When you touch soil, did you know there should be a village of microorganisms keeping the dirt viable for growth? Did you also know that often, this village is dwindling?

Alter Eco Farms, a soil food web specialized lab in Hixson, has set out to reintroduce the biodiversity soil should naturally have. I got to take a tour of the lab and talk with Founder Krisi Olivero about how she and her husband, Nick, are achieving this.

Where did the idea of Alter Eco Farms start?
The idea started from how excited you get when you plant something and you see the seed come up + like that pure joy that everybody experiences. If they sprout the seed, they're thrilled — that was a feeling that I was like, "How do we give that to everybody?"

We owned some land in Colorado, we were gonna try to build a community center out there and have people come do workshops, but the costs were super prohibitive. We weren't independently wealthy, we said, "What can we do that gets us to some of these same goals as individuals?"

That's when I got introduced to the world of soil biology, I took a couple of free classes with Dr. Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web School — learning about all of the microorganisms, learning about how restoring microorganisms can restore our soils. I told Nick I wanted to continue to take this class, which was 2-3 years for a package, I got a scholarship to do the first year for free.

What exactly are you doing here at the farm?
So, we specialize in restoring soil microorganisms, in short. If we take that back, into a bigger picture — if you go into an old-growth forest and take a sample of soil + put it under a microscope, you're gonna see billions of little living creatures. If you go to the average backyard, even ours here, you'll probably only see bacteria.

Most of the world's soils have lost all of these phenomenally helpful microorganisms — the reason we need fertilizers and additives is because we've killed the microorganisms. Independently, what we call a full soil food web, performs nutrient cycling, which gives your plant all of the nutrients it needs on its own, it'll just pop out of the soil every time.

We've lost so much of it, some of it from natural development, tilling, heavy machinery, chemical fertilizers — which we've become super dependent on — kill microorganisms. If we could go in there, and we put the microorganisms back, they'd naturally fix themselves.

Check out the difference between a store-bought soil mixture + Alter Eco Farms’ compost under the microscope — *psst:* That's a nematode you see. | Photos by NOOGAtoday

Can you explain the process to me like I'm five years old?
It's complex and not — a full soil food web has several essential microorganisms. Those are bacteria, fungi, protozoa + nematodes, you really need those four at minimum.

Your plant gets sugar and carbon dioxide from the sun + it sends about 30-40% of those sugars down to the roots, where they then go down into the soil. Those sugars naturally attract the bacteria and fungi that the plant needs to start nutrient cycling.

The bacteria and fungi take those sugars and then they produce enzymes that break those nutrients out of the existing soil — I think this is the part that gets lost on people, that the nutrients are already in the soil. We don't need to add them, we need to access them + that's where the protozoa and nematodes come in. They eat the bacteria and fungi to get the nutrition they need and leave us with the excess that can feed plants.

How we make this happen for people is we make compost where we breed those microorganisms on the compost, taking a variety of ingredients from around the area. We are truly just finding the already existing microorganisms in our area + putting them together with the right biology so that they naturally breed.

In terms of research, what future studies are you excited to do?
Right now, we're focused on livestock pastures. We broke our pasture into nine different paddocks, and were treating three of them with nothing — so they are rotational pastures.

We are treating three of them with biological amendments where we apply microbes + treating three of them with the traditional agricultural amendments that the agriculture extension office would offer if you submit your tests. We're gonna follow them this season into the fall.

We're looking at compaction — we count the nutrient availability of the soil, the nutrient availability of the plant + the presence of biology.

What is the community impact + where do you see this going?
On a small scale, it's great if you're a home gardener + on a bigger scale, can we get farmers on board for this? Can we start showing farmers how much money they save by restoring their soils? There are a lot of farmers who are interested with what we do —we're just trying to catch up with the scale at which they need us to do it.

We'd love to get up to the scale where we can be doing more direct giving, a community garden [where] we can establish the biology or even on a state park level.

*Bonus:* When you visit the farm, you can even meet Moon Pie, the llama + Little Debbie and Oatmeal Cream Pie, two alpacas. | Photo by Alter Eco Farms

What's one thing you want people to know or take away from this?
I would love for people to recognize that the earth doesn't stop at their feet, that there's a lot that goes on underneath us + it hugely affects our quality of life above ground. We can fix it and also fix it in a way that's not outrageously expensive and helps us all.

Looking to tap into your own soil food web? Alter Eco Farms hosts regular events and workshops to learn first hand or you can purchase compost, compost extract, and other products online. Make sure to also follow along on Instagram to keep up with the farm.

Bonus: You can meet the Oliveros yourself every first market of the month at the Main Street Farmers Market.