The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc

> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. Thank you. This is one of those super-underappreciated biological facts. Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory , making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun. Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: ▶ this video

I'll say it, because the article neglected to: "It's the soil health, stupid." It's troubling how (at least in mass media) every environmental problem gets collapsed down to just CO2 and greenhouse gases. Yes it does play a role here, but it shouldn't eclipse the other existential environmental problems we also face: soil erosion and killing the soil life that 'mines' nutrients for plants.[0] People imagine soil as merely an inert sponge that only stores nutrients (to the delight of fertilizer companies), but healthy living soil will actually break down rocks and air to create a constant supply of nutrients manufactured in situ . [0] ▶ this video

Yes. I keep sharing Gabe Brown's three-part video series titled Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem, now and then, here on HN, whenever such threads come up. Some really solid practical and pragmatic stuff there, on regenerative agriculture, which, as I understand it [1], goes beyond organic farming, and is related to many of the issues talked about in this thread. [1] I had done organic gardening successfully, for a few years, some time earlier, so I have at least some practice and experience (and also a lot of reading and thinking about what I read) as the basis for my opinions of his work and those of others I mention, such as Elaine Ingham (a video by her is below too). One of her most astonishing finds / claims is that (IIRC, I saw the video a few years ago), almost all soils anywhere on earth have more than enough nutrients for plants for many many years. She said the real issue and limitation is the lack of soil organic content and soil structure and mycorrhiza ( link ), without which even applying tons of nutrients is useless. And, Gabe has a big farm, a few thousand acres (so not small scale) in North Dakota, USA, with field crops, green manure, livestock on pasture / prairie, etc. And is making profits from his farming operations, sustainably, even regeneratively, without government subsidies, and more than his conventionally-farming neighbors, some of whose soils are getting worse, while his get better over time, by objective measures (checked by external govt. age

For a practical discussion of how this biotic cycling connects to agriculture, Dr Elaine Ingham delivers a salient presentation.[0] [0] ▶ this video

P and K are abundant in the world's agricultural soils. They just need to be 'eaten' (dissolved) by soil microorganisms.[1] The problem is that farmers have been taught to ignore the health of soil organisms and just apply a short-term bandaid chemical (vs biological) spray product, which causes more harm in the long-term. Take a wild guess who taught them that? [1] ▶ this video

> soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough It's eye-opening to realize that soil can make its own nutrients and fertilizer (unlike the common view of soil as an inert "sponge" which needs all the fertilizer added to it). Bacteria breaks down rock into minerals (including the all-important potassium and phosphorus) and also fix nitrogen. The problem is that applying synthetic fertilizers kills off this soil biology, making the farmer dependent on.... more synthetic fertilizers. It's a nice racket, until it kills the planet. ▶ this video It's a huge biotech opportunity. Manufacture fertilizer biologically in-situ, vs blowing up some land, dissolving it in acid (along with tasty cadmium impurities[1]), and shipping it around the globe. [1] link

I saw some another video where the claim was that there’s already enough elements in the soil to last thousands of years, but they require the right mixture of microorganisms to become available to the plants. It’s only the lack of microorganisms that forces us to add those nutrients. [0] ▶ this video

Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research applied widely). Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And this is because it is the soil life (they use the term "biology" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients available in forms that plants can actually use, via a deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria, fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals. Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her saying that most or all soils on earth, already have many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil organic matter content (all those critters need to eat), humidity

>However, it is usually organic food and it is typically much more expensive than regular, packaged food. I don't want organic. I just want to avoid packaging Just avoiding packaging is more expensive, because as this excellent article points out[1], packaging represents the automation of the distribution chain . > Some of the first packaging arose in the late 19th century. Some of the earliest packaging was for Uneeda Biscuits. They were packaged in a box with wax paper that sealed in the biscuits so they wouldn't go stale. Packaging was all about easing distribution for producers, because before that, everything was sold in bulk containers. The transformation of production and distribution as well as retail sales—going from mom and pop stores to the chain supermarkets we have today—means that packaging represents the automation of the distribution system. I think producers are very conscious of how helpful packaging is in helping them centralize their businesses. In doing that, they get to downsize and streamline and create economies of scale that they couldn't create if they didn't get to consolidate—which is what a lot of the drive behind switching from the refillable to the disposable bottle and can was about. The beer and soda industries consolidated massively in the post-war period, and the number of producers shrank dramatically. And this massive consolidation in both of those industries was facilitated by the switch to disposable containers. The industry no longer ha

> If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil. This is true. However the little-known fact is that healthy soil contains all the "machines" required to break down the abundant insoluble potassium (along with every other necessary element) present in rock particles into plant-soluble fertilizer. This "insoluble pool" contains enough nutrients for literally thousands of years of plant growth, if only the soil life is present to unlock it. The problem is that tillage kills this soil life, and that dead land now requires the constant import of external fertilizer to grow food. Pesticide and fertilizer application also kills these organisms, which out-compete pest species (as mentioned here: link ). Spraying becomes a vicious cycle for the farmer, and a lucrative cycle for their chemical supplier. In other words, functional soil isn't just an inert "tank" for holding nutrients. It's a two-dimensional factory for converting in-situ rock and air and rain into biomass. This is all explained much better by soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham. ▶ this video > luckily engineers and farmers are looking at these things more closely now. I would add biologists (including soil scientists, botanists, mycologists, entomologists, ecologists, etc) and indigenous experts to that list.

>use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well. Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future infestations. A much better, less toxic, and longer-lasting solution would be to provide pest-eating insect predators with habitats. In nature balance is achieved by predator/prey interactions instead of razing the beneficial soil ecosystem[1] with poison. To take just one example, ticks are naturally eaten by birds (eg chickens), and if productive bird species can be used this has the side effect of producing delicious chicken (vs surface water/aquifer pollution, soil degradation which necessitates fertilizers, and a proliferation of plastic "keep children and pets off this lawn for X hours" signs). People's instinct to protect themselves from disease-carrying pest species is a good one. The solutions handed to them by the post-war chemical industry are not. Who coulda thunk that redirecting all our WWII chemical weapons output to fighting nature wasn't such a good idea after all? [1] ▶ this video

>the high nutrient requirements needed to grow the biochar We seem to have forgotten that natural forests are incredibly productive, and don't need artificial fertilizer. So we have a proof-of-concept. How do they do it, and how can we emulate those processes? Spoiler alert: soil (along with the root action of plants) is essentially a flat biological nanomachine that breaks down solid rock and fixes nitrogen, manufacturing fertilizer in-situ . ▶ this video Of course the logical way to do this is not to create some vast new land use category ("carbon forests" or similar), but to transition our largest current land use category -- agriculture -- from a carbon-releasing to a carbon-sequestering mode. It also helps to increase biomass per hectare in suburbs, by transitioning our current low-carbon-density lawns over to a biome that buffers substantial amounts of carbon. This is the fundamental insight behind Permaculture btw, which has been working on figuring out exactly what this looks like. It's a hard problem yes, but one with existential importance for humanity. >Biochar is basically coal, which could be burned and converted into CO2 again. ...so don't do that. :) It's it obvious that burning coal also needs to stop for effective climate mitigation? In this application, density matters. Biochar is extremely low density, and high in surface area, which makes it an ideal soil amendment which buffers rainwater and provides microbial habitat (not to mention raw carbon for building in

You can convert the trees to biochar, then a large percentage won't decompose. You don't need to fertilize trees because they get their nutrients from microbial life[0], which is increased by fertilization with biochar. [0] elane ingham, food web talk - ▶ this video

>a piece of kit they use once or twice and then discard You're not thinking big enough. Microscopes aren't just a teaching tool, they're a powerful tool for observation of the world. One example is soil microbiology identification, which can be learned in a couple days and used to guide rehabilitation of degraded agricultural soils.[1] A microscope can reveal pathogens in polluted water. And not to mention all the medical procedures that boil down to "prep it and look at it through a microscope." The kids of today are the scientists and technologists of tomorrow. [1] ▶ this video

>If we can incentivize people to make useful products out of all that CO2 just floating in the atmosphere, then maybe, just _maybe_, we can start fixing the mess we made. I'm sure most people are picturing factories here, but using low/appropriate tech as well is essential. Building soil and woody biomass can absorb enormous amounts of carbon. The question essentially becomes, how much biomass per hectare are we talking about? Absorbing the 350 teratonnes of human emitted carbon [1] over the 11.7 billion hectares of Earth's non-tundra land surface [2] works out to 30 tonnes of carbon per hectare. If you exclude deserts it's 42 tonnes per hectare, but the technology already exists to successfully "green" deserts. That's 30 trees per hectare, at 1 tonne per tree.[3] Or 3 kg per square meter of soil carbon, the equivalent of 25 cm of topsoil Soil carbon is stored up to 40 meters down by deep rooted plants, so in practice this isn't a problem. [4] Most of our land management is via agricultural, so agricultural reform is the only lever long enough to make a dent. Practically this means switching from soil destroying tillage to soil building cover crops, long-distance imported fertilizer to in-situ fertility produced by soil organisms[5], and ecologically unstable monocultures to resiliant polyculture and agroforestry systems. If you run the numbers trying to use factories alone the cost is astronomical. It's larger* than the world's global energy infrastructure, because thermodyn

Topsoil erosion is already a massive problem.[1] So far we've been able to mask the damage by substituting fossil fuel inputs for soil fertility, but realistically soil husbandry is the only sustainable way to grow food. Heck, many people nowadays aren't even aware that soil organisms can manufacture bio-available nutrients from local minerals and the air.[2] The dominant view of soil seems to be as an inert tank that needs to be "refilled" with imported fertility. [1] link [2] ▶ this video

Synthetic materials don't come from nothing. Following the supply chain backwards they're all[1] mined from somewhere, either as fossil fuels or minerals like potash and limestone. All the NPK fertilizers (which this system uses) come from mined materials. Far from "not harming plants or animals," this material extraction comes with huge (but externalized) ecological, social justice, and wealth concentration problems. And of course it's completely unsustainable. Now compare that to how healthy soil functions: microorganisms leach minerals directly from grains of sand/loam/clay, essentially manufacturing in-situ minerals into bioavailable form right at the root zone. Nitrogen fixation is similar, performed by leguminous plants using otherwise wasted sunlight and ISRU. ▶ this video [1] Since I know someone will bring it up, some do come from plants like soybeans. But mechanized soybean production is primarily either soil mining or (in areas with badly degraded soil) entirely supported by fossil fertilizers.

>Because the alternatives to neonicotinoids are broader-spectrum pesticides Well 'ere's yer problem! ;) You're starting off by assuming that agriculture must use pesticides to grow food. But is that really true? I submit to you that it is not. Furthermore, I submit that a food system that depends on pesticides is doomed to self-destruct (because of inevitable biogeophysical processes). Pesticides destroy the nutrient cycling microorganisms in the soil leading to infertility, erosion, and ultimately desertification. Again, soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham explains the process better than I could: ▶ this video >I don't know why you insist on being so overtly hostile You're right. My apologies, and edited.

>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential. Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: ▶ this video