Improving the health of your soil is essential to increasing your output, but how can you tell if you are making progress?  Research shows that microbial biomass (fungi and bacteria) is the leading indicator of soil health. Living soil fixes nutrients, improves plant immunity, stores water more efficiently and builds soil structure, therefore, a healthy level of microbes increases productivity while reducing inputs.

microBIOMETER® is a low cost, 20-minute on-site soil test for microbial biomass and fungal to bacterial ratio that allows you to quickly determine the health of your soil. Frequent retesting will provide you with the data necessary to identify if your soil management practices are working.

Why microBIOMETER®?

Replaces costly lab tests with real time testing on living soil

Sending your soil out for lab testing is costly and can take weeks to get results. Furthermore, microbial populations alter once removed from the soil. Therefore, real time testing on field moist soil provides the most accurate results. microBIOMETER® allows you to test your living soil on-site with results available in 20 minutes for a cost of $13.50 a test or less. microBIOMETER® is faster, less expensive and provides a higher level of accuracy than lab microscopy.

Monitors the effectiveness of your soil amendments

Amendments are a great way to improve your soil and crop yield, however, they can be expensive and time consuming. Use microBIOMETER® to quickly assess how your inputs are impacting your soil's microbial biomass to determine if they are effective. An increase in microbes tells you that you have increased their food, therefore, increased the food for your plant.

Supports regenerative agriculture

One way regenerative agriculture improves your soil is by increasing the soil microbes. Increasing your soil microbes increases the carbon stored in the soil. For instance, switching to an optimal cover crop and no-till can increase stored microbial carbon by a ton an acre or more. microBIOMETER® can help you determine if your regenerative practices are increasing the carbon in your soil, therefore, building healthier soil while doing your part to fight climate change.

Data Sharing

Download, Edit & Share Your Data

Web Portal

Each time you perform a microBIOMETER® soil test, our innovative phone app stores all of your data along with test location in our web portal. Here you can view all of your samples, edit your data and export your information to Excel for a higher-level analysis and to share with colleagues or clients.

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Create a Team Project

Project Management

This exciting feature allows users to create custom projects utilizing unique fields and enables team members to contribute their microBIOMETER® soil test results to the project. Create a project, invite team members and access all sample data from the cloud. Data can be downloaded with custom fields, dates and locations.

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Performing the microBIOMETER® Soil Test

Regardless of your soil testing knowledge, you will find the microBIOMETER® soil test extremely easy to perform. All you need is a microBIOMETER® Starter Kit and a smartphone and you are ready to test the microbes in your soil. Download the app (iPhone or Android), run the 20-minute test and see your results! It is that simple.

Featured here is our step-by-step video tutorial. There are also photo instructions along with built in timers in the app and you can download and print instructions here – Soil and Compost Testing and Compost Tea and Extract Testing. The microBIOMETER® app stores all of your soil testing data by GPS location for future reference and analysis.

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Testimonials

“microBIOMETER® is an advancement in measuring soil food web activity that finally lets us see if our organic inputs are working or if we even need to add anything to our soils. It is a unique, highly affordable tool that offers tremendous potential to improve your soil.”

Jeff Lowenfels, author of Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Bacteria, Teaming with Nutrients and Teaming with Fungi

“microBIOMETER® tests give anyone the capacity to monitor the health of soils at a reasonable cost per test. The ability to measure microbial communities enables growers to monitor changes in soils as they improve cultivation practices. I recommend microBIOMETER to anyone working to improve soil health.”

Dr. James White, Rutgers University

“Understanding soil biology in an ecosystem is crucially important for producers to tune in the practices and steward land. While typically microbial analyses are more cost prohibitive, microBIOMETER® provides an affordable on demand proxy that allows producers to understand the relative abundance of soil microbial contents at any given point. “

Yadi Wang, President, Development of Regenerative Yields Cooperative (or DRY co-op)

“I’ve been farming for over a decade, and I can confidently say that incorporating the microbial testing kit into my compost tea brewing process has been a game-changer. This kit, with its innovative reagents, and ease of use allowed me to delve deep into the microbial ecosystem of my compost and brewed tea. It’s a powerful tool for any farmer looking to take their compost tea brewing to the next level.”

Laura Davis, Organic Certification Assistance Coordinator/Soil Technical Advisor at NOFA/Mass

“We are thrilled to welcome microBIOMETER® as a partner in our mission to promote sustainable soil management practices. Their expertise in soil testing and commitment to soil health aligns perfectly with our organization’s values, and we look forward to collaborating with them to advance this cause.”

Save Soil, Foundation Founding Member Committee

“The microBIOMETER® acts as a dashboard or gauge that shows where our growers start, where they are during the season and where they can finish out at the end of the season. We use this information to build a database that records year over year results; with the goal of increasing the biology in the soil.”

Holganix Midwest

“I really love how clean, how clear the microBIOMETER® test is. What this test brings to the table simplifies the work for microscopists. We need tests that are reliable, that can synergize with other tests and give us the ability to look around a corner we couldn’t look around before.”

Matt Powers, author, educator, citizen scientist, and entrepreneur

“microBIOMETER® provided an “in field” test that when conducted well seems to suggest it is a reliable, consistent, replicable, and relatively simple test to evaluate soil biological activity.”

David Purdy, Territory Business Manager at John Deere, and Soil Health Specialist

“We are so grateful for our partnership with microBIOMETER®! They offer a reliable soil testing product which we utilize in our Field Lab Kits. We greatly appreciate that we have a shared goal of making soil testing more accessible all over the world.”

Earthfort Labs, Oregon

“microBIOMETER® is a very efficient and time saving tool. It can be used by scientists, farmers, or a gardener in learning the microbial health of their soil. This testing process is also very non-invasive, and thus having a lesser negative environmental impact compared to traditional testing.”

Dr. Anna Paltseva, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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