Observing nature to manage companies
Discover new insights into soil health that can inspire the dynamics of human systems.
Diversity provides stability, a working principle of natural systems that people insist on ignoring when creating human systems.
An easy example to illustrate this point is using bacteria and fungi for biological pest control in crops. With the great advantage of replacing the use of toxic chemicals that kill life in the soil, biological pest control, however, still follows the logic of fighting the disease without acting on the cause of the imbalance.
In general, a system poor in species diversity, i.e., a monoculture, will always be less resistant to unforeseen events and bad weather and, therefore, more susceptible to pests and diseases.
It is no longer news that a pest is an indicator of imbalance. In a complex network with diverse agents, predators, and prey interact to sustain increasingly complex life forms. The natural succession of species naturally leads to greater diversity. But when a disturbance hits the system and affects this balance, an infestation of the same species can occur, regressing the system to previous levels of succession, something comparable to the transformation of a forest or savannah, full of carbon reserves, into a desert with no life-sustaining stocks.
Returning to the case of biological control technology, today, it is already possible to eliminate pathogenic fungi using a predatory fungus, Trichoderma. The issue is that once this technology is used, a new problem arises because the agent used can be so aggressive that it also kills the beneficial biology of the soil, which is responsible for protecting and giving health to plants.
In another scenario, in soil where there is a complete food chain of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and microarthropods, plants have the vigor and protection to avoid the proliferation of pathogens. This balance is achieved by imitating the soils of the most advanced systems, i.e., forests, where there is a correlation between bacteria and fungi, fixing carbon.
This is the difference between soil and dust. Soil contains biology and organic matter that make it capable of allowing air to pass through, retaining nutrients, and sustaining life. Dust, on the other hand, is only the mineral component of soil and is inert: clay, sand, or silt. If there is only mineral soil, only a few life forms can develop, and this is the start of succession.
Poor soil will be dominated by bacteria. They are the base of the soil food chain but are inferior in their ability to fix carbon. Without the diversity that comes with the presence of fungi and other life forms, pure soil, through bacteria, quickly consumes all the minerals (including chemical fertilizers) incorporated into it, metabolizing the carbon into carbon dioxide and depleting the soil's stocks.
Although bacteria cause this type of degradation, the presence of other agents, mainly fungi and the entire food chain that forms from them, controls the activity of the bacteria and helps to fix the carbon instead of losing it as a gas. The stock of carbon in the soil, combined with the presence of a diverse beneficial aerobic biology, is the main measure for creating balanced and healthy systems. Any external attack or disturbance has little impact when the entire plant is covered in this biology, colonizing the area around its roots and leaves. There are no open points of infection.
Transferred to human systems, this logic makes us value the diversity of local cultures and different ways of doing things, as well as the presence of different ways of thinking in the composition of teams and groups. This is how nature can inspire companies.
The article was written by Marina Utsch
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