Sure, soil is dirty. But is it sexy? Well, consider that soil is alive, teeming with billions of microbiota, reproducing and working with plants in a way that helps all these species to grow and thrive. For so long, plant growth, and soil health, was subject to the simplistic paradigm of NPK — or nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Now, soil scientists are beginning to understand and harness the biological complexity of the soil beneath our feet. And yes, it is sexy.
Kristin Ohlson tells this story in our latest piece with Orion Magazine, “Dirt First,” which appears in the May/June issue. Ohlson follows a “renegade” soil scientist at the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, Rick Haney, who doesn’t mince words. “Our entire agriculture industry is based on chemical inputs, but soil is not a chemistry set,” he says. “It’s a biological system. We’ve treated it like a chemistry set because the chemistry is easier to measure than the soil biology.”
As Ohlson explains: “In nature, of course, plants grow like mad without added synthetic fertilizer, thanks to a multimillion-year-old partnership with soil microorganisms.” What Haney is doing (and the NRCS is promoting to farmers around the country) is figuring out how to test soil for biological activity. The results, and recommendations, can mean an improvement in yields even as farmers eschew traditional fertilizer applications. In a separate Q&A, Ohlson then takes these lessons and translates them for home gardeners.
But if soil biota help plant life thrive, animals also can play a role, as Judith Schwartz makes clear in her latest story for FERN and Pacific Standard. In this story, published online last week, Schwartz reports on an experiment, halfway around the world in the grasslands of Zimbabwe, to restore desertified land with cattle. Employing the holistic grazing techniques of Allan Savory, she finds a village once dependent on food aid now living off its livestock and its crops. As the landscape has healed, wildlife has also returned.
“Neighboring communities now come to us for food,” Busie Nyachari, a young mother, says. And with better economic prospects, people are less prone to share information with poachers or kill endangered animals for food, she writes.
Soil doesn’t often grab headlines, but given its importance to food production — to life — it’s a core subject for FERN. If you believe these types of stories are worth bringing to light, please consider a donation to fund our work. In doing so, you’ll be joining operations like the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which provided a travel grant for Schwartz’s story.
Photograph by Julia Robinson.