Soil is alive: what lives in our soil?
Have you ever wondered what worms and centipedes are doing as they crawl through your soil? In fact, they work to improve the health of the soil, which in the long run benefits the environment and all living things.
Below is an excerpt Farming on the wild side By Nancy J. Hayden and John P. Hayden. It has been adapted for utilize on the Internet.
It’s all about the soil
Hearty soil is and always has been the foundation of our organic regenerative farm. Hearty and biodiverse soil regenerates through interactions between microbes, other soil inhabitants and the root zone, creating hearty plants and hearty food, while storing carbon and cleaning water.
This is one of the reasons why allowing hydroponic tomatoes or other hydroponic crops to be labeled as organic products does not make sense to us. Therefore, it makes no sense for us to utilize fungicides, herbicides or pesticides (even organic ones) that get into the soil and kill untargeted organisms.
These chemical tools are best viewed as ecological hammers that have detrimental effects on non-target insects, soil fungi, and other beneficial organisms.
Prioritizing biodiversity
On our farm, we want to be providers of life, not death, and promoters of biodiversity, not sterility resulting from a monocultural way of thinking. The basic principle of organic farming was to “feed the soil.”
While special interests and Massive Food may have usurped the term “organic” and questioned its basic assumptions, we will continue to march to the beat of organic, regenerative and biodiverse agriculture with particular emphasis on caring for the living soil of which we are part and which is part of us.
The soil is alive
Whether we focused on growing vegetables, animals or, as we do now, fruit, it was always about the soil. The frightening thing is that since the 1950s, global assessments of land degradation and improvement have estimated that We have lost almost two billion hectares of arable land (about 22 percent) worldwide due to land degradation.
Our society treats soil like dirt, and as our friend Vic Izzo, an instructor at UVM, likes to say, “Dirt is dead. The soil is alive.” We must adopt a “living soil” cultural mindset that recognizes soil – the skinny layer of biofilm resting on parent material – as the support of all land life on the planet. Soil is the key to human immunity and survival!
Living examples of soil
In fact, humans and other organisms are living manifestations of the soil. We are recycled carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other stardust elements that came together to form planet Earth over four billion years ago.
We are connected and part of everything and everyone else that has existed through this common origin and soil path.
Science has shown that certain microbes release calming endorphins when we dip our hands in their soil. Other microbes lend a hand populate that little bag of soil-like activity we carry around in our gut.
We are ecstatic to be part of this dance of life in which microbes, fungi, plants, humans and other animals continually emerge from biofilm in shared time and space. Separation from the earth is unthinkable. We will return to earth and eventually become parts of recent organisms as they take their turn in the dance.
The sacred secret of the soil
Over the years, we have enjoyed learning about scientific research that has examined many processes that occur among microbes, fungi, and plants, but we also realize that the soil holds within it the infinitely convoluted interconnections between all things. It is not possible to completely discover these interactions using scientific methods or models.
It reminds us of our efforts to understand the infinite universe, as we receive glimpses but never complete understanding. Not that we will ever stop testing the soil, but maybe sometimes we will we should acknowledge our intellectual limitations, sit back and respect the earth as part of the sacred mystery of life.
Ecology: Undiscovered Territory
When we as ecologists and long-time organic farmers think about soil and its cycles of birth and decay, we think about all the organisms – plant roots, bacteria, fungi, insects, and more – that call soil home. These are our partners and co-creators.
It is estimated that a teaspoon of hearty, opulent soil contains millions of organisms, and 95 percent of these soil organisms are unclassified and unknown. Much of our knowledge about ecosystems comes from land-based and aquatic studies.
Soil ecology remains a largely unexplored area. Although recent DNA sequencing and profiling tools lend a hand estimate genetic diversity, these tools do not lend a hand us recognize the holistic community structures and relationships that are key to understanding an ecosystem. After all, ecology is the study of communities and interactions.
What lives in our soil: fungi and organic matter
Scientific research is beginning to shed more lithe on the importance of fungi and their role in creating hearty soil and hearty plants.
While we knew that fungi were the major decomposers of organic matter, converting it into slowly released nutrients and carbon, we now have an even greater appreciation for the benefits of fungi-dominated soil systems.
In mutually beneficial relationships, Plant roots release sugars as a reward for fungi that make nutrients available from the soil. Mushroom mycelia can span immense spatial scales and act as communication networks in the soil.
Thanks to their antibiotic properties, beneficial mushrooms can also lend a hand control diseases and pathogens. No-till farming favors a fungi-dominated food web near the soil surfaceleading to increased aggregation of soil particles, increased decomposition rates, and overall greater soil carbon storage.
Nutrients and minerals found in the soil
In addition to living organisms, soil also contains organic matter, nutrients and minerals. It includes the geological material of the host rock from which it comes, as well as the water and air in the pore spaces.
We want our soils to act like a carbon-water sponge, not fully saturated, but more like a wrung out sponge. We can continually improve soils by adding organic matter in the form of compost, manure and wood chips and not tilling them. This improves the slope (structure) of the soil by increasing the pore space between the particles, while the carbon from these nutrients feeds the living organism, enabling long-term fertility.
How soil can lend a hand our planet
It is now widely believed that even if we could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it would still not be enough to reverse catastrophic climate change. We also need to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
An crucial way to achieve this goal is to sequester carbon in the soil by increasing organic matter and using no-till agriculture. The way we treat the soil has always been a matter of the survival of civilization. It’s no different with us.