Soil Biology Workshop: Mycorrhizal Fungi, Bacteria & Cutting Fertilizer Costs

### From the family farm to soil biology

Thank you all for coming. I’ll tell you a little about myself to start. I grew up by Lisbon, North Dakota — actually 17 miles southwest of there, out in the middle of nowhere. I grew up farming and farmed right up until I was a senior, and I loved it. I always had that passion for growing things and seeing things grow. My favorite was the combine, because I loved watching all our work go into the hopper.

But back then — kind of like a couple months ago — fertilizer prices were high and commodity prices were low, and we didn’t make it. So I thought, well, I guess I’m not going to be farming the rest of my life, I’ve got to go find something to do. I went through college, got my business management and finance degrees, all that fun stuff, but sitting in an office wasn’t for me. I had to be out in the field, doing something in ag.

That’s where I got into 890 Ag News, an agricultural radio station — Mark knows this. I was the sales manager at the time, so I could get out, talk to farmers, be in the fields. I was having a good time and learning, but I always had that chip on my shoulder: we didn’t make it in farming, and I wanted to figure out why, when my neighbors were still farming. So I told myself I’d keep my eye open for something that was truly going to change farming as a whole. I didn’t know what it would be.

### Discovering mycorrhizal fungi

The cool part about working at 890 Ag News is we went to all the farm shows, so I’d spend three days at a time going booth to booth. About 20 years ago, at Big Iron, way back in the corner, I found a booth that said “mycorrhizal fungi.” I went, “What is this? I’ve never heard of this.” They were a company out of Oregon, and they started telling me about the fungi, the soil, all of it. I’d never gone into soil biology or soil science, so it was all foreign — but it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard of.

So I took it on myself. I kept my day job, but I took online soil science and soil biology classes and learned how our soil is supposed to function — what mycorrhizal fungi are, what a lot of these bacteria are, how it’s all supposed to work. And I got to thinking: man, we’ve been doing things wrong for a long time. That’s really how everything started — learning the soil and how it’s supposed to function. That mycorrhizal fungi became MycoMaxx.

I wake up a lot around 3:00 in the morning, wide awake, and I get on my phone. I found this one not long ago: “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” What do we mean by that? If we’ve got no soil, we’ve got no food. I just got off WhatsApp with a guy in India — their soils are so salted out they can barely grow anything. I work in a lot of different countries now with these products to fix soils. We’ve degraded our soil badly, yes, but it’s never been easier than it is today, with our technology, to put soil health back in a relatively short amount of time. That’s what I’m going to show you how to do.

### What “healthy soil” really means

A lot of people come up and say, “I want healthier soil.” I ask them, “What is healthy soil?” and they say, “I don’t know — everybody talks about it, but what is it?” To me, healthy soil is a balance: the correct microbes at the correct ratios.

Your fungi-to-bacteria ratio should be pretty close to 1:1. Now, fungi are a lot more fickle than bacteria, and most of the soils I test have very, very little fungi left — so that’s one place to start. Getting that ratio right improves your fertilizer efficiency. We’re talking about putting 1, 1.1, or 1.2 pounds of nitrogen out per bushel. I’ve got guys down in the 0.43 to 0.47 range, and we’re still working it. I’ve got guys who just started who are down around 0.8 and happy with that. If we keep balancing these soils, we can get closer.

So to me, a fully functioning, balanced soil — with the right microbes in the right quantity doing the right things — that’s healthy soil. And what do you get out of it? Aggregation, structure, all of it. That comes from the microbes and the roots working together.

A lot of the tests I get back — the Regen test, the Haney test, and others — show arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi at a goose egg. I see it all the time. UV light kills it; every time we’ve tilled for the last century, we’ve tipped up our roots and our soil. One ratio I’m looking at is 220 bacteria to 7 total fungi — and I’m not just talking arbuscular fungi, I’m including the protozoa and everything else on the fungi side. A very poor ratio. I get maybe 5,000 of these a year across my desk, and a lot of them are close to zero.

The challenges are what you’d expect: tillage, anhydrous (that smokes everything), potato farmers who fumigate and wipe it out — though they put our products right back on because we have the beneficial ones. Compaction isn’t really the issue; get cereal rye and roots deep down and you can take care of compaction over time. Then erosion, synthetic fertilizers, heavy herbicide, fungicide, pesticide. Sugar beet growers put a lot of fungicide on, and that doesn’t help the fungi side. And salts — you may not see it here as much as you do out by Valley City or Jamestown, where guys are losing 20 or 30 acres out of every quarter to salt. That’s a big one, and it’s getting bigger.

### Mycorrhizal fungi: the forgotten hero

Let’s take a closer look at the fungi. This is how I started my company — I was one of maybe the first 120 to 150 biological companies out there. Now there are 1,500 or more. But I was one of the crazy ones who didn’t focus on bacteria; I focused on fungi, because there are two sides to the soil. Bacteria are a lot easier to grow in mass quantity and sell. Fungi are harder.

Our arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are really the forgotten hero — what we believe is the base of your soil. It’s the transport, the highway. It needs to be there so what your bacteria are working on actually gets to your plant. The spores go into your roots and start growing hyphae — little hairs — off the roots. Those hairs release enzymes that unlock phosphorus and potassium that’s tied up naturally. That’s why we have all these problems with nutrients in our soil being unavailable — except it’s not unavailable if we have the right microbes.

Once those hairs start growing, the mama plant up top is photosynthesizing and sending starches and sugars down to keep the hyphae growing out through the soil to find what the bacteria are converting. What you end up with is “fuzz” — all the microscopic hairs growing off your root. You won’t see it if you pull a root out of the ground, but that’s what’s happening underground.

### Bacteria: the converters

You’ve got all this bacteria in your soil right now, and it’s like the mafia — I call them converters. There’s bacteria down there that convert your nitrogen, which might be in a form that’s not usable, into usable form. Same with phosphorus, potassium, carbon, calcium, boron, zinc — all of them have to go through bacteria to become plant-usable. Then the mycorrhizae go through your soil, find what’s been converted, and bring it to the plant. That’s a fully functioning soil, how it’s supposed to work. If there’s a missing link, your soil isn’t working.

So what do we do? We side-dress, we wide-drop, we do everything we can to feed that plant because our soil doesn’t have enough beneficial fungi and bacteria. A lot of guys say, “That plant’s got a yellow streak, so it’s deficient in this.” I say you’re deficient in enough microbes in your soil to make it available — because our testing shows you’ve got plenty down there, you just can’t get it.

### What roots look like with mycorrhizae

When you see these pictures, people call the fuzz “dreads.” That’s your soil, your aggregate, your glomalin strains — the glue that holds your soil together — hanging onto the root. There’s the tip of a root; without mycorrhizae all you’d have is the bare circle, but these are all feeders going out to find nutrients and water.

When I’m doing radio interviews, I tell people to imagine a bull pine with long needles. Take the needles off and stick it in the ground upside down — that’s your root. Now put all the needles back on and stick it in the ground. That’s what you’ve got with mycorrhizae: a feeding system down there.

So we take your root system and the rhizosphere and expand it way out. Those little hairs have a PSI of about 1,250. Your roots, on a good system, have maybe 350 to 400. The hyphae will get to spots your roots will never reach and bring those nutrients back to your plant.

### Field results and trials

Here’s a grower out of Iowa — look at the roots on his beans. Year one. I’ve got literally thousands of these pictures. What we see is bigger roots and a lot more nodulation.

Here’s a Casselton corn trial from 2025. CHS ran it with their in-furrow fertilizer — I said keep your fertilizer, we’ll just throw our MycoMaxx right in with it, run it in-furrow, done in five minutes. Rep one: untreated 433, with MycoMaxx 488. Rep two: 478 to 538. We came out on top. Then we went to a salty area that had salted out two years prior and started treating it with Salt Be Gone — we’re getting beans that aren’t burning up anymore.

Sunflowers, the same story — look at the root mass and all the feeder hairs. I can put it on about anything but sugar beets: barley, oats, you name it. Parker, you guys pulled a lot of roots this year and saw it — way more feeder hairs, longer and bigger, and that’s where the nutrients come from.

### Reading your plants: brace roots and deficiencies

You want to see nice green brace roots, because that means your plant is getting the nutrients it needs. If you see purpling or reddish color, that’s phosphorus deficiency — the plant isn’t getting enough phosphorus. MycoMaxx and the mycorrhizae unlock the phosphorus that’s already there, and trust me, there’s plenty of it.

Your brace roots are a direct indication of ear size — I see it every single year. I also see ears sitting higher on the stalk, and I see plants tassel three to five days quicker, treated versus untreated. The plant’s growing faster. You’ll often get about two more rows around on the ear — you’re just getting more nutrients to your plant.

Tissue samples tell the same story — one jumped from 138 to 171 on iron. Build your mycorrhizal levels and your iron deficiency chlorosis in beans goes away. I’ve never once had anybody who’s no-tilled and cover-cropped for more than 20 years tell me they have IDC issues. Get the balance in your soil and your soil takes care of you.

### Mycorrhizae in drought

In harsh conditions like drought — and we’re in one right now over by Casselton that I’ve never seen anything like — undisturbed soil can have mycorrhizal fungi running literally for a mile, bringing back nutrients and mostly water. I’ve seen them found 60 feet down.

So in a drought, the mama plant sends starches and sugars down, and the root tells the hyphae, “I need water, bad — get growing, get me water.” If there’s water anywhere in the profile, they’ll go find it. If there’s none there, there’s nothing anyone can do. Here’s the University of Florida drought test — the difference is pretty obvious.

### Root protection, nematodes, and weed suppression

Mycorrhizae also protect your roots — they form a barrier against root rot. I see it a lot in small grains. With cyst nematode, the natural killer is mycorrhizal fungi: if the nematode tries to attack a root and you’ve got good mycorrhizae, the fungi form little nooses around it, kill it, and eat it, because that hypha knows if the root dies, it dies. It’s a wild kingdom down there.

On cutworm and rootworm, people are using beneficial nematodes to kill the larvae — beneficial bugs in the soil. The more beneficial nematodes we have, the more problems we get rid of. The trouble is, anybody fighting cyst has probably gone in with a nematicide and wiped out everything.

Weed suppression: most of the weeds we fight — Palmer amaranth, waterhemp, anything in the brassica family, canola, sugar beets — are non-mycorrhizal. They can’t use these spores to boost their root systems, so you’ll still have a weed, but a much weaker one, because it’s starved of nutrients and water.

### Soil structure and aggregation

Structure, tilth, soil health — the aggregation Mark was getting at — comes from the fungi. We have eight different species of mycorrhizae in our blend, and some are Glomus strains. Glomus produces glomalin, the glue that holds your soil together. We can start putting structure back into your soil literally in year one. It won’t stop blowing across the road next spring — that takes time — but cover crops and even reduced or shallow tillage help. If the good bugs live in the top ten inches, why flip the whole profile over? Till down three or four inches and keep that pocket of good biology for next year’s crop; they’ll reproduce themselves if they have a root to do it. That’s the very short version of mycorrhizal fungi — my full slideshow is about eight times longer.

### The bacteria library

Now, the bacteria we work with in our lab — we have thousands in a library. We know the good ones, the bad ones, and what they do. As I said, a lot of our deficiencies aren’t chemical deficiencies, because the soil holds plenty; it’s the microbe deficiency to unlock them that we’re short on.

A few examples: nutrient solubilization — if we don’t solubilize nutrients into plant-usable form, they’re tied up. Breakdown of organic matter — that corn residue after harvest we all struggle with. We have a blend we call “rotten sauce” because it rots residue. The difference with ours: we have eight species in there, and some produce their own heat and keep breaking down residue to 55 below zero. I told my guys I don’t want anything that quits working when it hits 50 below — you just spent money on something that isn’t even working. This works all winter.

Other bacteria are insecticidal to beetle larvae, or protect against fusarium root rot and potato rot. One possesses all the enzymes of the urea cycle — meaning when you put urea in the ground, it has to go through bacteria to become plant-usable, and if you don’t have enough of these, is it really plant-usable anymore?

### Cutting fertilizer with the right microbes

Nitrogen fixation. Do you think we can lower our nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium rates by putting the right microbes back in the soil? Why do people no-till and cover crop? Not because they like the heartache and pain of the first five years — they do it because in the end they have healthier soil that functions correctly and a much lower fertilizer bill. I’ve got guys who pay much less than their neighbors. They went through the pain. This is kind of your cheat code: knowing which bugs to put in, plus mycorrhizae, some cover cropping, and maybe a little reduced tillage — you can go a long way in a short time.

### DNA soil testing and the field prescription

Here’s a list of common diseases we test for. We do the Haney test, the TND test, and our own DNA analysis, and we combine them all. The coolest thing we do: we take your soil sample, and if we like what we see — if there are a lot of good natives in there — we’ll reproduce your native microbes and put them back in your soil the next year, because you don’t have enough. Nobody else does that. We do.

This is the report you’ll get. We have a library of thousands of beneficial microbes for fixation, conversion, solubilization, and minerals, and we know which beneficial bugs help with which diseases. Here’s the kicker on the fungi-to-bacteria ratio — I do it on a per-field basis, so you get a prescription for your field, not your farm. In one field, if fungi is 1 and bacteria is 114, we’re way off, so we add fungi.

Down here is how many pounds of carbon are in your soil. The pathway is one of our main concerns: if your pathway is under 80 or 90 percent, you’re not getting things from your soil. One field shows 5,700 pounds of nitrogen, but none of it is coming across to where it’s available, because we don’t have the right microbes. So we put those microbes in your blend. We’ve got 2,700 pounds of phosphorus, 3,000 pounds of nitrogen in that soil. I like to see phosphorus around 500 to 1,000, nitrogen around 1,500, potassium around 1,000 to 1,500 — that’s a good bank in your soil. We have a lot of fertilizer savings for you sitting right there.

They’ll tell you you’re going to mine your soil — but we can watch it. If I take even 20 or 30 pounds a year, it’s going to take a while to get it down to where it’s detrimental. It’s there; we just have to use it. Disease risk — pythium, gray leaf spot, fusarium, goss’s wilt, root rot — we put in good microbes that defend against disease. It won’t completely wipe out every disease, but it helps. It’s a two-year deal: you can see the percent change year to year — respiration up 27.2 percent, nitrogen pathway up 13, carbon up 17. We can watch how much is left in your bank and keep saving you money.

We also look at sulfur, zinc, calcium, sodium, magnesium, manganese, copper, iron — all of it. And organic matter: here’s the key — if I take a nice little root system and blow it up into a big one (even on cereal rye), that puts organic matter and carbon into your soil, not by tilling residue in but with bigger roots. That organic matter — which is a root — is a lot easier for microbes to break down and bring to the plant.

### What you get: fertility plus a biological blend

So what do you get? Your standard fertility rec — whatever your soil sampler comes back with. Then our custom biological blend: field-specific, maybe 30 different species of bacteria, fungi, and enzymes to help your soil function. On a sample report, if your fungi-to-bacteria ratio is far off, we’d recommend MycoMaxx. Bionic is a dual-species nitrogen-fixing bacteria, foliar, that brings in about 40 to 60 pounds of N per year — it doesn’t leach, it goes into your plant systemically and sucks in nitrogen all year.

### The cost breakdown and fertilizer savings

Let’s say your normal fertility rec is $165 an acre — I’m just throwing numbers out, because fertilizer prices do what they do. With our recommendation, all of it together costs about $30 to $35 an acre, and your fertility bill drops to around $95 an acre, because I’m cutting a bunch of your nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. That doesn’t include add-ons like boron and zinc. Normally we’ll save $30, $40, $50 an acre as we keep doing this. Over time we build your fungi, get a balance, and you don’t need as much — maybe you add a little every three years if you’re still tilling. Suddenly that $35 savings becomes $48, and some growers end up saving $60 or $70 an acre because they’ve built the soil. Cover crops only make this quicker and easier.

### The testing process

Here’s our website — nafbiologicals.com. You can read all about our testing. The process is easy: all I need is 12 eight-inch plugs or 16 six-inch plugs per field. We’ve taken 60 plugs and 10 plugs from the same field, sent both in, and got the exact same DNA back — so why have you out there pulling 50 or 60 plugs when 12 or 16 will do? I did a field the other day in about 12 minutes.

You get everything on that report — the good, the bad, and the ugly, your fertility rec, what our products do, plus the Haney and TND tests. A lot of guys worry about jumping their whole farm in year one. Don’t. Give me five or six fields you think should produce more; I guarantee there’s something microbial we can change. And yes, we can do zones for salty or less-productive areas, but as a whole we don’t feel it’s worth the extra time right now.

### MycoMaxx, Bionic, and rotten sauce

MycoMaxx is our flagship — it’s what a lot of soils need. We have all kinds of ways to apply it: dry, planter box, in-furrow, seed treatment. Bionic is the nitrogen-fixing dual-species foliar. Everything I make has more than one species, because nature lives by more than one species. There are 35,000 pounds of nitrogen above every acre — 78 percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen — so why not use it? Think of the rainforest: it gets its nutrients two ways. There aren’t little trolls walking around with fertilizer bags; it pulls nutrients from the ground with mycorrhizal fungi that can go four miles and pull water two miles back to a tree, and it pulls from the atmosphere through the leaves.

Why pour on 200 pounds of N when the farmer says he only gets half of it? If 100 pounds actually reaching the plant gives you 200 bushels, what if I make the fertilizer you put down more efficient — maybe you put on 150, but I get 75 percent of it to the plant? You’re still getting that 100 pounds. That’s fertilizer efficiency.

Bionic is easy — spray it on foliar when the corn’s knee-high. It works on small grains, sugar beets, and corn, but you need good foliage; spray it on the ground and it does you no good.

*Audience question: Is that a replacement for a wide drop?* Yes, if you don’t have a wide-drop side-dresser.

*Audience question: What if you’re already at 0.6 pounds?* If you’re at 0.6, I’d honestly look at whether there are more microbes we can add to the basket — and Bionic is 40 to 60 pounds, about 50, so it might get you down to 0.5. My goal with my farmers is to pull them down slowly as we build soil health.

### Nebraska trial and why NAF is different

Here’s a good example from a guy in Nebraska. He said, “Just for fun, I’m going to cut 60 pounds of fertilizer on my whole field,” and he tested three products. I won’t name the first one. The second is Bionic. The third is a good product too, but it’s four dollars more an acre than mine — I don’t have the overhead or the big advertising budget, so I keep my prices low.

Most of the companies that make a big splash are backed by big California investor companies with $50 million advertising budgets. I don’t think that investor sitting on his yacht has ever been in a field, and he doesn’t care who you are as long as the product sells. There’s something a little different about a North Dakota boy who does care about you — I don’t want you to quit farming or end up like I did.

Here’s a grower who, with his brother, farms about 20,000 acres in southeastern North Dakota — the hardest sell I’ve ever had. He finally used Bionic last year and sent me this photo, 7 to 10 days after treatment: “Man, you’ve got something with this one. I can see it within a week.” The reason I built it: if I can make the leaves bigger, they’re like solar panels — more photosynthesis, more starches and sugars down to the roots, more root exudates, more mycorrhizal activity. Everything cycles together. And it turns out this one sucks in nitrogen like crazy.

You can mix Bionic with a herbicide, but no pesticides or insecticides — you don’t want to kill it. I’m not a fan of mixing fungicides with it either; to be safe, I wouldn’t.

### Rotten sauce: breaking down residue

I came with this one to complete the cycle. Trig, I heard you talk about getting rid of corn residue — our biggest struggle. For years I looked for a way until we found the right bugs that work to 55 below zero. You spray it on after harvest, even with a drone, and it works all winter long. By next spring, even if you lightly till it in, it keeps working underground. That raises organic matter, the bigger roots hold rain, and it all works together as a cycle.

By breaking residue down and getting it back into the profile, we can release up to 100 pounds of nitrogen, 50 pounds of phosphorus, and 200 pounds of potassium from the residue. Get that back in the soil with the bugs and the mycorrhizae working, and next year’s crop keeps getting better as soil health grows.

### Salt Be Gone

I told you I have a big salt issue on the North Dakota side. We’ve got spots — 20, 30 acres — that are white and won’t grow anything, not even a weed. I see it track with soil types: one soil type will be white, salt sitting on top and burning everything, right next to ground farmed the same way its whole life.

Look at the salt load in our fertilizers: there are 63 pounds of salt in 100 pounds of urea. Glyphosate is around 3 pounds of salt per gallon. Farmers out west ask where the salt’s coming from — you’re putting it on with everything you apply.

Here’s the story behind Salt Be Gone. I asked a colleague, “Do you have anything that gets rid of salt?” He said, “I can get rid of plastic bottles with my bacteria if you want.” My son was with me. He throws bottles in a tank with water and his bacteria and basically eats them, and he said salt’s easy. So I told him to build me a salt product. The hardest part is breaking the NaCl bond; once it’s broken, you’ve got sodium and chloride, and we have microbes that break those down into a plant-usable form or a waste product that washes away with rain and roots. Get something growing in there and it washes away quicker.

Salt levels to know are right on saltbgone.com. If a chunk of land isn’t producing like it used to, check your salt levels — that might be the culprit. You can tank-mix it, run it through irrigators, fly it on with a drone, spot-spray with a four-wheeler, or run it in-furrow at about a cup per acre to keep salt from your starter fertilizer and start working the soil.

### Financing and working with cover crops

We have a low-rate financing program running until the end of December — I think it’s down around 2.9 percent, maybe 3.5. You don’t have to use your credit line, and there are no payments until 2028.

So, in a nutshell — I know it was a lot — there are ways to work with Mark to add biologicals and make this whole process quicker. He and I are going for the exact same thing; I just do it on a microbial level and he does it his way. We work together, and we can really make this thing fly.

### Q&A: drought and water holding

*Audience question about a specific field.* I’m glad you brought that up — I almost forgot I had these. If you go west out of Fargo and hit Mapleton, that first little town, then the Durbin overpass, the very next field on your right is where this came from. It got about the same rain we did here, maybe less. With the bigger roots and more organic matter year after year, you get way less stress on your plants, because there’s water down there and your mycorrhizae will go get it in the soil pores.

Look at this corn — the brace roots are the size of my pinky, nice and green, no purple, no red. There’s your difference: probably two more rows around, about the same length, and I guarantee if we’d gotten any rain at all, those second ears would’ve been nearly half full. You drive by that field right now and it’s still green, while every other field around it is brown. That’s a good indication of what you can do with some biologicals and healthy soil. Thank you — it was fun. I’ll be around for any questions afterward.