For the Love of Soil: Strategies to Regenerate Our Food Production Systems

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William Gibson once said that "the future is here - it is just not evenly distributed." "Nicole modestly claims that the information in the book is not new thinking, but her resynthesis of the lessons she has learned and refined in collaboration with regenerative land-managers is new, and it is powerful." Says Abe Collins, cofounder of LandStream and founder of Collins Grazing. "She lucidly shares lessons learned from the deep-topsoil futures she and her farming and ranching partners manage for and achieve." I spent recovering by applying the foundations teachings and my life has dramatically turned around. I have never experienced such vitality and happiness in my entire life. I am so grateful for WAPF. I have become so passionate about physical and mental health as well as farmer rights. I’m so eager to become involved in sharing knowledge about these things.” That’s Eden from Leesburg, Virginia. Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Nicole Masters. She has been providing agricultural consulting and extension services in Regenerative Agriculture since 2003, and is the Director of Integrity Soils Limited.

Deep inside, with all that you were going through, you knew it was something else. Paraquat is an herbicide. I’m guessing it’s like a Roundup or something. Is that right?For human health, the one thing that we can do immediately is to start taking care of our gut because obviously, our gut is affecting our thinking, our hormones, and everything else. I take fulvic acid every day. We use fulvic acid in agriculture. What it does is it feeds the soil gut microbiome. It’s a key lighter of heavy metals and toxins. When you take it for yourself, it relaxes the gut villa. It helps to restore the tight junctions in the gut. No matter if you are at the beginning of your regenerative journey or further down the road, Nicole Masters’ ‘For the Love of Soil’ will open your eyes and heart to fascinating new world below your feet. The first chapter had me hooked. Nicole shared her own story about Paraquot poisoning in her teens and how it affected her health and her journey into ultimately becoming an Agro-ecologist, educator and systems thinker. She not only tells her story but weaves it beautifully into the topic of this book. She speaks of chemicals, genetics, epigenetics and more telling the story of human reliance and exposure to these things. She encourages each and every one of us to listen to our bodies, nature and our intuition to build a rich and insightful life. In so doing she builds the reason for having written the book and her love of nature and soil. For years many of us involved in regenerative agriculture have been touting the soil health – plant health – animal health – human health connection but no one has tied them all together like Nicole does in “For the love of Soil”! Gabe Brown, Browns Ranch, USA Do you ever give much thought to the Earth? We walk on it, raise animals on it, build our houses on it, and depend on it for sustenance but some of us might not give it a second thought. This is an episode where we talk about why we need to. The soil is in trouble and we need to look at how we can restore its health to regenerate it and cultivate it in a way that is good for the Earth itself and for each of us. This is Episode 256 and our guest is Nicole Masters.

Here I am, just one person. Let’s say, I know my farmer but I still want to do something on a bigger scale to turn things around because won’t our dollars and won’t our choices impact that business? Brix measure the dissolved solids in the setup of a leafy plant. We’re using that as a tool to look at how much sugar and dissolve solids? How well is that plant photosynthesizing? It’s an indicator in the field. Whereas, these new meters are new infrared, spectroscopy, so they need to be correlated with those specific crops. At the moment, you can test maybe twenty different crops, apples, pears, and those obvious ones. There’s a lot of calibration that’s still required to test it but some of these new meters will tell you where in the world was this grown, which is cool. People can correlate that this has come from this property. It’s taken all of these things for a while but now it’s a hand meter. Masters views healthy soil as “the gut microbiome of the planet” and shares many insights about soil management. Although most readers likely know that using synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is counterproductive, Masters makes that fact explicit. Just like us, plants need air! Soil compaction, one of the inadvertent results of synthetic nitrogen application, suffocates plants and destroys the infrastructure formed by the termites, dung beetles, ants and earth­worms that let plants breathe easily. Her favor­ite won’t-leave-home-without-it device is the lowly shovel. A shovel allows visualization of soil color and its aggregates. One can smell the aroma, count the earthworms and even discern whether legumes are fixing nitrogen. Another essential tool is the simple refractometer, which measures the Brix (solids or “sugars”) in a plant. She tests crops and weeds, because if the weeds score high, and the crops score low, an adjust­ment is needed. “Make sure you are not farming or ranching for weeds,” she advises.

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As for critiques, there are times where the author repeats herself. I personally found this helpful, as it allowed some of the pertinent ideas to sink in. That said, I can imagine it would be irritating for some. One way I like to think about soil is the way that we think about the human gut microbiome. You imagine that you only eat one type of food for the rest of your life and what that does to your gut microbiome. It’s the same in the soil. If you’re growing monocultural crops and even if that’s alternating crops, you’re going to grow berries then you grow on the corn, which has a major impact on the diversity of the microbiome as it does with our own human health. She tells her personal story of how an herbicide jeopardized her health, though she did not know it at first. She goes over why monocrops are a problem (even organic monocrops), the correlation between chemical companies and pharmaceutical companies, and how personal testing meters are being developed to help us better assess the quality of our food and the health of the soil. In the end, she offers ideas to diversify and regenerate both the land, and our guts, for improved health. The author is inspirational, humble, very fair minded and leads us in a sensible discussion of the critical issues at hand (really... soil and food growing spells humanities survival!) Unlike some books discussing the issues with big agriculture and the food production systems, it wasn’t just a whinge and takedown of the “bad guys”. Rather, a well referenced yet entertaining guide of what we CAN do, with encouraging stories of people who are already doing this to great effect. Loved it.

What they found was all these methanotrophic organisms were gobbling away. They were like, “This is awesome.” That oil spill obviously had massive consequences at that time and impacts on everything but those organisms are going to come in. It’s food and carbon. Methane is a carbon source. It’s food for life so they’re not going to let it go to waste. Soil: Soil and water and cabin are intimately related. And as we start to break down those links, there are consequences above ground. Then, "Everybody knows" that synthetic nitrogen is not good for the soil (OK, maybe not EVERYbody), but she explains it well.We have all seen dust blowing in the wind as working (tilling) the soil disrupts the soil infrastructure. Do the people tilling realize that the most valuable substance in their soil is what is darkening the sky? It is humus, the final breakdown of organic matter, with a structure even finer than clay. Humus is an amphitheater, if you will, in which soil microorganisms thrive. It’s a great business model because now, you’re going to need this pill. You’re going to need that pill because that whole systems become compromised. It’s a great business model but not for us. Most people seem to have some malady that is or is not explained. Years of misery and many doctor visits to no avail; then, a practitioner pointed to Paraquat, the first flag in this book. Who would have thought bare feed as a child in a foreign land would be the culprit. Let’s pivot now and talk about the toxin loading of our soil. First of all, what’s going on and why should it matter to us?