Episode Overview
Sarah Pellkofer grew up a small town in Northern California in the olive-growing capital of the US. She got her BA in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Barbara then worked for years for a private environmental consulting firm writing Environmental Impact Reports/Statements and creating remediation plans for Superfund Sites. Then she moved over to Switzerland to get a Master’s Degree from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich studying and publishing work on the importance of urban gardens as habitat for solitary nesting bees and wasps while starting a microbrewery to pay for her tuition. After that she completed her Ph.D. in Plant Science and Policy at the University of Zurich, studying plant-soil interactions and publishing her work on Soil Biodiversity and the Stability of Ecosystem Functioning. During her Ph.D., she was lucky enough to be able to travel around the world to share the results of her years of research with other researchers and scientists. Sarah wanted to bring this knowledge about the crucial state of soil biodiversity to the public, so she left academia and started the company MicraCulture in Seattle in 2015 under which she designed the microbial inoculant Plant Probiotics with the motivation to empower all levels of gardeners to easily start to bring their own soil back to life.
You can check out Sarah's product on our website here: https://www.kisorganics.com/products/plant-probiotics-soil-microbe-inoculant
Articles we discussed in the podcast:
Nutrient- and Dose-Dependent Microbiome-Mediated Protection against a Plant Pathogen http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
Fertilizer destroys plant microbiome's ability to protect against disease https://m.phys.org/news/2018-07-fertilizer-microbiome-ability-disease.html
Resources & Links Mentioned
- Oregon Department of Agriculture Cannabis site: https://www.oregon.gov/ODA/agriculture/Pages/Cannabis.aspx
- Download the 2016 Oregon Department of Agriculture report on microbial products
- Download the 2015 Oregon Department of Agriculture report on microbial products
- Farmers can now buy designer microbes to replace fertilizer https://www.wired.com/story/farmers-can-now-buy-designer-microbes-to-replace-fertilizer/