Copyright 2015
Some history on Nico Snyman & Dr. Cloete
This product has been developed over the last 20 years by the late Dr. Pieter Cloete, and by Nico Snyman ( Bsc.
Agronomy Pta.). Nico has been involved in the hands-on development of commercial agriculture all of his life and
realised many years ago that the conventional practices of chemical industrial agriculture were damaging soil
biology to such an extent that growing healthy plants is becoming almost impossible.
Nico applied himself relentlessly to developing a natural method of rehabilitating biologically dead soil that could
be applied to large scale commercial farming.
He experimented with compost and the Rudolf Steiner Bio-Dynamic systems and anything he could lay his hands
on, and together with Dr. Cloete they developed SBM by trial and error over many years, conducting trials with all
types of plants.
Trials conducted by Nico and many farmers have proved beyond doubt that SBM really works very well.
Recently the University of the North West Province at Potchefstroom have been conducting research to understand
which soil microbes are present in SBM and how they interact with plant roots.
The FRONTIERS OF CROP SCIENCE
By Nico Snyman: B.Sc. Agric (Agron.)Pret.
Six years after we started farming in the tropics, in the upper catchment areas of the Congo basin, North Eastern Zambia, we
discovered why farming in the tropics always goes along with constant de-forestation. With cultivation the nutrients are lost
because everything captured in the biomass is removed. What we did not realize, was that the soil which is poor in nutrients is
very rich in microbial life and that is the important part.
In hindsight we now know that the first items you loose with clean cultivation of the soil are the different fungi, and then the
bacteria. These fungi colonise the roots of the plants and help with the nutrient uptake and moisture uptake of the roots and
they have a tremendous effect on plant growth. These fungi are also the easiest to propagate and researched. So that is why
most firms that sell biological products, sell fungi to farmers.
We then realized because you need a certain amount of cultivation to produce commercial mechanised crops, that we must
constantly replenish these bacteria and fungi.
For that purpose every commercial farmer needs access to a bio-bank. The problem was how to establish a bio-bank where
you have all these bacteria and fungi at hand when needed for application.
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