Episode Details

Hi Friends!

Welcome to Season 2 of The Regenerative Agriculture Podcast!

Thank you for listening, spreading the word, and helping to make this show such a hit, while expanding our community in the fast-growing regenerative agriculture movement.

It is my honor to be part of this community along with you as we launch Season 2 of this show.

For this season-opening episode, we are immeasurably pleased to bring Dr. Don Huber back again, sharing more of his wealth of accumulated knowledge. Don was our first guest on the show in Season 1, and you can listen to the first-ever Regenerative Agriculture Podcast episode with Don, here.

Dr. Don Huber is a leading plant pathologist, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, and prolific author, contributor, or editor of more than 300 published academic writings and three books.

For more than 50 years, Don has been a renowned researcher and principal voice in the field of crop-plant pathology, especially as it relates to the overlapping spheres of mineral fertility and microbial ecology.

As a research partner, consultant or advisor, he has contributed to work in more than a dozen countries and been awarded numerous honors and awards for his copious scientific contributions.

Critical among these, has been his work in: nitrogen efficiency; nitrification inhibitors; plant and microbial metabolite interactions; development of aminopeptidase profiling, whereby unknown micro-organisms can be rapidly identified and then cultured, by their amino acid profile; and copious work vastly furthering the understanding of mineral/ microbe/ disease/ herbicide interaction.

There are some heavy science topics in this show that may compel your own further research. But no matter what or where you grow, there are some truly high-value practicalities laid out in this conversation.

This all makes him a really exciting guest to have on the show.

In this episode, listen as Dr. Don Huber covers the following and more:

• Reducing vs. non-reducing sugars and the role they play in energy storage and metabolism.
• High levels of reducing sugars (glucose and fructose) are an attractant of insects and disease.
• Manganese is an enzyme cofactor for the sucrose phosphate synthase enzyme that converts glucose and fructose.
• Reducing sugars are exuded from roots, attracting pythium, Phytophthora, actinomycetes, oomycetes. Non-reducing sugars are less exuded and a poorer food source for these organisms.
• Most soil pathogens remain dormant and harmless until activated by external nutrient sources. The grower can control this.
• In disease suppressive soils, soil bacteria colonize the resting structures of dormant fungal or oomycete spores, causing fungistasis, keeping them dormant. Reducing sugars, as root exudates, disrupt this suppression by giving bacteria a more ready food source.
• Airborne pathogens are also attracted to a deficient nutrient profile of the above-ground plant parts.
• Rusts require an exogenous source of Zinc on the leaf surface for spores to germinate.
• Siderophores can be prevented by antibiotics, nutritional integrity, and immune responses.
• Some early fungicides did not affect the fungus, but rather the amino acid profile of the plant, denying the fungus its food source. Apple Scab example.
• Aminopep