From Brazil to Capitol Hill

Crops and soils have been a part of Endy Lopes Kailer’s life for as long as she can remember. She grew up on a small family farm in Brazil, where the whole family pitched in to raise dairy cattle and grow sugarcane, corn, beans, and other crops. Some of her favorite childhood memories involve going to the field with her mother and father, spending the early mornings together harvesting crops and collecting fresh milk from their cows.

“I’ve always been involved with soils and plants,” she says. “I always saw them as our livelihood—everything was dependent on them. I always knew that I wanted to work with something related to that.”

As she got older, she hit the books. She went on to work toward her bachelor's in Agronomy first at the University of Kentucky, finishing her degree at Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) in Brazil. She stayed at UFV to finish her master's in Agronomy, where she began to research how soil microbiology influences agronomic practices and crop yields. Just this week, she defended her Ph.D. at Kansas State University, building off of the work she began during her master’s. 

Small but mighty

Now, she spends her days balancing field and lab work, teaching, and writing. She studies a group of soil microorganisms with a big impact: arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). These tiny organisms have a symbiotic relationship with the majority of plants on earth, including many crops. The fungi expand plant root systems, which help plants more efficiently take up essential nutrients like phosphorus. The fungi also help the surrounding soil form clumps (aggregates), which reinforces soil structure, helping with water retention and erosion reduction. This is possible as AMF utilize their fungal network (hyphae), which Kailer describes as akin to a spider web or a hair net, to physically hold soil particles together. These aggregates are further cemented by sticky substances the AMF produce alongside other soil microbes like bacteria. But, she adds, this web is fragile and can be easily disturbed by outside forces.

“Imagine that you have a hair net and you fill it up with pebbles,” she explains. “That hair net is going to be able to hold the pebbles together. But if you till your soil, or, you poke a hole in that hair net, the pebbles are going to fall and you're going to lose part of them.”

Kailer aims to protect and restore these microbial communities on our crop fields. Her research investigates how different agricultural practices affect presence of AMF: Tillage and excess fertilization, for example, have been shown to lower natural abundance of the fungi. So, how do we bring them back? She compares different regenerative practices, like bioinoculants, cover crops, and no-till agriculture, to see what works best.

“It's very exciting work,” she says. “It has a lot of potential for saving farmers money on phosphorus fertilizer, but especially for building soil health and decreasing the dependence on external inputs.” 

Advocate for your work

The long-term science experiments that occur on agricultural fields need to happen over the course of multiple years to effectively capture slow acting, but significant, ecological changes. This means that stable, reoccurring funding is critical to get the actual results that growers need. 

Kailer has done some advocacy work within her state, thanks to opportunities awarded to her from Kansas State University. But she wanted to push the needle further and bring her efforts to the national level. That’s why she applied for an award to attend Congressional Visits Day (CVD), a two-day opportunity hosted by the Societies each year to communicate with federal policymakers and their staff about the importance of food and agricultural research. In February this year, she and more than 50 other members and Certified Crop Advisers traveled to DC to participate in CVD. 

For people with no experience in science policy, jumping straight into meetings with elected officials can be an intimidating idea. That’s why on the first day of CVD, all attendees go through training on topics in science policy and science communication. 

“We were running around the whole time. That was something that I did not expect—Congress is huge,” she says. “So, sometimes we would have a meeting on one side [of the building], and then we had 10 minutes to run to the other side.” 

Most of their time was spent talking to staff, who would go on to forward what they learned to the representative or senator they work for. Occasionally, Kailer and the others were able to talk to the policymakers themselves, but these meetings were always kept brief—there’s always something happening in the Capitol. Regardless of who they were talking to, each meeting had to make a quick and powerful impression. 

Kailer had ideas about how to quickly grab her audience’s attention. She brought two kinds of visuals with her—pamphlets explaining what AMF is and resin blocks with preserved soil samples inside. The clear blocks contained a series of soil aggregates from either a farm that had done conventional tilling for 35 years or a prairie—undisturbed and full of fungi. The pamphlets contained pictures of plant roots that either had an established association with AMF or were missing their symbiotic fungi. The difference in the root systems was clear and illustrated the fungi’s impact on soil and plant health. Kailer advises attendees  to bring some type of easy-to-understand visual, which could even be as simple as creating something in PowerPoint and printing some copies to take to CVD. 

Kailer had ideas about how to quickly grab her audience’s attention. She brought two kinds of visuals with her—pamphlets explaining what AMF is and resin blocks with preserved soil samples inside. The clear blocks contained a series of soil aggregates from either a farm that had done conventional tilling for 35 years or a prairie—undisturbed and full of fungi. The pamphlets contained pictures of plant roots that either had an established association with AMF or were missing their symbiotic fungi. The difference in the root systems was clear and illustrated the fungi’s impact on soil and plant health. Kailer advises attendees  to bring some type of easy-to-understand visual, which could even be as simple as creating something in PowerPoint and printing some copies to take to CVD. 

• Research the policymakers from your state, and their political beliefs, ahead of time. It’s very important to know who you’d be paired with if you’re awarded funding to go to CVD. 
   
• If possible, reach out to previous winners to hear why they applied and what they included in their application. “I am always happy to help,” she adds. “Whoever wants to contact me, I will always be more than happy to talk about my experience.” You can contact Kailer at [email protected] (send message).

But most importantly, "I think as long as you talk from the heart,” she says, “about why you want to be there and the importance of that award to you. I think that will give you a pretty good chance.”