Microbial Aeration: Beyond the core
Beyond the Core For the discerning turfgrass manager or horticultural enthusiast, the perennial quest for optimal soil health and robust sward vitality often centers upon strategies for soil aeration. Historically, mechanical core aeration, involving the physical extraction of soil plugs, has been the standard. However, a nuanced understanding of soil ecosystems reveals limitations in this purely physical approach, which, while creating macroscopic channels, offers heterogeneous coverage and carries inherent risks to subsurface infrastructure. This prompts an examination of alternative methodologies, such as Microbial Aeration, which purports to achieve similar, if not superior, outcomes through fundamentally different bio-mediated processes. This discourse, grounded in the provided sources, endeavors to elucidate the mechanistic underpinnings of Microbial Aeration, particularly focusing on the critical role of a decrease of bulk density and diffusion, the exchange if gases withi...
