Introduction - Biome Makers soil microbiome analyses

Hi all,
My name is Ariel Romeo, Product Operations Lead and together my partner Francisco Lopez, Agronomist at Biome Makers a startup specialized in analyzing the soil microbiome to assess soil health. We would like to introduce our company to the FarmOS community, and if there’s interest discuss the possibility of integrating into FarmOS.
Firstly, We’d like to congratulate the FarmOS community for their efforts providing farmers with accessible tools to manage their crops, way to go! We are trying to provide growers worldwide with tools to understand the microbial dimension of their soils, something that a few years ago was either impossible, or reserved for researchers and large ag corporations that could afford these technologies.

By combining microbial DNA Sequencing and AI, we are able to monitor living soil status, and provide a comprehensive view of soil functions. Our soil functional analyses, with the name of Becrop, are delivered in an easy to understand report, divided into three main areas:

  1. Soil biosustainability. This part of the report focuses on the diversity of the microbial species, both taxonomically and functionally, and their resistance to external aggressions. Since microbial communities are affected not only by environmental pressures but also by management practices, this gives an idea of how sustainable the soil management practices are.

  2. Soil health. This provides information about the plant disease risk, based on the presence and proportion of the pathogens, as well as the presence of other microbial species that compete with them. We are constantly updating our databases, allowing us to detect pathogens before they possess a threat. This gives growers the advantage of knowing what’s present in the soil when planning their IPM, allowing to cut on unnecessary applications. The report also provides information on the abundance of biocontrol species, microbial phytohormone production and adaptation to stress conditions.

  3. Nutrient cycling. This part of the report is unique, and presents information about the potential of the microbial pathways making nutrients available for plant uptake. These pathways have been known for decades, but now for the first time, we can calculate the potential of microbes to cycle nutrients and make them bioavailable within these pathways.

Besides our soil functional analyses, we also provide Soil Bioactivity tests for bioactive/inoculative products, and Gheom, a technology based on the Becrop reports which through a scientific comparative approach assesses the effect and efficacy of AgInputs or farming practices in different locations, over several time points and using control parcels.

Our process involves 16S and ITS sequencing to define the prokaryote and fungi respectively, followed by the use of our proprietary bioinformatic pipeline. We are happy to provide their raw microbe abundance data to those growers interested in knowing all microbial species present in their soils. On top of that, we offer access to our portal where users can explore and contrast the populations in their samples, as well as compare report results side by side.

Among all those scientific characteristics of BeCrop we want to mention its technological ones, which open a big range of possibilities to get connected/integrated with any platform and the benefits are increased with our BeCrop mobile app.

We would love to answer any questions and hear your feedback.

Cheers!

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Thanks for the introduction to what you’re working on @arielromeo! Super interesting!

You may also be interested in cross-posting to the GOAT Forum (Gathering for Open Ag Tech), and especially the OpenTEAM category, which may have a lot of overlapping interests around soil health: http://forum.goatech.org

As for integrations with farmOS there are lots of possibilities! One that comes to mind is potentially storing the results on your tests on Soil Test logs in farmOS, so that farmers can archive and relate those results to other records in the system. Or, perhaps a more elaborate integration module could provide additional features.

I’d love to hear ideas if you have them, and/or from others! Welcome to the farmOS community! :slight_smile:

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Hi all,
I’m Francisco, Agronomist at Biome Makers. Happy to answer any agronomy related questions that might come to your minds!

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Thanks @mstenta for such warm welcome!
For sure I will follow up your advice and x-posting this to GOAT forum.

And for all the community, please if you want to discuss about possible ways to get integrated, please ping me !

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Hi @mstenta,
That sounds interesting ! , reviewing the soil-tests information, it seems to allow us to attach files. But, what kind of information can a soil test log store? how is it structured ?, is FarmOS using a standard like modus to manage input/output of information ?

Regards!

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Great question! Currently the soil test log types have the ability to store files, and we are going to add support for the general purpose “Quantity Measurement” fields soon as well: https://www.drupal.org/project/farm/issues/2784911 - I hope to see this come together very soon! It’s not complicated, just need the time to do it. :slight_smile:

I would love to make them compatible with Modus too! Our schema is more flexible, but we can also adhere to more strict schemas like Modus as well - it’s just a matter of making a Modus module that provides an additional layer to do what we want with the underlying data storage.