certain flowers came up, when certain berries appeared, where the fish swam, and which fungi came up, and which ones could be used as food, as medicine, maybe as psychedelics or for other reasons as well. And this knowledge, it's not just knowledge held in here, it's knowledge in your nose, in your fingers, from the multi-sensory interaction with these organisms. And when we saw enclosure or the abolition of that common land and the beginning of agriculture where that land was cordoned off, crops were planted, harvested, and sold, anyone who continued to walk on that land and forage, there was a new word, and it was trespass. So suddenly they became trespassers, they were socially stigmatized. Then in the 18th century, as the whole enclosure movement expanded, not just in the UK, it was in Denmark, it was in France, it was in Germany, it was in Scotland. We saw the criminalization of people who continued to forage. And as the Brits continued around the world, basically we lost that knowledge within a couple of generations. When you are taken off country, you lose that knowledge very quickly because it's generally orally passed on. And it's knowledge learnt from having your hands in the dirt, from observing yourself, from you feeling that mushroom, going, ah, that's right. This is the one with the suede cap. That's the edible one I know about. It's from actually doing it rather than being told this knowledge. And what we saw is the formalization of that knowledge. It was the authorities, it was government, and it was university. So it became very much top-down knowledge. So we were told what the fungi were from the authorities. But what I've noticed just in about the last 10 years is this seems to be we've come full circle. And that knowledge is coming again from the ground up, like the mushrooms, from you people. It's the people growing mushrooms at home, learning about the particular conditions they need to grow. It's the people farming and noticing that mycelial mesh of those long white cobwebby fibers in the soil. It's the people doing all kinds of things with fungi, as I mentioned, whether it's making building materials or whatever. I think again, we're seeing this common ground of knowledge, commonly shared knowledge. So for me, it's a very, very exciting time. Don't get me wrong, as someone who's worked a lot in the academy, I also think it's incredibly exciting that we're now seeing a lot more funding going into study of fungi. We're seeing more PhD projects. So it's fantastic to have knowledge coming from both places. I mean, it's really only in very, very recent years that we've actually had more than two full-time mycologists in Australia. I mean, we've got lots of people working in medicinal mycology, so looking at wonderful things like penicillium and fungal extracts that can be used to cure all kinds of illnesses. And of course, in agricultural mycology, we've got lots of people looking at the micro fungi, but not many people actually look at the ecology or the macro fungi out there. So whenever people come to a workshop, I'd love to start by saying, why are you here? Am I working with a group, for example, of young emergency department doctors? They want to know about fungal toxins. They want to know when someone presents what symptoms they're having, what they might have eaten accidentally. Or am I working with a group of photographers who are trying to work out how do we animate fungi? I mean, you know, birds fly and sing and dance and do all these things. Mushrooms tend to do this, you know, they just sit there. But a filmmaker has to know how can they animate that fungus? So always trying to find that common ground. And a few years ago, Sam mentioned this wonderful woman called Judy Crocker. I don't know whether anybody knew Judy Crocker. She worked up in the Midlauden area, sort of to the southwest of Bendigo, and ran various conservation groups up there. And she rang me one day and she said, Allison, I need you to come and talk about your fungi. So I'm like, my fungi. Yep, that's fine. She said, These farmers here, they're farming old style. They're messing up the land. You need to come in and talk to them about your soil fungi. We don't want to lose the fungi from the soil. I thought, ooh, this isn't sounding too good. But she said, they're doing too many, too many, too much irrigation, too much fertilizer, they're disturbing the soil, they're compacting it, they're burning it. Come in and tell them about the fungi, how are we going to look after the fungi? I'm thinking, this is not really my approach to come in and tell anybody anything, particularly a group of farmers who've been on the land for six generations. But I can never refuse duty. So I turn up at the Woodstock on Laudon Hall. Anyone been there? It's a little red brick building. You know the hall, isn't it? You've been to dances. Oh, it was you I danced with. There we go. That's fantastic. Wonderful old red brick building in the middle of nowhere. It was the school until they ran out of children. Now it's a local hall. And I drive for an hour through exactly what Judy had described. Big empty open paddocks, not much in the way of shoulder belts, very heavily tilled. And I thought, okay, this is, she was right, it's pretty old style farming. And I turn up on a walk in the back door. And as I walked in, Judy was there to greet me. And I looked into the hall and it was full. Every seat was taken with someone in a flannelette shirt and a bald head. There was not a woman in the room. There was a sea of these bald heads, and I thought, oh, this is going to be a tough gig because I thought everything is working against me here. One, I'm not a farmer. Two, I'm not a local. Three, I'm a woman, two, I'm one to two generations younger. And the worst thing, I've been to that terrible place called the university. So I thought, oh, it's gonna be hard. I've got to find the common ground here. And so Judy's poked me in the bottom, says, Come on, get on stage and talk to these farmers. So I start walking down the aisle like a bride on the way to the gallows. And I hear this little voice behind me that says, Sagirly, where are you from? And I thought, hmm, girly, it's been a few decades since someone called me that. But let it go, let it go. And so I turned around, I said, Hi, hi, I'm Alison. He said, Well, I know who you are. And I said, Nice to meet you, whatever you're called. He said, Uh, so where are you from? I said, Well, I'm from down the road a bit. I learned this one when I lived in Darwin. Down the road could be in Humpty Doo, Alice Springs or Adelaide. You know, it was kind of that lovely Australian vague style. I said, I'll come from down the road a bit, but you know, the old boy's some round here, my dad's around here. And he looked at me and said, Well, who's the old boy? And I said, Well, that'll be Max. And he said, Max? I said, Yeah, Max. And he said, Brian, Brian, come over here. This is Max's daughter. And I was just about to say, And he left 77 years ago. I thought this is a terrible case of mistaken identity. But he's already going, Jimmy, Jimmy, do you know who this is? This is Max's daughter. I'm thinking, I wonder who Max could be. Anyway, Judy's poking me in the bottom again. I get up on stage and I thought, how am I going to do this? So I thought, common ground, common ground. And I said, look, Judy's asked me to come along tonight to have a bit of a yak with you about soils, agricultural soils, and how and why we might want to try and get fungi back into agricultural soils. So I want to share with you a few things that Max taught me. Dad was a banker. He didn't know anything about fungi. But it worked. There was this common ground, even if by false pretenses. This was 17 years ago. I get asked back every year. I'm actually introduced as Al Allison, Max's daughter. I give much the same talk each year. It doesn't matter. I don't understand the talk either. But the thing is, I've learned what I wanted to say is I've learned more from these farmers than any mycologist, any ecologist, anybody else I've been out in the field with because I got invited back to their farms. We looked at their soil. We measured their soil. We tasted their soil. We dug it up. We tried to find out what fungi were there. And some of them had farms they'd inherited where the soil was so compacted they could not get a single seedling to generate. So we ripped that soil and we got some organic matter from the local, very, very close by on the farm, and we buried that organic matter. And after two years, we tested it again, and it increased the porosity of the soil, and it actually converted dirt back to soil from just the mineral components to soil, the mineral components plus the biology, which you've heard a lot about already at this festival. But I was astonished how in two years, when you actually kick start, you catalyze that return to soil again from dirt, what can actually be achieved. So these farmers who have walked this land for so many generations have observed this change because they haven't been pushed off this land. They actually, this is where I've learned so much from working with these farmers. And as Sam said, that day that I walked in and labelled everything, I come from a taxonomic background where we name fungi. I mean, naming is a pretty, you know, the first thing we do when we meet someone, we ask their name. It helps to know what the name of something is. And when Judy said to me, These farmers haven't got time for names, they want to know what they do. You know, the fungi have to do something useful. So what do fungi do? Why are you here listening to me bang on about fungi? Well, we can't ask Max, he died. But you can ask him about banging. But what do fungi do? Why would we want to get fungi back into agricultural soils and why did they decide to leave in the first place? Why have we lost fungi in soils, in agricultural soils particularly? What was that? Disruption. That's the big thing. Disturbance. And disturbance comes in all kinds of ways. One of the very big ones is compaction. Fungi are aerobic organisms. They need oxygen. When we compact soil and we lose those air spaces, we lose all of those aerobic organisms that need it. That's a big one. But physical dislodgment through tilling, the actual fungus organism, when we see that beautiful mushroom pop up, remember we're just looking not at the whole organism, but at the organ of the organism. I'm sorry to tell you, those things on your pizza are the sex organs of fungi. Okay. So this isn't the whole thing. It's like the flower in plants or the genitali in animals. We're just seeing the reproductive bit. But the actual fungus exists as this amazing network or mesh or scaffold of these long fibers called hyphae that can fuse and divide and connect up to form the actual fungus organism. And then under certain conditions, particularly this time of year, as the soil temperature drops down and the moisture level increases, the fungus decides to produce its mushrooms, so it can release its spores. So we're just looking at the actual mushroom, the reproductive bit, not the whole organism. But what those fungi are doing, they are putting those scaffolds in soil. They're putting architecture in soil. When you've got air spaces in soil, of course, water can filtrate down to those deeper soil horizons. When you don't have the air spaces, it basically waterlogs or sits on the surface. And I was just thinking last year when I was driving up the Hume to Sydney, I can't think what forest it was I was coming past, but the paddocks were really flooded, but the forest wasn't. One side of the road you can see the forest, there's no water there, but in the paddocks, they were flooded simply because in the forest you've got not just the fungus, but you've also got all of those roots, you've got the actual scaffold, the architecture within the soil. So most of the fungi in those soils, what are they actually doing? What are they doing? What are they? I mean, they're just lying around in the bush. Are they actually doing something useful other than putting architecture in? Do you know what fungi do or how they feed? Be brave. Exactly. They're nutrient recyclers. So fungi have the enzymes that can actually break down those recalcitrant. Oh, that's not wood at all. It is painted to look like wood. They can't break down metal, but they can. They've got these enzymes that can break down those recalcitrant compounds like lignin and cellulose and hemicellulose that give wood its hardness, its structure, its rigidity. When a log or a stick breaks down, there's three groups of organisms. Basically, you've got bacteria, you've got invertebrates, all those little spineless bugs and beetles and things, and you've got the fungi that will break that piece of wood back down into soil again, what we call pedogenesis or soil formation. The invertebrates do it mechanically by biting into the organic matter, breaking it into smaller pieces, but the fungi do it chemically through enzyme secretion. And only fungi can break down lignin. So if we don't have fungi, that wood is not going to break down. Okay, the organic matter doesn't break down, which means the nutrients aren't unlocked and made biologically available to plants and other organisms. So most fungi are what we call saprotrophs or recyclers or decomposers. They're secreting their enzymes into the soil, breaking down organic matter. When you think about it, they're getting their nutrition in a very similar way to us. We put a piece of food into our mouths, it goes into our digestive tracts, enzymes act upon the food, we extract what we need. Fungi do exactly the same thing, but it's not internal digestion because they don't have a stomach, it's external digestion. They basically sit in their organic matter, they sit in their food, and they slobber. They release their enzymes and directly absorb the nutrients they need. But then there's a whole other group of fungi who get their nutrition in a different way, and that's by forming alliances with plants. Can you name one genera of plants you can see out there, one genus of plants? Sorry, I mean that's mycorrhizal fungi, but what's one genus of trees you can see out there or plants? Eucalyptus? Pine, excellent. Pine eucalyptus, what else do we have? She oak? Acacia? What else can you see?

SPEAKER_09 26:32

Or what did you see on the way here this morning? Grass? Yep. Oak.

SPEAKER_06 26:39

So every single plant you've mentioned forms a relationship with fungi. And not just one fungus species. Something like the pine you mentioned might form a relationship with hundreds of different fungi. Same with eucalyptus, they form relationships with dozens, if not hundreds, of different fungi. Most grasses, and certainly every single orchid, an orchid seed is so tiny, it's like a speck of dust. It can't actually even germinate unless it has a fungus to help it get its nutrients and water. So most plants, we don't know exactly how many, but probably between 90 and 95%, form this relationship with fungi. Now, this is quite an abstract concept because it's under the ground. We can't see it. And how do these relationships work? It's sort of been the theme, hasn't it, of the last few decades, the connectivity of everything. When you do something somewhere, we see this cascade of effects. And the problem with fungi, often there is a lag time. So when we do something, we might not see that effect for decades later. That's part of the issue. And I actually, the same person, Judy, was telling me how she did some thinning. She works in this forest, a sort of dry sclerophyll box and einbark forest to the southwest of Bendigo. And she was doing some ecological thing in the forest, and she said, Oh, we've lost all the cherry ballarts. I'm not sure what's going on there. This is exocarpus, a tree, of course, that's parasitic, we think, on the eucalyptus. So when it lost its host, of course, the cherry ballart died as well. And I thought it was fantastic that she shared this story rather than just tucking it away as a mistake. So we all can actually learn from that story and do it better. But oftentimes there is this lag time when we do something and then we see the effect. Years ago, I was working in freshwater science up in the Alps, looking at when they had ski resorts up there, they had sewage effluent ponds, and then they radically increased the number of resorts, but not the sewage effluent ponds. So we were seeing raw sewage go into the top of the catchment of water supply. Up there, it wasn't such a big problem, unless you were drinking it directly. But when you got downstream and the water warmed up and suddenly we're getting this very anoxic or oxygenless water because they were massively overloaded with nutrients, and we saw the result in fish kills, you can imagine the people in those towns downstream weren't so happy. But now we're 200 Ks away from the scheme resorts, nothing to do with us. So this is some of the tricky things when you're dealing with organisms such as fungi under the soil. We can do something, we can make a change, but we don't see the effect until much later on. So with fungi in agricultural soils, there was a question yesterday in one of the talks. Why would we want to get them back into agricultural soil and how can we do it? Now, the fungi that we see when the mushrooms pop up, they produce these what we call sporing bodies or mushrooms or these forms of basically vessels for holding the spores. We see those connected to trees like eucalypts, and we see them pop up, the saprotrophic ones, but most fungi of agricultural crops are what we call arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. And this term arbuscular comes from arbusle, from arbor, from tree. And the way they work, they form a little tree-like structure. They actually penetrate the cortical cells of the root and form this little tree-like structure within those cells. And this is the site of nutrient exchange. But they also produce their spores directly from their myestelium. They don't invest in making a mushroom, so to speak. So it becomes even more invisible. We've got these fungi in the soil, but we don't see the obvious mushroom pop up above the soil. So if you imagine, though, they form this network. It's very, very gossamer thin, it's delicate. If we shove a spade into it or if we till it, we break the organism. We lose the organism itself. And when we lose the organism, we lose the architecture they provide and we lose the services they provide, providing the nutrients, providing the water. So if we can get fungi back in agricultural soils, we're not only assisting the croplands, but we're also getting more of these scaffolds and architecture back in the soil. People often talk about inoculants. Has anyone used inoculants to try and get fungi back in a particular situation?

SPEAKER_09 30:51

What have you done? Okay, so I'm not sure if you could all hear that sound. That'd be great. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 31:22

Yes, yeah. Okay, as a as an inoculum to try and stimulate. Okay, and you haven't seen the results yet?

SPEAKER_07 31:27

Well slowly it's improving, but we haven't got anything concrete like in a report just yet. But it looks like it looks better, and we're we're we think we're going in the right direction. But we've had a soil test done and it looks like we've got much better. Um it's good, but could be improved. Um better than it was, but it's it's still got room to go.

SPEAKER_06 31:44

Better than it was in terms of before we started doing it. But what but what's better? Is this porporosity of the soil? Okay, okay. Has anybody else been using inoculants yet?

SPEAKER_10 32:03

I've been using an inoculant on uh before I started crop, the feeds. Um under cover crop seeds, which aren't inoculated with anything, and then I except for the clover, but then I get a it's a worm type of base. I bought it um that it's a worm type of base liquid. Okay. I mix it up with an active catalyst you have to mix it with. And then it's been great. The results have been amazing.

SPEAKER_06 32:27

So what what are the results? Tell me what what is it that you've seen that's different?

SPEAKER_10 32:31

Um, well, I've just the the the crop grows really well, the actual crop, and then I have been getting a lot more mushrooms, fungi mushrooms in my paddock.

SPEAKER_06 32:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_10 32:40

Yeah, so I don't know. I haven't I haven't done a follow-up soil test. We did that about five years ago. Okay. Um, I'm coming up for that to do a sort of fungal test.

SPEAKER_06 32:50

Sure. Okay, look, I'm really interested to hear these these reports of of what fungi you're doing, uh the inoculants you're using. Because often, did you want to add something to this?

SPEAKER_07 32:59

Yeah, two couple of little things you're saying. Results uh we had clover, say green all summer, and we have got mushrooms coming up in the paddock as well. So, and you relate that to the inoculant? Yes, because it has we haven't had mushrooms before. Yeah, I'm the same the firewebs disappeared.

SPEAKER_06 33:16

Okay. So it's very hard to know if this is directly related to the inoculant or if it is something else that's changed. Maybe it's been a damp year. It's very hard without doing a control to be really sure. And not wanting to contradict what you say, but just something to keep in mind. We can use inoculants, mycorrhizal inoculants to try and stimulate the growth, improve the yield. But another way we can do it is to minimize the stresses that fungi don't like and increase the diversity of the soil. Okay. One thing with inoculants, oftentimes you'll see more so probably in gardening than in farming, you'll see all these things on the nursery shelves, mycogold and all these different names. And some of these can work very, very well in a particular situation. Say you're working in endangered orchid conservation, for example, and you've got an endangered orchid, you know which fungus attaches to it. And maybe that same fungus attaches to a common orchid. So you can take that mycorrhizal fungus off and put it on the rare orchid, cultivate them, grow them up, and then release them back to the wild again. There's been some tremendous success with rare species, rare orchids using these fungi. But it's precisely because we know which fungus pairs up with which plant. Okay, and this is the tricky bit. When you've got a hundred a garden with a hundred plants in it, or even 10 plants in it, and we throw some mycorrhizal inoculant on it, how do we know that that fungus wants to form a relationship with that plant? In those very generic situations, it's very hard to know. Now, a study a couple of years ago by a couple of mycologists or ecologists, they looked at 10 different mycorrhizal products, inoculants you can buy, and 80% of them contain no inoculant. Okay, that's something to keep in mind is a spore is not like a seed. A plant seed is quite a robust thing. It has its own food supply. Some seeds we know can stay in soils for years, even for decades, if they don't get eaten or get wet and moldy and run away, they can actually be there for years and years and years until the right conditions come along and they germinate. It's not the case for spores. There are some spores that are very resilient. There are a few that are. There's a few species we know their spores can be found decades later. But spores are microscopic. They do not have a food supply. So if they do not find the right conditions, pretty much straight away, when I say right conditions in terms of the nutrients, the water, the temperature, the pH, the salinity, all of those factors, if they do not land in the right spot right away, that's it. They disintegrate. I mean, think of a puff ball. I'm sure you've all seen puffballs as you've walked around the farm. Those great big things. I mean, this strategy is simply a numbers game. One of those puff balls could have a trillion spores in it. The fact that we're all sitting in here, we're not surrounded by puffballs taking over the world, suggests that of those trillion spores, not many are viable and are successful. I've been driving around in my car with boxes full of fungi. I'm completely covered in spores. The fact that they're not growing out of my arms suggests that they haven't found the right conditions to germinate. So it's very hard with an inoculant to keep it viable for very long. Inoculant should contain spores, fragments of mycelium and other propagules. But I think this is why those researchers found that a lot of these inoculants actually don't, inoculant products don't have viable inoculant in it. So, yes, they can work. I'm glad to hear you've had success. It's sometimes it's tricky to differentiate. Is that the inoculant, or are there other factors that have also changed? Perhaps there has been a better year of rainfall or something else, because I think the inoculant that you've got won't be the same type of spores that grow your paddock mushrooms. You know what I mean? So I think that could be, I'm not wanting to contradict you, but that could be something that's happening in parallel rather than being a direct cause of the inoculant, which is why it's great to do controls with this sort of study when you're using it. If you're going to try it, I mean, it wouldn't be wonderful. If they're working and they're successful, that would be a fabulous thing. But also do a control. But I think more importantly, think about disturbance. Think about are there ways? I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do, you know how to farm, but think about are there ways I can minimize disturbance to keep those fungal scaffolds in place. So we just don't end up with very bacterial soils. We go back to that. Bacterial soils means we bring the soil back to a very immature state. After a massive disturbance, like a flood or a volcanic eruption or something, or a fire, we've just got bare soils and we see that succession of species come back, they start very bacterial, a few fungi move in, and over time the ratio shifts. I'm sure many of you know Elaine Ingham's work, and probably many of the talks today you've heard about those ratios of fungi to bacteria. But when we disturb the soil again, whether it's through fire or whether it's through tilling or whether it's through compaction, we basically bring that soil back to a very immature state. Okay. We then till it again, we bring it back again. This happens year after year, and we basically wear out the soil till it has nothing left to give. Okay, so just I guess one thing I would always say is think about disturbance. Am I running out of time? One minute? Think about, and that's I'm not telling you what to do, but if there's ways, even if we're talking about driving the yude across the paddock to the crop, think about not driving across the entire paddock, just driving across one place. Try to maximize the conditions so that we don't lose that fungal scaffold. And also to keep that diversity in. If you're a gardener, don't chip. Bunnings has a lot to answer for. There's a lot of fungi that don't want to live on a one centimetre square piece of wood. They want a diversity. Have you ever seen a tree with a built-in wood chipper? Trees don't wood chip their wood, so trying to keep that diversity in there. But I think we're going to open it up to some questions, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:06

We are, Alison. Thank you so much. You're very so engaging. And before we jump into questions, one week we are going to swap mics, that one's a bit of a roving. I need to make possibly a correction because I think I said that you've done over 600 workshops, forays, and seminars. It's actually nearly a thousand. And to make sure I don't forget at the end, but of Allison's seven books, four are available for purchase at the set right here. So don't forget. And what we'd like is when you ask a question, if you would mind sharing your name and also your favorite fungus. That would be great. Okay, so questions. Oh, right in the front.

SPEAKER_03 39:55

Okay, my name's um Matt, and I kindly had a quick conversation with you as you were driving in. But um so I was just um curious about um you just said then about um wood wood chips. Um so um you were mentioning in inoculants. Um so I've done a lot on my property, I've done a lot of um worm extract.

SPEAKER_08 40:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 40:17

So and then put that out just through a watering can onto wood chips. But I just feel like I haven't had a lot of success with seeing mushrooms, and I was wondering um whether or not there's other practices that you could suggest that might improve that.

SPEAKER_05 40:34

So the wood chips, have you brought these in or do you chip the wood that's fallen on your property?

SPEAKER_03 40:38

Uh predominantly I hit up the people on the side of the road when they're wood chipping and they just dump massive trucks. I've I've brought in so many uh truckloads of wood chips and spread them throughout the property.

SPEAKER_06 40:49

Good on you, that's fantastic. Next time you hit them up, try and jam a piece of metal in the chipper so it breaks and ask for the logs because it's diversity. A wood chip is a one centimeter square bit of wood, it's a bit like, and that will attract a very small subset of early pioneer, of early colonizing fungi. Okay. Whereas if you let a branch fall, a twig fall, a leaf fragment fall, a big limb fall, you provide homes for a much greater diversity of fungi. And why diversity matters is different fungi do different things. If you've got more processes, more talents, more functions, you end up with a more resilient society. It's a bit like we can start a new town down the road and call it New Dean's Marsh, and we're just gonna populate it with 17-year-old apprentice male plumbers. They're some of my best friends, don't get me wrong. Your toilet will flush perfectly, but who's gonna cook? My point is simply if you've got a limited society, a human society, this is a bit like wood chips. You're not gonna forget this now, are you? So, wood chips is providing one type of food for one limited group of fungi. But if you put a big log in there as well, you're gonna have a whole lot of different fungi that do different things other than just clean toilets, not clean toilets, who's gonna clean it toilets more to the point. So, what I'm thinking is try and get that wood before it's chipped. I mean, it's okay to have some of it chipped, but try and get the leaf fragments, the logs, the big limb as well. The microclimate under a log is very different to under a pile of wood chips. And people often say to me, you should see my wood chips. There's so many fungi coming up. And it's true, there's a lot of fungi coming up, there's a lot of biomass, but that is not biodiversity. What you want is biodiversity. So biomass is a lot of cells, there's a lot of organisms, biodiversity is a lot of species. And the more species you have, the different things they do. So think about diversifying that organic matter. You're then diversifying the microhabitats, the microclimates. You know, there's a fungus that they found called the hidden pink gill on Kangaroo Island. This is before the fires, it hasn't been seen since. And it only grows on large sheets of well-rotted sugar gum bark. It doesn't want a small sheet, it doesn't want an unrotted one, it doesn't want a stick or a wood chip. It's got a very particular habitat preference. Other fungi in this process of breaking down wood, they come in right at the beginning, the pioneers. Others will only come in when the bark is gone, the lignin is gone, there's just the cellulose there. So think about trying to, I mean, the wood chips are good because they're putting physical cover, and it's good to have that cover, but you want biological diversity. So we can also say, I'll have those chips, but can I just take these few branches as well? Different, when I say diversity, different sizes, shapes, ages, and species. Okay? Does that help answer the question? Yeah, good. Thank you for your question. Yes.

SPEAKER_11 43:49

Hi Allison. Uh Mike and uh my favorite mushroom is cordyceps gunni. Gunnii? I don't know how to say it, but it's the vegetable mushroom. Thingy. It's pretty freaky, and the kids love it.

SPEAKER_06 44:03

They do. Do you all know this wonderful fungus? Keep your eye out for the vegetable caterpillar, cordyceps guniae.

SPEAKER_11 44:10

They're starting at the moment.

SPEAKER_06 44:11

Fantastic. Yep. Among acacias, particularly melanoxal and blackwoods. Thank you.

SPEAKER_11 44:16

Yeah, and uh my question is about uh I'm a plant grower and uh retired. And um but I've always had this theory that mycorrhizal fungi inoculating seed will help the seed germinate. Now we know that mycorrhizal fungi helps plants grow and be healthy and get nutrient and water and all that. But I don't I haven't found a lot of information about whether it actually improves germination, especially of some of our understory plants, which are really difficult to germinate.

SPEAKER_06 44:53

Yeah, it's a fabulous question. Look, we certainly know with orchids that they're very fundamental to germination. So we've got different types of mycorrhizes. I mentioned the ones, the ectomycorizes that form that external sheath on the plant root. We've got the arbuscular mycorrhizes that form little tree-like structure inside the cortical cells of the plant root. Orchid mycorrhizes are different again. I don't know. I think with trees like or most of our woody species, my feeling is it's not at the seed germination stage. It's once that those roots have actually established, then the fungi form that connection and help expand them out. And the only reason I say this, and I'm very happy to be corrected, it's simply because if you walk into a young pine plantation, you don't actually see fungi for quite a few years. It might be 10 or 15 years until you start seeing them appear. So my feeling is that many of them, it's once that root system's actually already established that we know with orchids that's not the case. But I'm really open. Is somebody studying this?

SPEAKER_09 45:53

Could anybody develop answer this question for us?

SPEAKER_06 46:26

That makes total sense. If you've got your food supplied with you, you don't need the fungus to find it for you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

Alison, sorry, could I ask you to just summarise and repeat that so we get in the recording?

SPEAKER_06 46:36

That was a really fabulous comment about are mycorrhizal fungi forming the relationship at the seed stage or once the root system is established? And the gentleman made this excellent comment that it could be related to the seed size. So a large the larger the seed is, the more likely it is to have its food supply. But a very, very small seed like an orchid or the ones you mentioned, they actually release a chemical into the soil within the proximity of the fungus hyphae to encourage that connection. So for a seed that doesn't have its food supply, they become all the more important. Thank you so much for that wonderful insight. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 47:13

I'm just wondering whether weedy fungi is an issue. Are we introducing fungus into the system that shouldn't be there?

SPEAKER_06 47:22

This is a really fantastic question. So you all know the red one with the white dots. Did you see the fairies as well? That's always they always come with a cargo of fairies. What's the fly garlic, ammonita muscaria? Now, this fungus has been in the country, we think, probably for about 100 years, probably came in in early forestry pinus and signals or pinus radiata, as we call it today. It's been confined within its pine plantations, doing a great job extending out the root system of those pine trees, helping them to grow taller, more healthy, more resilient. But in the Otway region, also in Tasmania, also in the South Island and the North Island of New Zealand, this fungus has now moved out of the pine plantation and has latched onto the roots of the Nopophagus, our southern beach, our native beaches, and is knocking off the native partners that form the relationship with the beach. Now, no one's actually studying this, so we don't know if this is a problem, but generally, as a principle within ecology, when a native species loses its suite of fungal partners, it seems like not a very good strategy for the tree to invest to just have one fungal partner. So we don't actually know what the impact of that is, but there is concern about that fungus. And what's interesting too, from a conservation perspective, this is probably the most revered fungus in the world. Everybody knows it's beautiful charismatic fungus. So what happens now when it becomes an aggressive invader? That this fungus falls from its pedestal of being admired. So this is one that we need to know about. But there's another one that is really good to know at it's not mycorrhizal, it's a saprotrope, it's growing on woody debris, and it's called the orange pore fungus. So has anyone seen this one around? You've seen this one? Flavilasia Claudopus. And the concern about this fungus, in New Zealand they found it on 40 types of wood, and it secretes an antifungal. So in a piece of wood that's fallen to the ground, over the course of that, from the minute that wood falls till it's turned back into the soil, there will be hundreds of different fungi involved in that breakdown process. So what happens when this fungus says, get out? It's myolog now, it secretes its antifungals. Apparently it's a weak antifungal, so that's a good sign, but we don't really know what are the implications with how that wood will be recycled. This fungus was only found, I think it was 2004, was found in Melbourne. The last time I looked on the Atlas of Living Australia, it's been found in about 7,000 locations now. And they're always ruteral, not rural, but ruderal, so human disturbed environments, so picnic grounds, track edges, golf courses, parks, nature strips. So it seems, it's pointing the finger, that Homo sapiens might be the vector distributing the spores. But again, we don't really know what the implications are. So you three have got PhD projects waiting for you to find out what the implications are of these potentially weedy problematic fungi. But creating environments so, like wood chips, can actually increase the probability of these weedy fungi getting a hold. But a very important question. So very particular-looking fungus. It's it's only about the size of your thumbnail. And on the other underside, sometimes in Australia it's called the orange ping pong bat or the orange pore fungus, that's got these beautiful large tear-shaped pores. And what you'll just see is a log with a whole lot of orange dots on it. And then as you come up closer, there's sort of one cent. Can you remember what a one cent piece looks like? You'll see there's very, very tiny little orange ping pong bat-shaped sporing bodies with this porous underside. They're right throughout the Otways. So you'll see them throughout there. Yeah, now that I've mentioned it, you'll notice it everywhere. What can we do? If we were to collect all those sporing bodies, will that solve the problem? Unfortunately not. Because if one can release thousands, if not millions, of spores, it only takes one spore. The best thing we can do, again, it's minimize disturbance. We can only try and build up that environment so that the other fungi keep it in check. With a lot of these things, once the fungus is there, we can't get rid of it. But what we can do is build up the resilience of the system, get the other fungi back by not wood chipping, but actually having more diverse organic matter that will hopefully keep those fungi in check. But great question. Thank you for asking.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

And we've got we've got one last question. We could get your name and favorite fungi.

SPEAKER_04 51:51

Um, my name's Gwyn. My favorite um fungus mushroom is the one that comes on pizza. And um, my question is if we do that log thing, right, in our paddocks where we're trying to graze or whatever, like what like how big of an area is that fungus going to actually spread and affect the well-being of the whole pasture?

SPEAKER_06 52:15

Okay, so that's a that's a big conversation, that one. So the fungi that are gonna come in with the log are probably being a macro fungi, and certainly they're helping putting structure in the soil, increasing the biodiversity of the soil, the porosity of the soil, the water filtration of the soil, but they're probably not gonna be forming mycorrhizal fungi uh relationships with your crops. That's a different type of fungus that does that. So, and again, it's always hard to talk about how big it's hard, it's hard to talk about extent, you know what I mean. It depends on the rainfall, it depends on the soil type, it depends on the history of the land. Has it been intensively cropped or grazed in the past? Was it recently burnt? So there's lots of things that come into that. But I think even by starting with just inserting fungi into the equation of how we think about a paddock, about a garden, about an ecosystem, just thinking, well, is what I'm doing going to be having a detrimental effect on the fungi? When I put out a book called Underground Lovers, which in America they changed the name because it was a bit too sordid and steamy. But so, sorry, Americans are my best friends, don't get me wrong. I actually, in that book, I do a walk with this fabulous Japanese woman who had a property up near Beechworth, and she takes us all around the farm in the book. I talked, I sort of try to tell the story through her voice of all the things she did to try and bring fungi back onto her farm. She looked for the ecological legacies in the landscape, the log, the depression, the area where moisture can accumulate, where biodiversity can accumulate. So I sort of go step by step what she did over a 20-year period to think about how we might actually encourage fungi back into our agricultural soils. It's really easy for me to stand up here and talk about it. It's much, much harder to do it. I'm hugely appreciative of the challenges we've got. But I just love it that everyone is interested to think about how I can do things that won't actually displace the fungi. I'm so appreciative of you all coming along for having me here at the festival. I welcome continued conversations and thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you all so much.