University Place

Fertile Soil: Between Geology and Biology

– Good afternoon everybody, my name is Sandy Syburg. I’m the President and Co-Founder of Purple Cow Organics. We have offices right here in Madison as well as over in Oconomowoc, closer to Milwaukee. In addition to Purple Cow Organics, I’m also a certified organic farmer. I grow a variety of crops. I’m a member of Crop Cooperative. You might know that as the brand in the grocery store, as Organic Valley, so we grow corn and forages for the dairy farmers. We also grow sunflowers for an organic sunflower oil company in Pulaski, Wisconsin,

dry edible beans for Chipotle restaurants, as well as seed for the Albert Lea Seed Company in Albert Lea, Minnesota, so a very diverse and highly functioning organic farm in southeastern Wisconsin. What I’m going to talk about today is really the definition and the understanding of what we want to see in our gardens as well as in our farmlands is fertile and productive soils. And with the advent and the knowledge of new technologies and new understandings from our universities and other areas of science, I want to just briefly go into a bit of a history lesson.

As humans, we’ve been on the planet for some say millions, others say billions, but a long, long time. Agriculture and the production of food and the transition of our species from hunter-gatherers to gardeners and farmers, where we actually selectively planted a seed in the soil and harvested that seed and stopped moving around, is really only about eight or 10 thousand years old. So in the big picture in the course of history, it’s a relatively small period of time.

Fast forward now to just 500 year ago, where we were really beginning sort of a renaissance and looking at science more from a philosopher’s standpoint. People like Leonardo da Vinci, who were trained up in a wide variety of what today we call sciences, proclaimed that, “We know more about the movement of the celestial bodies “than we do about the ground underfoot.”

Fast forward another 50 or 60 years, and Zachariah Hansen and his father invented the first microscope.

And in the invention of this microscope, the first person who really took it and decided that they were going to do something with it was Galileo. He put a focusing mechanism on it and pointed it to the stars again. So, we didn’t really move a whole lot, as far as the needle, as far as lookin’ at the soil underneath our feet.

Fast forward another 50 years, so we’re still in that roughly 450 to 500 years ago, and this handsome guy– look at that hair. He is noted as being the founder of microscopy, so he took that early invention from the Janssens, really refined it. He was actually a lens maker in Holland, and really was able to improve upon the optics of this microscope. So for the first time, less than 500 years ago,

we see the first organisms that are not visible to the naked eye. The first drop of water that he brought from a pond, you know, he saw these little organisms. No idea what they were.

They were defined as, “wee beasties,”

so that’s where we are 450 years ago.

Then Jan Baptist van Helmont took some of this information from the philosophical sciences, and the emerging departments of science, and really wanted to understand the plant, soil relationship. You know, there’d been this understanding of microorganisms on the leaf surfaces of plants, as well as starting to eventually begin to see these wee beasties in the soil.

And at that point in time, in the 1600s, it was believed that plants were soil eaters, where they literally consumed this material, what was called soil, and that’s where the trees or the plants came from. Van Helmont’s experiment took a five-pound willow tree, put it in exactly 200 pounds of dried soil in a pot, covered the top of the pot, so no leaves or any other material or debris could go into that pot. He grew that tree with only water for five years, removed the tree from the pot, and he ended up with a 164-pound willow tree and that 200 pounds of soil had only been reduced by 2 ounces.

So he was credited with discovering that where does the tree come from.

You know, the tree is primarily made of carbon. The atmosphere and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the tree came from the air.

Now we’re not going to bore you with the history lesson part of it, so fast forward those 500 years, and obviously you know, we’ve landed on the Moon; we’ve traveled out to Mars. We’re still focusing an incredible amount of energy, I guess is the pattern I’m trying to show here, on the celestial bodies, right, and what we can see in the wonder of beyond instead of the soil underfoot.

You know, we have smart phones, smart TVs, smart speakers now. I was just flying back from Washington, D.C. this week, and a passenger sitting near me had a bottle of smart water.
(audience laughing)
I don’t even know what smart water is, right?

So for a moment, I’m going to challenge all of our brains with the possibility as to whether or not we have smart plants. So Jack Schultz, this is just 35 years ago now, so remember, we didn’t even see these organisms in the soil 500 years ago, and we’ve moved quite a bit in the direction of understanding them, but Jack is credited, 35 years ago, with understanding the language of plants, and discovering that plants– This is what the picture you get now, so you don’t get that engraving anymore, you get a Ted Talk, so that’s how he’ll go down in history. He won’t have the engraving in the powdered wig, and he’s probably okay with that.

Plants have 700 plus different receptors that they can actually use as a way to interpret the language of other plants. And this is not about sentient beings, and they’re not, you know, chatting about the weather, or you know, what did you have for dinner last night. They’re communicating in much more extreme ways. Plants live in an extremely stressful and harsh environment. They can’t run away from their predators, and if they’re limited on their resources, they can’t move somewhere where there’s additional resources.

But what this does with these receptors is it gives them the ability to communicate both above and below ground. I’ll explain that in just a second. So this is how he discovered it in his lab. He took a plant, put it in a glass cloche, it’s called, like a jar without a bottom on it. That plant that you see in the foreground with the tin foil on it, very close to us, they put an insect on that plant, and that chewing insect chewed on the plant, and, according to Jack’s hypothesis, which he then later proved, that plant emitted what they call volatizing organic compounds. Things that we would think of as Chanel No. 5, you know, something perfume, something aromatic. He then took that air from that first plant, ran it through a mass spectrum analyzer, and then put that air from that first plant into the cloches of the other two plants. The other two plants responded identically, as if they were being chewed on by the insect. So these compounds emit up into the air; they’re all sorts of different carbon compounds, and the plants actually can even change the compounds that they emit, based on the saliva of the chewing insect that is attacking them. So this is what they look like if you’re a chemist, you know, or in organic chemistry, and writing things out in carbon chains. But to you and I, again we’re back to that Chanel No. 5. They’re clove, coriander, orange blossom, hops. And they’re emitted at extremely low densities, but the plants, if they’re grown in an environment with appropriate and abundant biology, and the nutrients in the soil, they can produce these compounds and literally protect themselves and prevent, you know. You’ve had those instances in your garden where four tomato plants, and one’s not doing well. The reality is that plant is being selected out, often times, by those pathogens,

and plants have that ability to communicate with each other in this way to alert or alarm the other plants

of either drought or insect attack or even diseases.

Back to the father of microscopy again, Leeuwenhoek,

and remember, he was looking at pond water and plaque on his teeth and excited about all these things that he was seeing back 500 years ago, and this is what we can see now. These are actually electron microscope. This is a plant tissue.

And the outer shapes are all each individual cells of that plant, and those green dots that you see are individual molecules of chlorophyll.

And there’s even more powerful microscopes than this now, so this is the direction that science is eventually getting to now, and it’s like the frontier, or the Jacques Cousteau almost, type of an environment where discoveries are happening extremely fast, extremely rapidly,

and it’s really very, very exciting. So from a biology standpoint, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today is really the connection between soil biology and rocks in the soil and what is it about those two, and that frontier between those two, that ultimately results in fertile soil. Bacteria and their function in the soil is to solubilize rocks, to produce vitamins, hormone production, enzyme production, even antibiotic production. If any of you remember, we don’t use a lot of penicillin nowadays from antibiotics, but that penicillin was actually derived from penicillium which is a soil organism.

Antibiotic creams like streptomycin or erythromycin were all derived from soil organisms.

This is a picture of what I look at, at least at my office, from the standpoint of a soil or a compost you know, under a microscope. It’s like reading a foreign language or driving someplace that you’ve never driven before, but in that slide, and you actually start to look at what those are, those small particles are a wide variety of different components from bacteria, including protozoa, ciliates, amoeba,

minerals and organic matter.

To the naked eye, and that’s often times why soil is so mysterious to most people,

including myself at times, is that without the use of that microscope, it’s often times very hard to see, so we have to really understand and believe in something that we can’t see. These are actually nodules on the roots of a legume plant.

One of the things that’s most miraculous about plants, at least in my opinion, is that many of them, like legumes, which are your beans, alfalfa, soybeans, peas, have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in the soil called rhizobium, so the plant actually creates those little nodules.

Those are initially empty houses which with then this rhizobium occupies those, and rhizobium have the ability to take nitrogen, which is 78% of the air we’re breathing. So think about that for a moment, that equates to 32,000 tons of nitrogen above every acre. Now we all know that if we could figure out a way to access even a little bit of that, and not have to fertilize our lawn or our gardens, you know, that would be a good thing. Lawn grasses, when I was a kid, all the seed companies made grasses with some clovers, some legumes in the mix. As a kid, we could lay on the ground, you know, rub a dandelion under your sister’s chin and turn her to butter, or look for a four-leaf clover, because that’s the way grasses and lawns were made up. And what happened in that instance was lawns were far more resilient, and they also produced some of their own nitrogen through this nitrogen fixing bacteria component. If you were ever to pull one of your beans out, your green bean plants out of your garden in the summer time, you should be able to see exactly what you see in this photo, and your plants would be taking atmospheric nitrogen and fixing it in your soil, not only leaving some of that nitrogen behind for your next crop, which we like to move plants around in our garden. So move a crop that needs nitrogen, like your corn or your peppers, to where your legumes, where your beans were, and you’re going to be able to access some of that nitrogen in your garden just like farmers grow alfalfa or soybeans or peas ahead of a nitrogen-needing crop, -demanding crop, like corn.

Fungi also solubilize rock. They solubilize it in a different way. They also produce vitamins, hormones, and enzymes, but then there’s also another function of fungi,

and that’s to degrade plant matter. So they’re the soil’s digestive system. They are the recyclers, so your plant residues, the leaves that fall off of trees, and the other components of dead or dying material in the soil, fungi is extremely efficient at sequestering, digesting, converting those nutrients back into a plant available form. So here’s what some fungi look like; they’re beautiful. This is the Bauveria bassiana. This actually is a soil fungus that not only performs great ecosystem services in the soil itself, like I was talking about, but it also is extremely harmful to any insect that has chitin in its outer shell. So all the ectoskeleton bugs that you see in your garden, if this fungi gets on or in that bug, it will eventually consume that chitin and naturally take that predator out of your garden for you.

So it’s being cultured and used widely now as an organic insecticide in organic vegetable and grain production.

Again, just beautiful.

This is the fungal hyphae, as they’re referred to, are those long threads and strands. And then the round pieces that you see there are actually propagules, you know, spores for future fungi.

Nematodes are a small worm-like creature in the soil, and a lot of this can make some people sort of wheezy, as far as, you know, is this all really going on in my soil. And I think that’s another reason why we’ve sort of hesitated, right. We think of bacteria as germs; germs are bad. We think of fungi as molds, and that happens in our refrigerator drawer and we’re not too happy about that, and nematodes are also not necessarily friendly looking creatures, but they’re extremely important in the nutrient cycling and the plant protection capacities of soil.

This is a pretty famous electron microscope of a nematode on a tomato root, and if you look closely at that, you’ll also see that thread-like fungal hyphae, and it has a lasso around that nematode. So there are fungi in the soil that actually emit pheromones which attract these blind creatures in the dark, and literally, as they go through that lasso, there’s a mechanism that immediately swells that fungal hyphae and captures the nematode. The fungi can’t move in the soil. The nematodes are able to move very freely and through the soil, and magically and almost, well not almost, miraculously they’re able to lure them in, capture them. The nutrients that that nematode was able to gather as it harvested and moved through the soil is now closely locked by that fungi right next to that tomato root, and as that nematode expires and extinguishes, it releases those nutrients to that tomato plant.

This is a very often referred to document. It was actually funded by the NRCS almost 30 years ago.

World renowned microbiologist, Elaine Ingham and her husband worked to get a better understanding of what they call the trophic layers.

What creature in the soil, what unknown creature, bacteria, fungi, et cetera, consumes others and in what is, basically, the predator, pray relationship and the hierarchy of what’s going on under the soil. The big driver though, if you look closely, on the upper left hand side is the sun, you know, the energy that drives and completely fuels that system is the sun. If you look at the plants below the sun, you’ll see that there’s a equal relationship usually, in good healthy soil, of above ground and below ground matter, and by doing so, the plants will spend between 40 and 60 percent of that solar income.

And they will exude sugars, liquid sunshine, sugars and carbohydrates into the soil. Now you would think to yourself, you know, if I was running a business, or I was trying to work on the number of calories that I ate today, why would I share, you know, roughly half of that with these unknown and unseen creatures in the soil. The reason for that is, is that, through that symbiotic relationship and this liquid sunshine, which scientists call exudates, they feed that bacteria and fungi, in those pictures that I previously showed you, under the soil, attracting them to the soil. So that fungi that was living on that root, which caught that nematode, was actually there and hosted by the plant.

The process then moves through a number of other organisms in the soil and ultimately to terrestrial life and to us in the form of food.

The big thing about soil life, and when I say soil life, I’m talking about bacteria, fungi, and you know, microorganisms primarily, is that, even in all this 500 years and all the microscopes and all the things that I’ve showed you, it’s still widely believed that only between five and 20% of all soil life we know what it is, we’ve given it a name, and we may know what it does. So that leaves a vast amount of biology that is extremely unknown, not only what it does individually,

but also what they may do from the standpoint of a symbiotic relationship.

This is a study that’s been telling, and I’ve heard it over and over again from other people. I think we have a microbiologist in the room, so this is not to give any doubt to the great work that microbiology and soil sciences have given, but “over the past 100 years, “microbiologists have attempted to characterize “the biodiversity of microbial life in soil, “and many have reached the unsatisfying conclusion “that bacteria may be too diverse to count.”

As we move over to geology, this initially when you look at it, looks like the world, it’s a beautiful picture, William Blake, a poet. Again, I don’t know why I keep goin’ back 100s of years, but it seems to be a trend as well. But that’s actually an electron microscope picture of a grain of sand.

And the green spots that you see on that grain of sand is a method that scientists use to stain or bring to light when they– It’s almost like a black light. Well, probably talkin’ to the wrong crowd, but when I was a kid, we had black lights and we had posters that glowed when the black lights were on ’em, but ultimately there’s a way for them to fluoresce these bacteria and have them be visible through that microscope. So that shows you just the amount of bacteria

living on just one grain of sand.

So as we look at geology, at least my mind, and I know bein’ a soils guy, I think of rocks and minerals. So looking at a very 10,000-foot level, this is what geology looks like, right? You know, there was the volcanoes and the erosion and the eruptions and the things that brought minerals either directly to the surface or mixed them with surface minerals. You know, we went through school and this is what we tried to learn was the periodic table and it became very confusing and it’s still sort of confusing to me. It was very interesting, and I’m always amazed at how extremely forward thinking and almost clairvoyant some of these scientists were from hundreds of years ago. The individual that actually came up with the periodic table. When he put the first elements in, he left places, knowing or predicting what the molecular weight of unknown components on that table would be in the future, beyond his lifetime.

To convert that periodic table to something more, that’s relative to a gardener or a farmer in plant life, you look at you know, what we see at the garden center or on our bag of lawn fertilizer. It’s typically a three number ordeal, right, that’s N, P, K. Those three are, for the most part, what has been, at least for the last 50 years or so, believed to be the essential elements to plant growth. That number, from the time I was in school to now, has grown to about 12, so if you look at all the dark purple ones, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, iron, zinc.

But they’ve also determined that there’s about 51 additional trace elements that are critical, and the reason they call them trace elements, or some call them secondary elements, is ’cause they’re needed in very low amounts. An acre of soil six inches deep, from the standpoint of measuring these nutrients in soil, weighs, on average in the United States, two million pounds. Boron, for instance, the ideal level of boron in that two million pounds of soil is four.

So when you look at then what’s necessary as far as a parts per million or a parts per billion in a plant, it’s understandable that, certainly when we were looking at the expansion of civilization, you know post World War II peace time how are we going to feed all these people, something that was only four pounds out of two million pounds we’re not– We’re going to focus on the big stuff, right? The reality is that the little stuff, in many instances, is as important, and in some instances, more important that the big stuff.

Our immune systems, our heart and blood system alone runs on about 54 enzymes. And each one of those enzymes needs one of these 90 elements on the periodic table to be created. They need it as what’s called a co-factor. So if we don’t have those elements, even if it is those few parts per billion of molybdenum or chlorine or you know, selenium, our ability to produce these enzymes and our physiology to express itself to its maximum potential and our health to be optimum are compromised.

So what’s the connection? You’re probably all right about now, we gone history lesson, we’ve gone all these little creatures that I’ll never see again after this presentation, some that I don’t want to see again. And you know, rocks melting off the face of the earth to turn into something that you don’t know. So what’s the connection? One of the interesting things that makes this connection was originally discovered and hypothesized in 1905, by a Russian scientist, and then later, really expanded upon primarily because of the ability to do DNA and RNA testing. The guy in 1905 didn’t even know what that was going to be, but Doctor Margulis, in the 60s, was able to go in with DNA and RNA testing. In the picture over on the right, she brought back this early Russian scientist’s definition called symbiogenesis. And what it describes is the ability for some of the early species of organisms, archaea, primarily bacteria, billions of years ago, to develop a process called cross gene transfer. It’s kind of scary actually. You think how is the genetics of one organism going to move crossways. We think of the tree of life as straight trunks and roots and branches, right?

Doctor Margulis’s work completely disrupted the origin of life theory and the way the tree of life has been drawn ever since. And, if you look closely– It’s a little bit difficult, I apologize for that. It’s explained more in this great book. David Montgomery, he’s a geologist from Washington State University. I was on a panel with him at the Good Food Expo in Chicago, wrote this book originally starting out as a geologist, a guy who’s in the rock business. And what he found was he really began to write a story about agriculture and what man has done from the standpoint of changing the soil and the geology on the face of the planet, and through that process, and writing this book called The Hidden Half of Nature, he explains that connection very well between geology, as is his expertise, and biology. But the main link that happened, the second one up on that chart on the right, is when there was a horizontal gene transfer

between plants and prokaryotes, which later became terrestrial life. So it literally is, Doctor Margulis’s work, made the connection that either plants are related to us, or we’re related to plants.

If you look closely at the make-up of hemoglobin, on the left, that’s our red blood cells, and chlorophyll on the right, with the exception of a few minor components, it’s strikingly similar, the lifeblood of a plant and the lifeblood of a human.

What’s the relevance of this cross gene transfer and the ability for a fungi to consume a bacteria, but not kill the bacteria, that is symbiogenesis, and become a new organism? We all hike. We’ve in the mountains. We’ve been under trees, and we’ve seen these here, lichen. You know, they live on the surfaces of rocks. That actually was a symbiogenic transmutation basically, this cross gene transfer of a fungi and algae.

And you know, it was one of the organisms that really presented the first creation of lenses of soil on the planet, so imagine we were a rocky– Atmosphere was relatively caustic. And these creatures were surviving, and they were living on rocks, and part of the things that fungi do is they’re exudates.

Their products of their metabolism are acids, you know, more acidic than sulfuric acid, pH of one or two, something that, if you were to put a drop of that on a rock, you would see it bubble, and you would see the rock dissolve. So these creatures living on the rocks were literally, over millennia, dissolving them, and then as those eventually drifted off into the first lenses of soil, you know, more plant species and more soil and greater lenses of soil, and you can begin to see the picture that we are now, that is the connection between the initial early connections and, to this day, the same connections between geology and biology. Let’s go back to the soil, food web for a second. Again, this is thirty-year-old work. We’re discovering new things at an alarmingly fast rate now, and, in all of this work, it really was all about hierarchy. Who eats who and creating these separate areas

where different organisms had very specific functions, performed very specific agro-ecosystem services, and either ate or were eaten by other organisms in that soil-food web.

This is a study that just came out last September.

And you know, at least for people in my world, plant-soil relationships, it’s extremely mind blowing. But this Rhizophagy Cycle is about an organism, a bacteria, that has the ability to lose its outer shell, so that’s a picture of a root tip. Imagine a bacteria, which is a single-cell organism, that has a membrane around it that holds it together. It would be like us losing all of our skin. These organisms have the ability to shed that outer membrane, enter into the tip of a root of a plant. Remember we started 500 years ago in this story, we’re now just months ago that this was discovered. Enter into the root tip of that plant, where about 50% of those now, protoplasmic, all living together, organisms without outer membranes and differentiation, are oxidized by the plant. The plant brings them up, utilizes those nutrients, and the other half of them, this is the wild part, exit back out an emerging root hair, back into the soil, where they re-form their outer membrane, explore new soil, explore new minerals, new nutrients, new water, and potentially take that amusement park ride again.

The reason that I said we go back to this–

So, a food web is never in this process. Is that plant root up in the upper left part of the who eats who component? So it’s not to say that this work from thirty years ago, by the NRCS and Doctor Ingham were wrong, it’s just the fact that we’ve learned this very new and exciting feature that the plant is one of the trophic layers in this process.

Another discovery that’s very recent, 1996, glomalin.

All of the green that you see on that plant root and on the fungi around it, is this product called glomalin. It’s the highest carbon-concentrated component on the face of the earth. And it’s produced by this fungi. And one of the other amazing things that it does is it works like a biotic glue. So if you have the fungi in the soil, you have the glomalin production, when you bring up clumps of soil, and you see the soil sticking to the plant root, or you see the soil aggregating, it’s called, or sticking together, looking sort of like cottage cheese or chocolate cake or coffee grounds, it’s actually these secondary metabolites and these co-products of the existence of this beneficial fungi in the soil producing the biotic glue and gluing those soils together. This is a picture of a wheat root. You can see that, in these healthy soils, that glomalin, that fungal activity, those roots are– It’s not because it’s a sticky soil or it’s a muddy soil or the roots were just clinging onto that. The rhizosphere as it’s called, which is the very narrow area around a plant root, is full of all these beneficial organisms that are producing agro-ecosystem services, not only from the standpoint of cycling nutrients and making nutrients available, but for us that live with plants, it’s holding soil together, preventing erosion, and keeping lakes and streams, rivers, et cetera.

This is another very recent discovery. So now we’ve talked about biology and bacteria, and we’ve talked about fungi, and the almost countless numbers of them. The fact that we only know maybe five to 20% of them.

And the more amazing thing is that with electron microscopy and the ability to see these things beneath the soil, we’ve now been able to see that there’s a symbiotic relationship between them, and that fungi and bacteria are co-dependent, from the standpoint of their existence and operation in the soil.

This video I call the fungal highway. So that’s actually, as you see those long strands, that’s fungi in the soil, and we saw those pictures earlier of glomalin. There’s another co-product of a fungi called mucilage. And the bacteria find this little thin layer of what obviously is a viscous and slippery substance. If you look at the bacteria, over to the left now as that picture is zooming out, they are not in that same environment, and they are what’s called non-motile. They can’t really move around very well. So now we’re just beginning, and this again, is a very new discovery, just months ago, just last year, where they are finding out that this symbiotic relationship between bacteria and fungi. And imagine now that that bacteria has the ability to get on the fungal highway and move much greater distances at much greater speeds to perform the agro-ecosystem services. When I say agro-ecosystem service, that’s sort of a fancy word for makin’ your plants grow really good in your garden.

This was just a couple of weeks ago at the corn-soy expo. USDA researcher presented and made this comment that, “If we spent as much time and resources on soil biology “as we have on soil chemistry in the last 50 to 100 years, “we’d be in a totally different place in agriculture “and the understanding of the soil-plant relationships.” That sounds like I got a chip on my shoulder, ’cause I’m like a soil microorganism geek, but the reality is is that we’re now just really starting to figure out that these components have tremendous and compounding benefits for the plants that we want to grow, for the environment that we share with them and that they’re grown in, as well as, you know, our own livestock and human health.

Hippocrates was the one that said, “Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.”

The other thing that’s extremely important, in this geology-biology frontier is that they’re in balance. And if you have minerals out of balance, in other words, if you’re potentially fertilizing your garden with too much calcium or too much potassium, you have the potential to shift that mineral portion of your soil out of balance, and then, when you drive that mineral portion out of balance,

you out-of-whack the biology part of your soil. So it’s really important that, in these instances, and we’re learning again more and more about that, that we don’t try and over fertilize, and that we don’t try and over stimulate a plant to get that successful first tomato in the neighborhood or the tallest, greenest, fastest whatever, but that we allow this symphony to go on in the soil between these biology and between the geology and trust in the fact that some of these

many, many organisms that we’re seein’ here today are going to perform that service for you and liberate that nutrient and keep your plant healthy.

Another sort of mind-blowing statistic is that a handful of healthy soil has more living organisms in it, than all the people on earth.

Yeah, I see the eyes like that a lot of times when I say that. I mean literally, a handful of healthy soil has more life in it, a handful. Remember we talk about two million pounds in an acre, but a handful is more living organisms that there are people alive on this planet today. So think about that again now, when we really look at the agro-ecosystem services. We know the geology’s there. We can feel it, touch it, right? But trust in the unseen.

If you look at that from the standpoint of what does that mean– This is in hectares, and there’d be 20 cows per hectare, and if you translate that to acres, that’s 8.4 cows per acre. Now take the unseen part, the fact that I told you we were going to be talkin’ about and needing to trust and believe in things that we can’t see. Imagine moving them up on the surface of the soil just for a brief moment, and every acre you drive past has eight cows standing on it.

Soil life is there; soil life needs to be fed.

It was one of the things that growing up on my grandparents’ farm– this is my grandmother bless her soul– was constantly harped. “Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil.” Ultimately, that’s how I got intrigued and evolved into the composter that I am today.

Compost then has a concentration of these things, and this can be the compost that you do in your back yard. It can be the compost that you get from your municipality.

And to all varying degrees, I wanted to share this slide to give you an idea of the relative microbial richness of compost.

You know, Pliny the Elder wrote about it in Roman times, so this is not a new technology. This is completely the other end of the spectrum from the electron microscopes and all the magic that we were looking at earlier. Something as simple as compost, composting yourself, composting with your neighbors, composting with your community, however you end up doing it, compost is extremely beneficial, and obviously the microbial richness, as you see to the right, relative to fertile soil. If that fertile soil, in the center bar, is that more life than there are humans on earth, imagine how much life is in a handful of compost.

This is another one of my grandmother’s comments, “Life’s made out of dirt,” but “man, despite his artistic pretensions, “his sophistication and his many accomplishments, “owes his existence to a six-inch layer of soil “and the fact that it rains.”

Other great quotable moments, Wendell Berry, love the guy,

“Soil is the great connector of lives.” Go back to Roosevelt; now remember he’s post dust-bowl. He’s dealin’ with some really tough times, not only agriculturally, economically, environmentally, but he also probably read history and saw that the Romans were gone, the Greeks were gone, you know, the Egyptians were gone, and they’d all basically fallen because they didn’t take care of the soil. So he tried to warn this nation that, “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”

Henry Wallace, he was a Secretary of Agriculture, “Nations endure only as long as their top soil.”

William Albrecht, one of my heroes, was really one of the scientists down at Missouri State that came up with the understanding of really what chemistry’s, other than N, P, K, are necessary in plant development, and calcium was one of those, but you know, “Soil is the creative material of most basic needs of life, “and creation starts with a handful of dust.” Again, a lot of this goes back to some of our early and ancient wisdom learnings, in our cultures and our religions. You know, “Dust to dust,” and all those sorts of things that starts to make perfect sense now.

To bring it all together, an inch of soil, on that two million pounds of an acre of soil, science estimates, takes about 475 years to create.

Currently in the United States, we’re losing an inch of soil about every 15 years. I was not very good at math when I was in school, still not very good now, but

you know globally, potentially we were– You know, we can’t say it’s just the Greeks or the Romans. We are all– We’re in a global society. We’re in a global economy, global, global, global. The reality is that this potential cliff, this potential catastrophe, is facing all of us.

And I’m not trying to be a doom sayer or bum you out,

but the reality is that we also have a lot of ability to understand that we can change that.

Those same soil experts are looking at, in some areas of the world. There’s only 60 years left of top soil, I mean, 60 harvests.

UW Wisconsin did a study back in the 80s, and it determined that, with the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, we’ve aged, we’ve weathered our soils. We’ve chemically weathered our soils, in the State of Wisconsin, 5000 years in the last 50. And if any of you drive around, you know there’s gravel pits and limestone quarries everywhere around this country. The more unfortunate part of that is that we don’t have enough lime in this state, buried beneath the soils of this state, to counteract the acidity that’s been created by those fertilizers.

One of the ways that you can counteract that in your gardens and counteract that in agriculture is through diversity, so you know, planting additional plant species, increasing rotation, learning and experimenting with foods that might contain pea protein or lentils or dry beans or those sorts of things, and you know, it’s not an animal protein versus plant protein argument from me. It’s about diversify our diets, we will diversify agriculture. You know, farmers in this country will grow what we want to eat and buy. That’s a cover crop mix that I grow on my farm. So that’s seven different species of plants that we grow after every crop. So we do not leave soil bare, nor should you leave your garden soils bare, after you’ve harvested the bounty, put it in the freezer, the fridge, or the can. You know, you should be feedin’ that soil. Listen to Grandma, “Feed the soil, “feed the soil, feed the soil.” Back to that picture with the sun, the plant and the root exudates. The easiest way to feed that soil is to let nature and let the plant do it.

This particular seed mix looks like something that I should put in a bag and carry on a hike as a trail mix, and, quite frankly, it springs from the ground and is just as beautiful when it’s up. The other thing that it does is it mixes up that plant architecture. So the red line that you see across the picture is really if we were growing a mono-crop or crops that were very similar in their root architecture, in their root size, we would not go lower or wider into the soil, but by adding diversity to those cropping systems, the plant roots can explore portions of the soil that our other crop could not.

And they’ll also mine for, look for, and operate symbiotically with biology, and liberate and explore nutrients that potentially the other crop didn’t as well. So it allows for the sequestration of all those other nutrients.

This is a picture with just that crop diversity rotation and the cover crop in between, what we’re able to do to soils in just three years. So the clod on the left is a portion of the field that we left in its standard rotation, and the soil on the right, that’s on the shovel, is just three years. We know that as soils are darker, right, we always think about a garden soil, that black.

Those soils inherently, the darker in color you go, the higher amount of organic matter is in the soil, and usually, because of that organic matter, that’s why those soils are more fertile, because the organic matter has the ability to store those nutrients and water to a much higher degree than the mineral components of the soil do.

The other thing, especially in a city like Madison or in a state like Wisconsin where we rely so heavily, for recreation, drinking water, you name it, our waters are extremely important to us, both surface and ground water. The jar on your right is that soil that’s been in that more diverse rotation, and being fed by root exudates continually. And the soil on the left is the same soil. This is the same field, and it’s what’s called a slake test. So the soil on the right, going back to that picture that I had of the green fungi and the glomalin, those biotic glues, in just three short years, are holding that soil together, where, in soils that do not have that same support system, the same plant-soil relationship going on and that same diversity of microbiology, they don’t have those biotic glues and therefore the soils do not hold up in the water.

This is a map of soil degradation, and again, I’m trying to really bring together the frontier between geology and biology, and why does it matter, and what can we do, as eaters and consumers, about it. But if you look at the central Midwest, over here on the left, North America, the Mississippi Valley, or the Mississippi watershed, is pretty much bright red.

And those are very degraded soils. And those are also the soils that lead us to our hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. If you don’t know what the hypoxic zone is, that’s ultimately the soil has left, the soil has carried the nutrients, the nutrients make it out to the Gulf of Mexico, and we now have shrimp fishermen that have to go 20 miles off the coast of Louisiana before they get to water that supports life.

There has been progress, so it’s not all doom and gloom, right? You know, if you go back to 1982, which is anything that’s sort of the orangish color,

we’ve reduced that soil erosion by 50%. We’ve gone from almost eight tons, national average per acre per year, to a little bit less than five tons.

And those are great strides, and those are things that we should be commending federal agencies, local agencies, and farmers alike in reducing that number, but think about the number, I mean five tons. Most people that drove here today, unless they’re in a pick-up truck, have a vehicle that weighs about a ton. That’s five of your vehicles per acre per year that are leaving this country. So again, back to how we can understand how soil functions and how we can encourage that soil to function optimally to reduce that erosion, ultimately is the fact that eating becomes an agricultural act. So what we choose to eat is how we choose to have our land farmed.

Here’s another great quote, Gary Zimmer, good friend of mine, “Soil’s not rocket science, “it’s a whole lot more complicated than that,” and this would be basically the lecture board at the university, if we were really going to get into soil science.

But again, back to the farming piece of it, and the understanding as we moved into it, it was all about when Abraham Lincoln was elected President, 98% of this country were farmers. Today, less than 2% are farmers.

And you know, we were promoting the fact that we needed to become more efficient, and obviously this is an old Moline ad where, just think of what one man can do now that you’ve got that piece of machinery. This is what they’re inventing now. This is what’s called an autonomous tractor. Won’t have a farmer in it. Won’t even have a cab on it for a farmer to get it from field to field. As Wendell says, “Eating is an agricultural act,” but we need more farmers, not less farmers. We need to increase our eyes to acres ratio.

We need to understand that, even in your garden, the more you’re out there frequently looking, inspecting, understanding, determining if the bugs are there, but are they there enough that I should really go to the garden center and get something to do about it, or should I go back out tomorrow and you know, maybe a predatory insect has come and taken care of it for me, and waiting and learning from nature. In order for us to do that in our agricultural systems, and globally from a soil health standpoint, and really maintain the fragile residual of what’s left of that frontier between geology and biology, is we need more farmers. We need to lower the acres to eyes ratio.

Um, it wasn’t supposed to do that.

Diversifying the cropping system, like we were talking about that’s all choices that we can make. Not only how our food is grown, and where our food is grown, whether it’s local whether it’s not local, but you know, diversifying our diets will diversify our agricultural systems. And ultimately, even though I’ve gone through some highs and some lows, as far as some of the things that sound somewhat doomsday, this is an extremely great time of hope, I think, for our soil systems, because we are really at a frontier of understanding that frontier, to the greatest degree that we have in the 500 years since we first saw it.

One last thing, you know as a farmer, you always go lookin’ at your fields and, probably shouldn’t admit it, but you sneak into your neighbor’s and you grab one of your neighbor’s field, you kind of look at ’em and compare ’em. And this is a friend of mine’s farm and he did that. And the corn that you see the chickens eating, on the left, is from this very biology diverse, very biology robust soils, high mineralization, you know, all those biotic glues, all that good life going on. And the corncob on the right is from a field that doesn’t have as much of that good stuff goin’ on, and I guess my feeling is that, if a chicken, with that little itty-bitty brain,
(laughter)
can figure out which cob of corn they want to eat, we should be able to follow suit and figure some of that out as well.

The other thing is how we think about things. So this is a picture, from my five-year-old granddaughter, of my corn field last year.

So I want to leave you with, if we want to make small changes, we should change how we do things. If we want to make big changes, we should change how we see things. See a cornfield like my granddaughter. Thank you.
(audience applauding)