The soil is alive. It is our responsibility to nurture healthy soils. Healthy soil produces nutrient rich food that we need for our own health.
In a teaspoon of healthy soil there are more organisms than there are people on the planet. You can literally pick up a handful of soil and be holding billions of organisms right in the palm of your hand. What are they doing there? Most of them have a close relationship with plants, and most of them are beneficial. They bring water and nutrients to the plant in exchange for carbon that plants pull from the atmosphere. Plants actually pump carbon into the soil through their roots to stimulate microbial activity. This increased activity right around the roots gives plants access to nutrients that may not otherwise be available. The plants depend on the microbes and microbes depend on the plants.
As caretakers of the land, it is up to us to make sure that this relationship is alive and well. One important way that we do this on our farm is by using perennial cover. I’m talking about a mix of grasses and forbs that are living year-round. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. Mother nature does not leave the soil bare. Go into a forest or a prairie and you will see a diverse mix of living plants covering the ground all year long. That is what we are striving to imitate. Soil microbes can do a much better job of bringing water and nutrients to the plants than we can. Our job is to make sure they have a favorable environment that allows them to do their job.
The relationship between plants and soil microbes is very similar to our own relationship with the microbes on and in our bodies. We cannot live without them. They digest our food, and fight off sickness. Eating a diverse diet of whole foods with high nutrient density is what keeps these microbes happy and healthy. They return the favor by keeping us happy and healthy. It is amazing to learn how much we depend on these microscopic organisms every day.
Last summer, as a way to demonstrate all of the activity going on below the ground, we took the soil your undies challenge and buried a couple of pairs of cotton underwear. One in the pasture and one in a corn field next to the pasture. The underwear was buried in the top six inches of soil in mid-August and we left them for two full months. We wanted to see how active our soil microbes were. Since the underwear is made up of carbon, and the microbes live on carbon, we expected the underwear would be a nice snack for them. The more underwear consumed at the end of the two months, the higher the microbial activity.
In October, we returned to dig up the soiled undies! We were happy to see that a significant portion of the underwear was gone after just two months. As we continue working to build healthy soil, we will monitor our progress with tests and observations like this one.
We understand that healthy soil is the key to providing plant health, animal health, and human health.
