Healthy Soil Could Solve Most of the World's Problems
Healthy soil could prevent flooding and drought while absorbing excess atmospheric carbon and delivering abundant quantities of nutritious food to our tables.
Soil and dirt are worlds apart.
If you start with soil, you can turn it into dirt. Humans do that, on a large scale. But if you start with dirt, you can turn it into soil. Nature does that, and humans can facilitate that process, if we choose to.
If we want to turn dirt into soil, we can follow the Five Principles of Soil Health, enumerated above.
The Five Principles of Soil Health are set forth in “Dirt to Soil,” by farmer and author Gabe Brown. Gabe and his family went from nearly bankrupt to financially prosperous by applying the Five Principles of Soil Health.
We’ve been trained to see a trade off between humans and nature. But we have countless opportunities to nurture nature while also nurturing ourselves.
For example, when we grow our vegetables in rich soil, the vegetables are more nutritious and can go far to prevent or eliminate health problems. Only rich soil is capable of delivering the nutrients that make a plant nutritious and resilient.
That same rich soil serves to prevent erosion and water pollution. Most of our erosion and water pollution comes from farms that continually degrade the soil, via tillage, chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Let’s talk about what good soil is and how it works.
Most of our farmlands used to be forests or grasslands. As such, the soil was infused with living roots. We cleared the forests and started plowing. We also plowed the grasslands. John Deere invented a plow that was capable of ripping the roots in what is now the American Midwest.
Plowing is one of the worst things we do to soil (See Principle #1). Allowing plants to grow in the soil is one of the best things we do (See Principle #4).
We stumble at this point, because we can’t imagine farming without plowing. We imagine the iconic farmer on a tractor plowing a field, and we think that’s what farming is. But “no-till” farming is a growing trend. And in “Dirt to Soil” Gabe Brown explains why it is not only better for the natural environment, but it is more profitable and produces more nutritious food. There is no downside.
Farmers will tell you, “We have to feed the world,” by which they mean that we cannot grow food while regenerating the soil.
But Gabe explains why he can produce more pounds of food per acre and more nutrition per acre than conventional methods. So if we treat the soil well, we will get more food per acre and more nutrition per bushel of food.
We can also prevent flooding, because good soil absorbs rainfall. Good soil is about 40% pore spaces. Pore spaces contain air, until it rains, and then the pore spaces fill up with water. Good soil soaks up the rain like a sponge.
Whenever we see flooding in the news, we are told that “climate change” is the reason. We are told that climate change causes more rain, and more rain means more flooding. But that’s less than half of the real story. Much of our flooding could be prevented if we had quality soil, which absorbs the rainfall and prevents runoff.
Quality soil could also prevent drought. We have drought largely because of degraded soil and not enough plant matter. We have removed our forests and degraded and destroyed our grasslands. In many areas, there’s hardly anything left to absorb the rain that does fall. Drought is not just a function of how much rain we get. It’s a function of how much rain we keep. When the land has plant matter and quality soil, then it tends to keep the rain that it gets, and then contributes that water back to the water cycles that make rain.
Quality soil supports wildlife, because quality soil supports plants, and plants support wildlife. Degraded soil becomes increasingly dry because it cannot hold onto the rain. Increasingly dry soil loses organic matter and becomes increasingly compacted and unable to hold onto the rain, and increasingly unable to support plant life.
So the solution to many if not most of our ecological problems lies in nurturing healthy soil. The Five Principles of Soil Health answer the question of HOW we nurture healthy soil in our farms, our forests and our landscapes?
The great thing is that anyone who owns a home can apply the principles of soil health. This requires that we rethink everything we’ve ever seen in terms of lawn care. But when we get first hand experience with healthy soil in our own landscape, we can then apply that understanding to our decisions as consumers and citizens.
Please understand that as citizens and consumers, we are currently supporting an all out assault on our soils worldwide. And the mainstream climate conversation has nothing to say about this, because that conversation is controlled by people and institutions (e.g., Wall Street and major political parties) who have no interest in solving the climate problem. They pin all the blame on excess CO2 and are unwilling to look at other causes, such as degraded soil and inadequate plant matter. Thus, they are gaining power and money by blaming excess CO2 and pretending to solve that problem. But they don’t even have a plan, much less the ability or desire to implement.