Intro  ……etc ...Today  I am going to talk about Quorum sensing which is my geek favourite subject, that I hope not to bore you to tears with but During my talk I am likely to throw these balls out at random people , this is not only to wake some of you up but also it links into Quorum sensing and I will explain this at the end , don’t worry throwing them back pls keep or throw again ,

hopefully you will take away from here today an additional perspective to add to the many needed to look at soil differently 

and the final point to add is to the best of my knowledge everything I am about to say about soil is as per the results of trials and experiment I have carried out but there is no way everything will be right as the soil biome is so big and so undiscovered, so do bare with me  

Right 

I want to begin with the moment soil stopped being background to me and became the subject itself.

That moment came while I was working for a long-standing client Kew Gardens. It was winter. I found sections of the gardens where the soil looked saturated, almost sluffy at the surface, and yet just millimetres below that surface it was astonishingly dry. Almost bone dry. And here is the thing that made it stranger still: both layers were well-aggregated, open soils. Neither looked damaged. Neither looked compacted. And yet they were behaving in completely opposite ways.

That welded itself in to my mind.

Because it made no sense if you looked at soil in the simple way many people still do. The surface was telling one story. The profile beneath it was telling another.

At the same time, one of my soil heroes Barry Pace, is an extraordinarily experienced sports turf constructor helped deepen that shift. Barry has that rare inquisitive eye that allows someone to look at a profile and see not just material, but function. Not just texture, but behaviour. Not just a soil, but a system, and he had seen the same issues elsewhere in his work .

And the more I looked because of this , the more I realised that the contradiction I had seen at Kew was not really a contradiction at all.

It was a clue.

A clue that water in soil is not simply about how much water is present. It is about where it sits, how it moves, what pathways exist, what is blocked, what is connected , what biology is doing to the pore geometry, what roots and fungi and microbial communities are doing to the very architecture of that space.

In other words, the issue was not just water. It was living soil.

If there is one habit I think modern agriculture needs to recover more seriously, it is this: we need to dig more soil pits.

Because a soil pit is one of the few places where the field tells the truth. 

Not the spreadsheet truth. 

Not the average-sample truth. 

Not the top-six-inch truth. The truth.

A pit shows you the structure, the layering, the rooting depth, the compaction, the porosity, the mottling, the smell, the worm channels, the moisture distribution, the biological architecture — and the difference between what the field looks like from the surface and what it is actually doing.

A pit reminds us that the field is three-dimensional. Not flat.

One globally experienced soil profiler whose work I follow has made the point that there may be well over 250,000 different soil types worldwide. 

Whether the exact number shifts with classification system or scale, the point stands: soil diversity is immense.

That matters because if soils differ that much, then one-size-fits-all thinking is plainly foolish. The field beneath your boots is not interchangeable with another field somewhere else, even if the crop is the same. Biology, water movement, root behaviour, nutrient cycling, and resilience are all being expressed through a specific profile, a specific history, and a specific architecture.

And once you accept that, a great many crude assumptions start to wobble.

Because soil is not merely a container.

It is a habitat. A scaffold. A filter. A reservoir. A reactor. A memory. A network.

Before I come to quorum sensing itself, I want to name something that I think holds us back in how we think about soil.

We are very accustomed to talking about soil health------ And within that conversation, we tend to single out individual causes , a mineral deficiency here, a compaction layer there, a fungal imbalance somewhere else. The problem is that so many of these issues are so deeply intertwined with one another that isolating a single cause and applying a single solution can leave the real problem entirely untouched. The potential for a genuine solution is limited before you even start, because you are looking at one thread in a fabric.

Think about everything we already list when we talk about soil health. Minerals. Organic matter. Water. Air. Bacterial communities. Fungal communities. Carbon. Amoeba. Nematodes. Protozoa. Earthworms. And I am sure you can add more 

And that is before we add the physical and climatic factors ,temperature gradients, freeze-thaw cycles, moisture fluctuation, root pressure, gas exchange ,all of which interact with the biology constantly.

With all of these factors interacting simultaneously, it is virtually impossible for there not to be some form of coordination operating within the profile. Cause-and-effect chains that we have never fully traced, but that are there none the less. Patterns of response and adaptation running through the whole system, not just individual parts of it.

It does not suggest any form of consciousness or cognitive state in the soil. But it does represent a real-time dynamic overlay of coordination and symbiotic trading , between the plant and its exudates, between the plant and the biome, and within the biome itself, using the mycelium network as its infrastructure. It is an influencing factor on soil health that is operating constantly, that science has documented clearly, and that agriculture almost never speaks of.

And yet when we talk about soil health, we almost never talk about what coordinates it all.

That is the gap. And quorum sensing fits precisely in that space.

So what is quorum sensing?

If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. Even now, ask a room of farmers, agronomists, or quite a few soil scientists about it, and many will either not know the term or know it only vaguely. But that needs to change. Because quorum sensing may be one of the most influential and underappreciated forces in every farming system.

At its simplest, quorum sensing is how microbes coordinate.

An individual bacterium releases signalling molecules into its surroundings. At low density, those molecules drift away and little changes. But when enough microbes are present — when the signal builds to a threshold , genes switch. Behaviour changes. The population begins acting less like scattered individuals and more like a coordinated group.

That coordination may lead to biofilm formation. It may trigger spore production. It may organise nutrient capture. It may switch on virulence, support symbiosis, trigger dormancy, or prime defence.

The key point is this: microbial behaviour is not just random background metabolism. Under the right conditions it is organised, timed, and social.

The roots of this field go back to the 1950s. By the 1960s and 70s, work on luminous marine bacteria showed that Vibrio fischeri switched on bioluminescence only when enough cells had built up the right signal concentration. By the early 1990s the molecular details were clear, and in 1994 the term quorum sensing was formalised in the way we now recognise it.

That changed microbiology. Because once you understand that microbes can coordinate, you stop asking only what organisms are present, and you begin asking what they are saying to one another, and what they are deciding to do.

And that question matters especially in soil.

The classic quorum sensing story is largely a chemical one. Signal molecules accumulate, thresholds are reached, populations change state.

But there is another part of the story that matters just as much for soil , the electrical one.

M. C. Potter showed as early as 1911 that microbes could generate electricity. In the 1980s, microbial electrochemistry re-emerged through fuel cell work. Later, research on extracellular electron transfer and microbial nanowires established that microbes could move electrons beyond the cell. Then in 2015, researchers showed that bacterial biofilms could coordinate through potassium ion-mediated electrical signalling.

That was a major moment. Because it showed that microbial communication is not just chemical in the narrow sense. It can also involve bioelectrical dynamics, ion fluxes, and structured collective signalling ,faster, more responsive, and able to move information across longer distances than chemical signals alone.

And the reach of this is wider than most people realise. It is widely thought that around eighty percent of all bacteria and fungi are capable of electrical communication ,and not only within their own species. This appears to operate as something close to a universal language across very different types. That means the vast majority of the microbial world is not just chemically chatty. It is also electrically connected.

So when I talk about soil communication, I am not asking anyone to choose between chemistry and electricity. The real soil environment is richer than either one on its own.

Soil is chemical. Soil is physical. Soil is biological. And soil is, in meaningful ways, informational Data.

This is where biofilms come in.

Biofilms are often dismissed as slime, or treated as a medical or industrial nuisance. But in soils they are part of how life organises itself. A biofilm is a microbial community embedded within extracellular polymeric substances , a matrix that changes adhesion, protection, local hydration, diffusion, and pore behaviour.

In some circumstances, biofilms and extracellular polymers help stabilise aggregates and maintain moisture around the rhizosphere. In others they constrict pathways and contribute to localised bioclogging. Biology can both facilitate and restrict water movement, depending on context and scale. These are not failures. They are strategic decisions by microbial communities, and quorum sensing is what drives them.

That matters when we talk about water. Because biology does not merely allow water to move downwards through a profile. Living soil systems , including roots, fungi, biofilms, and aggregate structure , shape the hydraulic architecture of the soil. We know from the literature on hydraulic lift and hydraulic redistribution that plants can move water from deeper moist layers into drier upper layers, particularly at night. We know fungi, especially mycorrhizal networks, can play important roles in water dynamics.

So the practical message is this: biology does not simply affect infiltration. It affects storage, connectivity, redistribution, and whether water remains functionally available where roots and microbes need it.

A dead, disconnected soil can look wet and behave dry.

A biologically structured soil can receive water, hold it, share it, and make it functionally available for longer.

That was the real lesson at Kew. What I had stumbled into was not merely a drainage puzzle. It was an example of how living structure changes hydraulic reality.

Once you start seeing soil that way, one of the biggest questions becomes: how coordinated is the biology that is shaping all of this?

That question eventually led me to my own work with soil batteries.

I built simple anode-and-cathode systems placed into soil from one of our own fields. At first, the fascination was simply that they worked. LEDs lit up. Then they powered an outdoor Christmas tree set of lights using only a few kilograms of soil.

[Demonstration moment — webcam in box, then remove box and pull apart soil battery live]

Ever since, I have powered a Christmas tree outside the farm office each year using soil as the energy source — partly as a reminder of where this all started. I was not adding bacteria. I was feeding the existing community. And that was when I realised: the soil was not just producing energy. It was producing information.

The key point was never the novelty. It was the pattern.

The output was not static. It changed. It pulsed. It shifted with water, with time, with disturbance, and with management. And that was the point at which I stopped seeing the soil battery as a trick and started seeing it as a question.

Not: can soil produce electricity?

But: what organised biology sits behind that current, and what information is carried in its changes?

That question led me into recording, digitising, and analysing the output rather than simply measuring it as power. I began treating the signal not only as energy, but as data.

Over time I have grouped the output into different bands and patterns. And let me be clear , when I use wave-style language, I am not claiming that soil is producing literal human EEG states. I am using a descriptive framework to say the output appears layered, responsive, and structured ,with lower-frequency, mid-frequency, and higher-frequency components that may reflect different kinds of biological organisation and stress.

Those patterns have proven consistent. After rainfall, hydration signals spike. When fertilisers are applied, signal complexity often collapses after an initial frenzy. When biofilm formation is triggered, signals harmonise in a way that is both measurable and repeatable. It is not just a reaction , it is a strategy.

Agriculture is very good at measuring aftermath. We can measure pH, nitrate, moisture, bulk conductivity, temperature. All useful. But those measurements often tell us what the soil is. They do not necessarily tell us what the living network is about to do next.

That is the gap that fascinates me.

And the more I have looked, the more convinced I have become that one of the reasons we are still poor at reading this layer is because we still know remarkably little about the soil biome.

A single gram of soil can contain billions of microbial cells and extraordinary taxonomic diversity. A huge proportion of soil microbes remain uncultured, poorly characterised, or functionally unknown. And consider this: a handful of soil contains at least twenty miles of mycelium , the fungal threads that support quorum sensing data transfer across the profile. The laptop you may have in front of you contains roughly twenty miles of internal circuitry. The parallel is worth sitting with for a moment. 

The above is further compounded by most soil biologist stating we are in low single digit % of looking at bacteria in soil in any shape of form 

Modern PCR and sequencing are powerful tools. But they are affected by extraction bias, primer bias, low abundance, patchy distribution, dormant states, biofilm protection, and protected intracellular niches. They can tell us a great deal, but they do not give us a perfect census of the living, active, context-dependent microbiome.

Some microbes are active. Some are dormant. Some are in VBNC states ,viable but non-culturable. Some persist intracellularly, protected within other organisms. Some are patchily distributed in ways that make them almost impossible to represent accurately even in a carefully taken sample.

So when people talk confidently about having measured the soil biome, I think we should be much more cautious. We know enough to know we do not know ,nearly enough.

Also quite a lot of bacteria can move. Not fast in the way we imagine larger organisms moving, but meaningfully — through flagellar swimming in water films, swarming, twitching, chemotaxis, and transport along fungal hyphae. 

In the microbial world, a few millimetres can mean the difference between resource access and starvation, between root contact and absence, between joining a biofilm and remaining isolated.

The soil biome is not merely a census. It is traffic. And traffic means signalling, routing, thresholds, and local coordination.

Now I want to be direct about something that is often glossed over in the enthusiasm around biological products.

There is a huge temptation in modern agriculture to think: if biology matters, then the answer must be to buy some biology in a bottle and pour it on. And sometimes that may help. But very often the situation is far more complicated.

Every field contains a resident microbial society shaped by its own climate, crop history, texture, mineralogy, moisture regime, and decades of ecological memory. That community is not random. It has been selected, adapted, and refined by its specific environment over time. It communicates through local quorum sensing signals. It has established its own thresholds, its own dormancy patterns, its own relationships with the plant roots above it.

When you introduce microbes from a very different environment ,or from a laboratory production line , you are not releasing them into an empty stadium. You are releasing them into a crowded, competitive, chemically active, locally adapted community that did not ask for them and may have no space for them.

I use a simple analogy for this. Imagine you take a Highland cow , a magnificent, well-adapted animal, built for cold wet Scottish hillsides, rough grazing, and horizontal rain ,and you move it to the Sahara. It does not thrive. Not because the animal is defective, and not because your intentions were bad. But because it evolved for a completely different environment. Drop it into forty-degree heat and deep sand and all of that capability becomes irrelevant. The Highland cow is not wrong. The context is. And trying to move microbes blindly from one environment into another carries exactly the same risk.

The literature on microbial inoculants is very clear on this: success is often highly context-dependent. Some inoculants work well under specific conditions. Some work weakly. Some fail. And some may have effects that are inconsistent or even counterproductive if context is ignored.

There is a further layer that most people overlook. A soil sample, even a well-analysed one, does not give you a true census of what is actually there. Many bacteria may be hibernating , in long-term dormancy for years or even decades. They can be virtually undetectable if hiding intracellularly, within biofilms, or as VBNC cells. They are not absent. They are waiting. And they are waiting for a quorum sensing signal that tells them the conditions are right to emerge.

So before we import biology, it is worth asking: what is already there, still largely unknown, that may wake up when the conditions change?

In many cases, the more important starting question is not: what can I add? But: what is already here, what is it doing, and what is it trying to tell me?

I want to bring in another way of thinking that is deeply important, and which I see as entirely complementary to what I have been describing.

We must stop looking only at the soil and also look at the plant as a live diagnostic read-out. Not merely what is in the soil, but what is the plant actually receiving, moving, and using right now? That is where sap and leaf testing come in , and I do not see that way of thinking as separate from electrical quorum sensing. I see it as part of the same system read at a different layer.

A soil pit tells you about architecture. A lab test tells you about inventory. A sap or leaf test tells you about uptake and flow. And electrical quorum-style observation may help tell you something about coordination and timing , before any of the other signals become obvious.

A pit may reveal why roots are not exploring. A sap test may reveal what the plant is failing to mobilise. A microbial or electrical trace may indicate that the biological network has already shifted into stress or reorganisation before the plant visibly shows it.

The future is not one silver bullet method. It is integration. Pit, profile, root, sap, soil chemistry, biology, electrical behaviour, and management history , all interpreted together.

Plants are not blind passengers in this network. They signal, they recruit, they prime, and they react. One of the best-known defence frameworks is systemic acquired resistance ,SAR , in which a local challenge triggers broader whole-plant defensive readiness. Alongside that, beneficial rhizosphere microbes can induce forms of systemic priming through what is discussed as induced systemic resistance, or ISR.

The practical field point is this: the plant-soil-microbe system can shift into defensive coordination before visible symptoms appear.

You may see drought response before wilt. Disease pressure before lesions. Nutrient stress before obvious deficiency. System disruption before yield is lost.

That is why reading the communication layer may be far more powerful than waiting for visible failure.

And this is where we come to the practical commercial point.

If electrical quorum sensing helps us understand when the soil-plant system is coordinated, stressed, disrupted, hydrated, or entering defence mode , this is not just a scientific curiosity. It is a decision tool.

It could help farmers time nitrogen more accurately, avoid wasted passes, improve irrigation timing, spot trouble earlier, and reduce the amount of money spent reacting too late. But I want to go further than timing. Because reading QS signals may not just tell you when to apply inputs , it may tell you that you need less of them in the first place.

When a biologically coherent soil is genuinely coordinating its own nutrient cycling and defence, the external input requirements shift. You are not filling a void. You are working with a functioning system. And a functioning system often needs less propping up.

Let me put that in blunt farming terms: profit is often lost long before symptoms are seen. If EQS narrows that gap, it has commercial value ,not just by protecting yield, but by reducing what you spend to achieve it.

The first economic gain may not be spectacular extra top-end yield. It may be fewer hidden yield penalties. Less wasted fertiliser. Better irrigation timing. Less defensive overspending. Earlier intervention. Fewer blunt rescue measures.

Uncertainty is expensive. Better biological intelligence reduces precautionary spending.

That matters enormously in UK farming right now, where input costs, weather volatility, soil degradation, compaction, and pressure to reduce chemistry are all squeezing margins from every direction. In that context, understanding the living communication layer in soil is not a curiosity. It could become a strategic advantage.

This brings me to a point that I think regenerative farming still undershoots.

We speak a great deal about organic matter, cover crops, reduced tillage, biology, and carbon sequestration. All important. But too often the conversation still sounds as though carbon storage happens because we have simply added the right ingredients.

It does not.

Carbon is not stored by good intentions. Carbon is not stored by slogans. Carbon is not stored because a field has been labelled regenerative.

Carbon is stored when living systems are coordinated well enough to build structure faster than we destroy it. That means roots feeding microbes. Fungi extending reach. Biofilms forming protective matrices. Microbes producing extracellular glues and compounds. Aggregates stabilising. Pore networks functioning. Residues being processed into more durable forms. And the whole system holding together long enough for that architecture to persist.

Carbon storage is not just a chemistry issue. It is a coordination issue.

And that is why quorum sensing matters here. If the microbial network is constantly disrupted by disturbance, overload, or crude timing, the system struggles to build lasting structure. Biology becomes less coherent. Carbon can be cycled fast but not held well. The architecture that protects fertility and moisture weakens.

So the real frontier in regenerative farming is not merely adding more biology. It is protecting the communication system that allows biology to organise itself.

That is a very different standard. It means asking not only: have I reduced tillage? But: have I preserved network continuity? Not only: have I put carbon into the soil? But: have I created the biological coordination needed to hold it there?

And here is something worth saying plainly about regenerative systems, because it is often the objection raised. Yes , moving to regenerative approaches may in some cases lead to a drop in yield. That is real and should not be dismissed. But the more important question is what happens to the input costs at the same time. If yield falls by, say, ten percent, but input costs fall by thirty percent, the crop has become more profitable , not less. A biologically coherent soil, communicating well, cycling nutrients more efficiently, and needing less external support to maintain its health, changes the economics of farming even before the yield figures do.

That reframe matters. And quorum sensing sits right at the heart of it , because it is the coordination layer that makes biological efficiency possible in the first place.

There is one more uncomfortable point worth naming.

Modern breeding has given us extraordinary gains in yield, architecture, and uniformity. But there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that domestication and intensive selection have in many cases altered root exudation patterns, rhizosphere recruitment behaviour, and the ability of crops to assemble beneficial microbial partnerships as effectively as their wild relatives or older lines.

I am not saying modern varieties cannot integrate with the soil biome. Clearly they do. But it is fair to say that some modern crops may be less ecologically fluent underground than the plants they came from. We have bred heavily for above-ground performance under conditions of high external support. In doing so, we may in some cases have weakened the traits linked to recruitment, cooperation, and signalling in the rhizosphere.

Because a crop is not just a genome standing alone. It is part of a network. It releases signals. It responds to signals. It recruits helpers. It suppresses threats. It negotiates. And if we have bred some of that ecological fluency down, we may have varieties that perform brilliantly with full intervention but struggle when the soil network itself needs to carry more of the burden.

This kind of signalling is not confined to soil.

In YOUR the mouth, bacteria build biofilms on teeth and gums , what most people call plaque. But plaque is not just a mess of microbes sitting still. It is a structured community, using quorum sensing, organising itself, protecting itself, and changing its behaviour collectively. When that communication is balanced, it supports resilience. When it breaks down, the whole system can spiral into disorder.

In YOUR gut, microbes are also constantly signalling. Quorum-sensing molecules, microbial metabolites, and other biochemical signals influence barrier function, inflammation, and host responses. This is increasingly discussed as part of the gut-brain axis, where microbial products and signals influence neural, endocrine, and immune pathways ,including mood, stress response, and inflammation.

When people speak of the oral-gut-brain axis, they are recognising something quite profound: microbial communication does not stay neatly in one compartment. The consequences of disrupted or healthy signalling ripple outward through the whole system.

So when I talk about microbial communication in soil, I am not describing an agricultural curiosity. I am describing part of a much wider biological principle. 

Microbes signal. 

Microbes coordinate. 

Microbes build communities. 

Microbes alter host behaviour and environmental function. 

And wherever those communities exist , in soil, in the mouth, in the gut , the consequences can be profound. 

Throw some tennis balls 

If microbial signalling is important enough to matter in plaque, gut function, and wider host responses, then it is surely important enough to matter in the field beneath our boots.

This is why I often use the comparison with the World Wide Web because I think it helps people grasp what is so extraordinary here.

We often speak of microbes communicating, but that still sounds small and simple. What we are looking at is something much closer to a distributed network. There is no central controller. There are local nodes, signal traffic, thresholds, temporary hubs, transport layers, disruption events, recovery events, and shifting states.

Roots are nodes. Biofilms are local subnetworks. Fungal hyphae are transport and routing layers. Signal molecules are packets. Electrical changes are rapid updates. Dormancy is low-power mode. Stress bursts are alarms. Symbiosis is a negotiated handshake. Tillage can be a network crash. Recovery can be a reboot.

It is not a perfect analogy. But it changes how people think. It moves soil from being treated as a substance to being treated as a system.

And once you do that, management is not just input application. It is also network intervention.

So the future ,could include far more intelligent decisions based on live or near-live biological patterning.

When is the field truly ready for drilling? When is biology asking for recovery rather than stimulation? When has fertiliser pushed the system into frenzy and collapse? When is the rhizosphere entering a defensive state? When is carbon being built into structure? When is moisture present but functionally unavailable? When are crops and microbes still speaking fluently and when has that relationship become strained?

Those are not abstract questions. They are farm-management questions.

I am not standing here claiming we have fully decoded the language of soil. We have not. I am not claiming that every electrical trace can already be translated into a precise agronomic instruction. It cannot. And I am certainly not claiming that the soil is a brain.

What I am saying is this: we now have enough evidence to know that the soil is not silent. Enough evidence to know that biology coordinates through chemical and electrical means. And enough signal to begin learning how to listen properly. 

So I want to end where I began.

At Kew. In winter. 

A surface that looked saturated. 

A layer beneath it that behaved dry. 

Both of them well-aggregated, open soils , and yet telling completely different stories. A contradiction that was not a contradiction at all, but a signal that soil tells different truths at different scales.

A shift from seeing soil as material to seeing it as process.

From seeing it as soil to seeing it as architecture.

From seeing it as chemistry to seeing it as chemistry, physics, biology, and information woven together.

So the next time you walk a field, a trial plot, a sports pitch, or a garden border , pause.

Not just to look across it. But to think beneath it.

Think of a living network under your boots — still largely unknown, still mostly unheard, but active all the same.

And then ask yourself:

What if one of the biggest things missing from modern soil management is not another product, another stimulant, or another intervention 

But a better ability to hear the conversation already taking place?

What if the future of resilient farming depends not simply on feeding the soil 

But on finally learning how to listen to it?

Oh and bye the way ,the tennis balls I have been throwing at you move at around 5-7 metres /second that’s roughly the same speed bacterial data exchanges can move at ,through soil