Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was shopping around on Amazon and saw some mycorrizhae inoculant for sale. I don't have any experience in using this product but I am aware that mycorrizhae help fix nitrogen in the soil for plants. I've read that using this stuff helps to increase plant biomass but my concern lies in the regulation of these organisms over time. Essentially, at what point, if any, does mycorrizhae stop being beneficial and start being pathogenic? Also, how do these organisms affect fish? I'd like to incorporate this inoculant in my system to help with recycling nutrients and assist in filtration if it is capable of doing so. Does anyone have any experience in using mycorrizhae inoculant in hydroponics/aquaponics? If so, how did you regulate its growth and what was the overall effect on your system?

-Thanks

I don't think you will find too many familiar with this fungus in an aquaponic setting; gravel-based F/D, or UVI constant flow method. I had occasion to try M. fungus a year or so ago in my sand based system to try to defeat an invasion of Root Knot Nematodes (RKN's). I cant say for sure if it helped as much as is claimed by the suppliers, but I can say it didn't hurt anything. As to the proliferation of the fungus, mine wasn't able to get too far because I eventually decided to strip and bleach my beds to get rid of the RKN's. I had had discussions with a few of the companies supplying M. fungus and the response from them was "you want to do [i]what[i] with this fungus?" I finally did have one representative from my area contact me and want to see how I intended to use the fungus. He came by my house, we had a show-and-tell about my system. He left me with a sample tube of innoculant which I used when I replanted my beds. The general consensus is M fungus won't hurt anything, but whether it is a waste of money in a "traditional" AP setting is anyone's guess. If you research deep enough to get to the companies that produce the fungus and call them and talk to someone in the lab, the answer I usually got was they dont have any idea how things work in an AP environment. If you start a quest to get answers about M fungus, I hope you have better luck than I and find someone familiar enough to give a good answer.

Thanks for the reply. This is a valuable insight to how mycorrizhae may help in combating the proliferation of other pathogens. I hadn't thought of that in depth before I made this post. I may try using it when I get my aquaponics system set up but I would like to learn more before doing so. Did the mycorrizhae help to defeat the invasion in your system or did it not have enough time to run its course before you could do an analysis? Do you think that if you had used the fungus from the beginning it may have prevented the invasion from ever occurring?

nope. RKN's are a tenacious ground pest. I found a few soil treatments, but when AP or fish are put into the equation, all I got was a definate NO. I wound up redesigning my setup to prevent another invasion. I have inoculated my beds with this
http://www.bountygreens.com/. How well it will work, I dont know yet. But, I doubt it will hurt. Especially with the AP system (http://iavs.info/what-iavs-is/) I am using.