Soil Health & Human Health
While preparing a series of articles for The Growers Solution, I came across an article published on April 11, 2026 on mscenter.weillcornell.org entitled "Your Gut Microbiome, Your Health." The series in The Growers Solution will focus on creating an environment in soil that will allow the beneficial microbes to assist the plant to exist with the best health possible in order to be as reproductive as possible. So, I thought the data from this article by Dr. Timothy Vartanian was very much related to the approach of the Growers Program.
"The human gut microbiome comprises approximately 100 trillion microbes representing the most complicated interaction between microbiota and the human body. Collectively, these microbes inhabiting your gut are termed symbionts, which means "fellow travelers" or species different from us that live within us. Amongst these symbionts are mutualists, commensals, and pathogens, that is, microbes that are helpful and some that are harmful. Due to intense selection pressure by the host (humans in this case), of the 1,200 to 1,500 estimated bacterial phyla (major bacterial groups), greater than 90% of microbiota in the human gut fall within 2 phyla: Bacteroidota and Firmicutes. Put another way. during health, your body has the capacity to discern amongst one trillion bacterial species on earth and choose just 100 core species to inhabit the gut... Environment in this case is crucially geographic location and diet...It's important to talk with your doctor about diet and how you can optimize it to tip the balance in favor of beneficial microbes."
This is an excerpt from the Summer Growers Solution (2026) written by Jim Halbeisen, Director of Research.
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