FERTILISERS AND CHEMICALS
It’s time to fight fungi with fungi With multiple chemical fungicides getting banned, professional sports turf managers’ arsenals against fungal pathogens are shrinking. Craig Sams, Executive Chairman of Carbon Gold, explains why it’s time for the turf industry to adopt a biological approach to pathogen control… Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 was a godsend but, after nearly a century of overprescription, bacteria are becoming resistant and superbugs like MRSA are haunting our hospital hallways. We are threatened with a return to the pre-penicillin days when we were completely unequipped to deal with infection. When they first reared their heads, the medical community reacted to superbugs with blanket sterilisation, but by simultaneously killing benign and beneficial bacteria, they were inadvertently giving superbugs grounds to flourish, making the problem worse. With experience we grow wiser and now, in the place of alcohol rubs, hospitals will soon have microbial soaps to beat the superbugs at their own game. Literally fighting bacteria with bacteria. The healthcare industry’s rapid progress in its approach to tackling super-resistant pathogens is not replicated in the world of turf however, which has been in a state of arrested development for some years. The number of fungicides available to deal with troublesome pathogens, such as fusarium, (which leaves unsightly brown patches on green grass) outstripped the speed with which the fungi could adapt and outweighed
Digging deep AQUA-AID’s EU Director Hans de Kort explains why Worm Power Turf, a vermicomposted liquid compost, is different from other tea-based products on the market, and how the product benefits root system development to create a stronger, healthier strand of turf and healthier roots.
68 | Turf Matters | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018
their ability to develop resistance. Greenkeepers could cycle through six or so chemical fungicides, switching from one to the other every time their effectiveness declined. By the time they’d got through them all the fungi would have lost their resistance to the first fungicide in the sequence, and so the cycle starts again. Apart from being expensive to do so many applications per year, it may seem like a perfectly balanced system but balance, as always, is delicate. Fungicide after fungicide is being found to be carcinogenic or harmful to people and the environment and their approval for use in the EU is being revoked. The greenkeeper’s arsenal is rapidly shrinking. The threat now is that there are no longer enough fungicides in the cycle to keep pathogens like fusarium at bay; they will adapt faster than we can keep up, possibly even becoming resistant to all our chemical treatments. So, what then? We could try to put off the inevitable a little longer by developing more chemical fungicides. We could continue to fight on the back foot, barely keeping up with nature, while exposing golfers and the like to more potentially hazardous chemicals. A better approach is to take a blade from the medical community’s pitch and fight fungi with fungi. Biostimulants are very much the cutting edge of agritech. We now know that incorporating beneficial microbiology around the roots of grass ensures the turf is all around healthier. The microbiology competes with pathogens, making
the grass better equipped to fight off pests and diseases. Prevention is better (and cheaper) than cure. The best performing biostimulant has been repeatedly shown in independent studies to be Carbon Gold’s enriched biochar. This is because microorganisms and nutrients normally leach away with rainwater and irrigation, but biochar, which is a highly purified and porous form of charcoal, provides beneficial soil biology with permanent and recalcitrant housing. Carbon Gold’s biochar is enriched with mycorrhizal and trichoderma fungi (the fungal ‘good guys’), seaweed and wormcasts – a combination that enables faster establishment and root growth, and improved grass health. Following successful trials, enriched biochar has been incorporated on all the greens at Okehampton Golf Course and this year Royal Ascot reports a significant improvement in the quality of its racecourse. The STRI testing enriched biochar in its turf trials right now, so official confirmation is on its way. Biochar is more effective than standard agrichemicals at keeping turf healthy and, because it is organic, there is no risk of it being found to be carcinogenic somewhere down the line. The risk of it being banned is zero. Yes, the arsenals of groundsmen and greenkeepers are shrinking, but when a superior alternative exists, what does it matter? For forward looking sports turf managers, the arrested development is coming to an end. It’s now time to end the fungicide cycle. It’s time to fight fungi with fungi.
What exactly is Worm Power Turf?
With other teas and products like it, the big goal seems to be that if billions of microbes are a good thing, then trillions are better. So people want microbial blooms in their products. In our opinion, that’s really not the important thing. The numbers aren’t important. The important thing is the broad spectrum of colonies that we achieve, and the viability of those colonies once they hit the soil.
Worm Power Turf is a vermicomposted liquid compost that boosts microbial life in the profile. It’s made strictly from our own OMRI-listed vermicompost, which is produced on site in our facility, and water, which are the only two ingredients in Worm Power Turf. This sets it apart from a lot of other vermicompost products, and we refer to our product as a liquid extract. You’ll hear in the industry, the jargon is compost tea. For us, we view that as kind of a pejorative.
How does it work? What the liquid really is, is a vector for