EXCAVATOR

The wonders of microbes, Larry Fiene and Planet Earth Agronomy have developed a consortium of microbes, a microbe cocktail, if you will, called Excavator, which is applied to plant residues like post harvest corn and wheat stocks. This microbial mixture works to break down the residues and in so doing, produces nutrients that blend back into the soil. He explains. It's a pretty big move and pretty good progress in the breakdown and of course, the breakdown and the other part of the story that's really a benefit to farmers is that the microbes themselves, they contain a lot of the nutrients, so the nitrogen that's inside the microbes is organic and it's also ammonium, which is a much more stable source of nitrogen. So not only does it break down, but they break it down, but they also stabilize the nutrients in the soil so that they're not subject to loss and so forth as, say, when they go through a very rapid change with a different set of microbes in the soil that might turn them from an ammonium ion directly into nitrate, which could leach out or could potentially form into gas and gas off into the atmosphere. So there's much more stability when you use a consortium with the type of microbes that are being put together today by a lot of the research.