Land Health, Soil Health and our Food
Let's hear from David R. Montgomery, PhD, and his new book: "What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health."
My guest is Dr. David R. Montgomery, Professor of Geology at the University of Washington. He is author of “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations,” “Growing a Revolution,” “The Hidden Half of Nature” (with his wife Anne Biklé, who is a biologist) and also with Anne Biklé, their latest book, “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health.”
His books have been translated into six languages, including Chinese, Japanese Korean, German, French and Spanish.
HART HAGAN: David, your latest book with Anne Biklé is “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health.” What motivated you to write this book?
DAVID MONTGOMERY: This book is an attempt to address some questions that were left over from our previous writing, questions like, what's the effect of soil health on human health.
We've done a lot of work and writing on how farming practices affect the health of the land, how that affected ancient societies in “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations,” how microbial life is influencing soil fertility in “The Hidden Half of Nature,” and how regenerative agricultural practices can help revive small-scale and large-scale farming--and soil--and farming profits. But one of the things that was left on the table after writing those books was this: “What really is the connection between soil health and human health?”
People have been arguing about this for 80 years or so since the early days of organic agriculture, and some of the influential writers of the 1930s and 40s. “What Your Food Ate” is Anne’s and my attempt to look into those questions and ask, “How much have we learned in the last 80 years?” What are the connections? What are those dots that connect how we treat the land, to the health of the soil, to the health of our crops, to the health of our livestock, to what goes into our bodies in our food and how that may influence human health.
So it's really a natural extension of the work that Anne and I have been doing for a number of years looking into these areas. But it was, in great part, an effort to answer those questions to--our own satisfaction--about how can we really think about those connections. What's solid and what’s still a little squishy and how those dots line up.
It was a lot of fun and very revealing to actually see the record and then figure out how to tell it in a way where you mix in history along with the science to help the science go down, and see where we've been. It’s a way to forecast where we might go in terms of agriculture in the future and what it might mean for human health.