February 17, 2025

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Soil health is big business, but some research shows fungal products don’t work as promised

Soil health is big business, but some research shows fungal products don’t work as promised

What do businesses say?

The Kansas News Service reached out to 11 of the manufacturers whose products were tested by KU.

Two of them replied. One is Groundwork BioAg, which says it is the world’s biggest producer of mycorrhizal inoculants.

The KU paper said one of the company’s products, Dynomyco, produced mycorrhizae in 1 out of 5 pots. It also noted that a pathogen called Olpidium, which can attack plants and host viruses that do the same, repeatedly cropped up on plants grown with Dynomyco.

“We take such studies very seriously,” Dan Grotsky, cofounder of Groundwork BioAg and general manager of Dynomyco, wrote in an email while questioning KU’s methods. “Groundwork BioAg tests its products regularly, using several types of standard tests, and has never received results like these, even on old or shipped and returned products, which we test as well.”

Those tests also include checking Dynomyco for pathogens including Olpidium, he said, and none have turned up.

Grotsky suggested that because KU’s study found Olpidium in products from five companies, the contamination could have happened at KU’s lab. He said his company “would welcome a transparent discussion with full access to the dataset and methods.”

KU is not alone in finding a pattern of Olpidium contamination in commercial products. Its scientists combed through 67 other peer-reviewed trials that tested commercial products for Olpidium. Eleven of those trials found the pathogen.

Koziol said KU’s methods for working with mycorrhizal fungi are used widely in this field of research.

“As curator of the world’s largest AM (arbuscular mycorrhizal) fungi collection, I train others in these techniques, including commercial inoculant producers,” Koziol said. “The fungal assessments we used were appropriate and published in highly regarded, peer-reviewed journals.”

To Benitez Ponce, the plant pathologist at Ohio State, the discovery of Olpidium in multiple products raises the question of whether something in the supply chain could explain it, such as some manufacturers unknowingly receiving an infected ingredient from a single supplier.

“The challenge is that we don’t know where the Olpidium is coming from,” she said.

The other company that replied to the Kansas News Service was MicraCulture, a small company run by Sarah Pellkofer in Seattle. Pellkofer wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich on soil biodiversity, and she said she was pleased to see KU’s study.

Her product, Plant Probiotics, was free of the Olpidium pathogen in KU’s trial.

The product didn’t produce mycorrhizae in the trial. But that didn’t alarm Pellkofer because these fungi are just one small part of her microbe mix.

“Our recipe does not only consist of (these fungi), but a suite of microbes” including bacteria, she said in an email. This is to “boost the soil ecosystem as a whole,” because plants benefit from soil biodiversity.

The KU results suggested other microbes in Plant Probiotics helped plants grow, even though the fungal spores didn’t.

Pellkofer said her product instructions recommend that people reapply the mix multiple times during a plant’s growing cycle to increase the chance that the spores will grow and bond with the roots.

She also noted that KU scientists found exactly as many fungal spores in her product as printed on the label, which made it the outlier among the products studied. Pellkofer said this reflects that her company has “gone out of our way” to ensure accuracy.

“I welcome regulation in our field,” she said. “I’ve seen the market flooded with products that have lots of claims that maybe do not go through the scientific testing to back them, and as we see in this study, often do not contain the microbes claimed.”

A snapshot of the KU trial results

KU scientists tested fungi that they grow in-house. They also tested soil from a nearby organic farm that contains fungi. When added to plants, these two sources of fungi produced mycorrhizae 72% of the time.

Tested commercial products produced mycorrhizae 12% of the time.

Products that didn’t produce mycorrhizae when KU scientists tried them out:

  • Great White Premium Mycorrhizae
  • King of Mycorrhizae
  • Plant Probiotics
  • Root Naturally Endo Mycorrhizae
  • Promix Organics
  • Wildroot Organic
  • New Life Agriculture Microbial Solutions

These produced mycorrhizae in 1 out of 5 pots:

  • Big Foot
  • Dynomyco
  • Green Eden
  • Happy Frog
  • Mikrobs
  • Myco Bliss
  • Xtreme Gardening

Root Magic produced mycorrhizae in 2 out of 5 pots.

The pathogen Olpidium was a problem when KU scientists used these products:

  • Wildroot Organic
  • Bigfoot
  • Xtreme Gardening Mykos
  • Dynomyco
  • Root Magic

This story was first produced and published by the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.

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