DOES LIVING SOIL AFFECT PLANT HEALTH AND OUR HEALTH?
We’ve been taught to ignore the Hidden Half of Nature, the life of the soil that delivers nutrients to plants, and ultimately to us.
A conversation with Dr. David Montgomery about his new book, with Anne Biklé, “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health.”
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HART HAGAN: Does the quality of the soil affect plant health? And can plants be more resilient and more nutritious as a result of growing in healthy soil?
DAVID MONTGOMERY: When plants put root exudates into the soil, and those fats, sugars and proteins feed life in the soil, they’re not doing that just to be nice to the microbes. They're doing it because they get something in return. And what they've done is they've offshored a lot of their digestion.
Where does a plant digest its food? Out in the soil around its roots. It’s the microbes out in the soil that are doing the role for a plant of what our own microbiome does in our own gut.
Healthy, fertile soil that's provisioned with a community of organisms that are engaged in symbiotic relationships with the plants are an extension of the plant’s healthcare system, an extension of its ability to care for itself.
Some of those microbes in the soil will make growth hormones for plants, things are very specialized for certain kinds of plants and certain kinds of microbes. It's every bit as evolutionarily honed as the relationships between, say, pollinators and flowers.
But what's happening below ground is out-of-sight, out-of-mind. It’s what I call the Hidden Half of Nature. We don't tend to appreciate it much, but those relationships are happening underground. And they do bolster the health of crops.
So if you look at crops grown in healthy fertile soil, they tend to have lower pest pressure and lower disease pressure. It’s a more resilient, life-filled soil that has a lot of organic matter and will be more climate resilient because it can hold more water and hold onto it longer so plants can actually get at it.
There are connections between soil health and crop health. That translates into human health through the provisioning of the mineral micronutrients, vitamins, phytochemicals, things that we don't need a lot of in our diet, but we need more than we're getting today.
Those are all things that are affected by how we treat the soil, and it can cascade up into what's getting into our bodies as well.
The connection, we think, is for the prevention and maintenance of chronic diseases.