— Barry Bonner, on our call
The microbial work we discussed, set out in full: the data, the honest limits, and the threads worth pulling between what you do and what we are building.
Ray put us together, and I am glad he did. You said it on the call, everybody just does a little, and the people who say they care the most often do the least. That has stuck with me. As Ray puts it, healing the land is the easy part; the humans are the issue. There is a stirring, though, and we are both pulling in the same direction.
You were direct with me about microbes, that you are not naturally interested because the category has burned everyone with overpromised products, and that biostimulants are where you have landed and are getting good results. I took that seriously. This document is written with your scepticism in mind, not against it. It sets out exactly what we are working with, what the data does and does not yet show, and the specific places our work could be useful to each other.
The reason for the call was the microbes, so that is what this is about. There is one personal item at the very end, about the friends you mentioned.
Two elements carry it: a baseline microbial consortium that can be tailored to the soil strata it is going into, and industrial hemp as a remediation rotation. The endocannabinoid side of my work is at the end of five years of R&D. The microbes are at the beginning, in year two. I am not going to present them as more finished than they are.
The microbial industry has a deserved reputation problem. There are a lot of rubbish products, a lot of labels claiming organisms that are simply not in the jug when you test it. It is, as you said, a bug in the jug, and that is a hard thing to sell to a farmer who has been let down before. I am not going to pretend that is not the landscape we are operating in.
What lets me stand behind this is the partner I am building it with and the verification underneath it. Every claim we make is proven out in our own genomics laboratory before it leaves the building. We are not selling a story about what is in the consortium. We can sequence it and show you, organism by organism, and we can show what changed in the soil afterwards. Where most programmes sample bulk soil, we pull root samples and sequence the rhizosphere directly, the narrow zone on the living root where the biology that matters actually operates.
The point. I am not asking you to believe a label. I am offering to put the consortium on a controlled strip next to a control, sequence both at the end of the season, and let the data speak. If it does not hold up, it does not hold up. That is the only way this category earns back trust, and it is the only way I am willing to build it.
I tracked Aster Bio down after I moved to Texas. They are the private microbial company called in when the petrochemical industry makes a mess, they were part of the response that put the cork in the bottle on the hydrocarbons after Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf in 2010. Run by Eric Rambaud and Paul, they have thirty-seven years of experience building microbial consortia and a genomics laboratory in Houston. They have touched agriculture, rice paddies in Vietnam, asparagus growers here, but it was never their lane.
So I built RAD Microbes around it. Our agreement is straightforward: any agricultural microbes formulated under my organisation, we own the IP, and we split the profit once OPEX and COGS are out. Aster Bio stays focused on petrochemical bioremediation of soil and water. Agriculture, and every agricultural formulation, is mine. That gives us decades of formulation science and a serious lab on day one, with an independent agricultural mission sitting on top of it.
I will give you this exactly as it is, including the flaw. We ran a simple pre-farm corn trial across two neighbouring North Texas farms, two acres each, four acres in total. The treated plots had no synthetic fertilizer applied, only residual fertility from the prior season. The control was the farmer's normal NPK programme, $420 per acre. Yield came back identical, with a visibly healthier rhizosphere around the root structure on the treated plots.
The flaw, which I flagged on the call: the two farms were neighbours, same soil, same inputs, across a road from each other, so it is not the clean separation I would have wanted. It is an early signal, not a proof. Everything below is from end-of-season genomics, treated versus control.
Your point on soil testing, taken. You were right that we need to know the residual nitrogen going in. We are adding before-and-after soil tests through Regen Ag Labs in Nebraska across all trials from here, alongside the in-house molecular work and our standard Texas A&M / LSU agronomy sampling. Knowing the available nitrogen before planting, and the fungal-to-bacterial shift after, is exactly the missing layer. Thank you for it.
Right now we run one concentrated liquid Bacillus consortium, five species, with Bacillus megaterium as the main structure and Bacillus licheniformis alongside it, plus species drawn from arid environments selected for water retention in the root zone and heat tolerance in the plant. It costs us about $5.30 to make the one litre that covers an acre. We are deliberately not building a broad-spectrum kitchen-sink product, because if you throw everything in at once you cannot tell what is doing what, or what is downgrading something else. We prove one block, then add the next.
The advantage of getting to the living, fungal consortium is that it stops being something you reapply every year. It becomes a factory in the soil that builds its own enzyme tools and keeps going, a living organism procreating in the ground rather than a short-lived input.
You are getting good results with biostimulants, the algae and blue-green algae, chlorella, bacteria, plant extracts, and you are applying things like Enso Algae at a fraction of our volume. That is genuinely the direction we are moving toward on the delivery side, and there is real overlap to explore once we have a solid format. None of this is something I would propose before proving it out, but it is worth naming.
I heard you clearly on hemp. You gave it twenty years and let it go, the fibre processing and harvesting economics have not arrived, the seed yields are low, and the gap between what people think hemp can do and what it actually does is wide. I am not going to argue the cash-crop case with someone who has lived it. Where hemp earns its place in our work is narrower and, I think, more defensible: as a remediation rotation and as a feedstock for the soil-input pellet, not as a fibre fortune.
You went straight to the real constraints, and they are the right ones. Here is where things stand and what I am taking back to the team.
The standing offer: the microbes are free for any trial you want to run, and we cover shipping. One acre treated, one acre as control on the grower’s normal programme, full genomics at our cost. Here is what I took from the call, please correct anything I have misremembered.
You spoke about two friends carrying cancer, one who may already be gone, and one who has been at it three years, doing the alternative work, meditating, on the right path, but living hard by the freeway and the oil derricks and still in real discomfort. You asked how he could get hold of what I make. He does not need a trial. He can come straight into the program.
Separate from RAD Microbes, through my telehealth practice, I formulate phytocannabinoid preparations for specific conditions rather than off-the-shelf wellness products. I work with around eleven phytocannabinoids and their acidic precursors, not CBD alone, which on its own only scratches the surface. For rectal cancer specifically I know exactly which of my formulations applies: a targeted suppository built around delta-8, for its apoptotic activity, in organic cocoa butter, with apricot-seed amygdalin and a little beta-caryophyllene. Alongside that I work in topicals, a beeswax salve, a cannabis oil, and a sublingual, inside a five-pillar protocol. I have worked with more than six hundred people this way.
The simplest next step is the one Ray used for us: send a three-way text and I will reach out directly, educate, and take it from there, quietly and properly. Text me your email and I will send some reading first. No expectation attached, and entirely apart from the agricultural work, just a genuine offer between two people who both believe this plant has more to give than the market allows.