Regenerative Agriculture: Farming with Benefits. Profitable Farms. Healthy Food. Greener Planet. Foreword by Nicolette Hahn Niman.

By Marianne Landzettel

Fires, floods, hurricanes, drought and extended periods of heat - extreme, 'once in a lifetime' weather events now happen frequently and over prolonged periods. 'There is no normal anymore, all we have is abnormal,' says Cynthia Daley, professor with the College of Agriculture at CSU, Chico. 'Maybe we have ten years to turn this around. We need

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Kunz
• Release date: Jan 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9783922845539

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Here in the United States, many farmers and ranchers have long been skeptical of climate change. In 2015, after I gave a talk in Missouri about sustainable livestock farming, a farmer in his sixties approached me and said he really enjoyed my speech. But, he followed up, Why do you talk about global warming like it’s real? It was a jarring moment. As a person trained in biology and law, I have always tried to seek knowledge and truth, looking hard at credible, empirical scientific evidence. At that moment I was face-to-face with the reality there were people in rural America whose views on climate change were fixed, and they were doubters. Many were listening to elected officials and news sources who were repeatedly suggesting this was fake news. And in their own lives, they were not seeing evidence of a dramatically changing climate.

I believe that’s changed over the past several years. Coastal parts of the United States have seen a dramatic rise in the number and severity of hurricanes. The Western U.S. has been experiencing longer and more extreme wildfire seasons. Even the center of the country – The Heartland – has been experiencing newly extreme storms and flooding. Facebook has been filled with pictures of Biblical flooding in Nebraska and wind twisted silos and barn roofs in Iowa. The physical evidence of climate events directly affecting rural America has jostled loose the once unshakable view that climate change was merely a hoax. As the extreme weather that caused flooding in the Midwest [in 2019] dovetailed with the scientific warnings, climate change and its impact on agriculture started to get more attention—including among farmers, lawmakers and farm groups that have been reluctant to connect the dots, Inside Climate News reported.

At the same time, an idea has been taking hold in mainstream agriculture. That idea is regenerative farming. American farms and ranches have struggled financially for decades. A growing number have been moving away from the once-ubiquitous mindset that agricultural chemicals are the solution. More are turning, instead, toward farming that focuses on soil health, and seeks to minimize chemical inputs. This doesn’t get a lot of mainstream media attention. But I have seen the signs everywhere. I hear it when I speak directly with people in agriculture. I see it in social media conversations among farmers. A university professor friend of mine who writes and consults about regenerative farming told me his conference talks – once attended by handfuls – are now crowded with hundreds of farmers eager to learn of a different, better way. This is not the hippie farmers of the sixties; it’s mainstream agriculture.

But this movement is not being led by academics or government, at least not in the United States. It’s being led by farmers. A couple of years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of spending time with one of the heroes of this burgeoning movement, Gabe Brown. In his book Dirt to Soil, Gabe describes his own journey from conventional North Dakota crop farmer to the architect of an ecologically complex, highly diverse, regenerative farm. As I sat next to Gabe at the authors’ table in Kentucky, a long line of farmers waited patiently to buy his book and get his signature. Gabe would not call himself an expert of sustainable farming. But he is inspiring thousands with his example. He has shown, through experimentation and creativity on his own farm, the way to make an ecologically vibrant and financially viable farm. One that produces delicious, nutrient rich food. His example is a beacon of hope for farmers around the country, and even in other parts of the world. Getting to know Gabe and other farmers who are showing the way forward for regenerative farming has given me great hope for the future.

I am delighted Marianne Landzettel has written this book, sharing the stories and examples of regenerative farmers and farms. We need regenerative agriculture to address the urgent (and related) ecological problems of climate change, soil erosion, water scarcity, drought and desertification. And we need it just as much to address the health crisis of diet related chronic diseases. By telling the stories of regenerative farmers and ranchers, Marianne shows us what is possible. Farmers and consumers, together, can forge a new and much better future for farming, food production and human health.

Nicolette Hahn Niman

Rancher, Lawyer, Author, Mother.

Bolinas, California

October, 2020

Apocalypse Now and what to do about it

Lunch time in Chico on 8th November, the day the Camp Fire broke out

Chico is a small university town in northern California. Cynthia Daley teaches there and is the director of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative. We had come to California at the end of a long research trip that had us travelling through Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado. It was the second week of November, and Cynthia Daley had agreed to meet us just south of Chico on the university’s research farm. But then things changed, and they did so rather fast. In the early hours of that day the ‘Camp Fire’ broke out. While the small town of Paradise burnt to the ground, people fled for their lives and the flames spread, Chico grew dark and cold under the clouds of smoke that fanned out as far as the Pacific. In Chico, just over ten miles to the west of where the fires raged, ash particles silently floated to the ground like snowflakes. Watching TV news and the continuously updated maps, we began to understand the scale and extent of the fire. We stood outside, looking at the red glow on the eastern horizon under an otherwise dark sky. It felt as if nature was posting some final climate change warning: in November, the rainy season should have been in full swing, there should have been no fires, California should have been green. But since the 1970s, climate change has led to the fire season being prolonged by more than 80 days.

The morning of 8th November, just west of Chico

Climate change is creating a flood of negative headlines on a daily basis. But amidst the gloom and doom there is one bit of seriously good news: regenerative agriculture¹ can sequester carbon in the soil and thereby reduce the CO2 concentration in the air. We know what regenerative agricultural practices are, and they are available to be employed immediately. While not every practice is suitable for all farms, every farmer will find some regenerative practices that will be right for his or her land. Farmers who work with regenerative agriculture not only help to mitigate climate change but can potentially contribute to actually cooling the planet. And carbon rich ‘good’ soil can also hold more water, which helps farmers to cope better with drought conditions, preventing run-off, and in some areas, protecting low-lying towns and cities from flooding.

Why is this book mostly about regenerative agriculture in the United States of America? In Europe, agriculture has evolved over thousands of years. Agriculture is not just a function of geography, soil type and climate, it’s also shaped by regional traditions, history, politics and policies. Agriculture in the Netherlands and northern Germany differ even though geographical and climatic conditions are very similar. Agriculture in east Germany is different from that in west Germany because the large communist farming cooperatives that were created in the GDR lent themselves to industrial farming practices after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Such variations in conditions and differences in development can obscure the view. In the US climatic and geographic conditions are much more homogenous: from the east of Kansas to the west it’s about as far as from Hamburg to Munich, or from London to the north of Scotland but while landscape and agriculture will change continuously as you drive through Germany or from the south of England to the north of Scotland you will see fields of corn, soy, sorghum and wheat just about everywhere in Kansas. Only the number of center pivot irrigation systems will increase the further west you are; average rainfall in eastern Kansas is considerably higher than in the west.

And large parts of the United States have only been farmed for about 150 years. In some regions, agriculture even has a start date: May 20th 1862, the day President Abraham Lincoln signed the ‘Homestead Act’. The bill allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of land. A settler could become official owner of a piece of land after five years if he could prove that he had continuously lived on it and farmed it. For many new immigrants, the ‘Homestead Act’ seemed like a golden opportunity. Settlers streamed to the more remote parts of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and plowed up the prairies.

The third reason to look towards the USA is the fact that everything there is simply bigger – including the problems. The consequences of climate change can be seen the world over, but in the US they are now impossible to overlook. Drought, flooding, and blizzards, weather events that year after year break all records for highest or lowest temperatures ever measured. Farmers in the US don’t just see the effects of climate change on their farms, they are forced to deal with them and find solutions.

In February of 2019 NASA scientists announced that in 2018 the average surface temperature on Earth had been the fourth highest on record. Newspapers and electronic media outlets illustrated the news with graphs and maps showing much of the globe in hues of yellow to red.

There is no other news today

Today, nature writes headlines: forest fires, floods, and hurricanes cannot be ignored.

We know that time is running out to stop the atmosphere from heating up even more. That means cutting Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, with reducing the use of fossil fuels top of the list. The manufacturing industry, the transport sector, and construction are responsible for most of the emissions. But industrial agriculture plays a major role, too: through direct emissions from raising livestock in confinement, to agricultural practices such as plowing, and indirectly through the use of agrichemicals, to name but a few of the elements.

A lot of technical fixes are being bandied about, from huge plants ‘cleaning’ the atmosphere to spraying tiny sulfate particulates into the lower stratosphere. These are solutions that would cost billions and are nowhere near ready to be rolled out on a scale that would have any effect.

So, is it ‘solution found, agriculture to the rescue’? That is pretty much the idea behind the ‘4 per 1,000’ initiative which was founded in France at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference under the auspices of the then French Minister of Agriculture, Stéphane Le Foll: ‘An annual growth rate of 0.4% in the soil carbon stocks, or 4‰ per year, would halt the increase in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere related to human activities,’ states the initiative’s website². And: ‘The 4 per 1,000 initiative shows that agriculture can provide some practical solutions to the challenge posed by climate changes, while at the same time highlighting the challenge of food security through the implementation of agricultural practices adapted to local conditions such as: agroecology, agroforestry, conservation, agriculture, landscape management....’ Several governments signed up: the Germans, the Spanish, and, in 2018, the Vietnamese, as did universities and other research bodies from around the globe. Numerous studies are being conducted, and the conferences and meetings continue. The international connections that are being forged no doubt help the flow of information on a scientific as well as a practical level. What hasn’t happened (yet) is a government coming forward with a practical plan that puts money behind the idea of carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture, and with proposals on how to remunerate farmers for this service.

With the Soil Health initiative, California has taken a tentative first step which will be described in the last chapter of this book.

New ideas are emerging and gaining momentum. In February, a blueprint for a Green New Deal³ was published, ‘urging a ‘10-year national mobilization’ for a speedy shift away from fossil fuels and calling for national health care coverage and job guarantees in a sweeping bid to remake the U.S. economy’. The scope is broad and the time frame ambitious, given the glacial pace at which such political processes move.

The European Green Deal is the roadmap set out by the European Commission with the aim of making the countries in the EU climate neutral by 2050.

Politicians in Britain, too, are under pressure to act. At the end of April 2019 tens of thousands of people in London and other British cities came out every day for a whole week to protest. Their demand was for politicians to declare a climate and ecological emergency and GHG emissions to be reduced to zero by 2025. These goals may not be achievable, but one thing is clear: a sizable number of people have understood what is at stake and are demanding action. Many of the protesters are young. The ‘School strike for climate’, initiated by the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, has developed into a global ‘Fridays for Future’ movement which has students staying away from school and demonstrating instead. Politicians in Europe are taking note. Whether they will take action remains to be seen.

What we can do…

‘We’ve got maybe ten years to fix this,’ said Cynthia Daley, when we talked at the university farm the day after the ‘Camp fire’ started. With that time frame, hoping for political solutions may not be an option. But it could lead to a completely different approach: a change of perspective.

What if we focused on farm profitability with carbon sequestration as a welcome and highly beneficial side effect?

Noon the next day at the Chico University Farm

Here’s how I believe different and seemingly independent developments may align to make this an option. Industrial farming is in deep crisis. Farm net income in the US is at its lowest level in 15 years. Commodity prices are falling while input costs, in particular for seeds, herbicides and fertilizer, are rising. Farmers are dealing with increasing herbicide resistance in weeds for which, this time, the agrochemical industry does not seem to have another poison fix to offer. There is no hint of news that a new herbicide might become available soon; what the industry is offering is new combinations of already available herbicides which may be efficient for a short while. However, in June 2018, scientists in Missouri confirmed the first case of a waterhemp plant that had developed resistance to six different herbicides⁴. And of course, the herbicide combinations can only be applied on soy and corn plants that have been genetically engineered to withstand them. Developing them doesn’t come cheap, which again increases input costs for farmers.

Then there are the consumers who remain wary of GMOs and are becoming more alert to possible links between pesticide use and human health. Demand for organic food, not just in the US but worldwide, is increasing. Consumers are also starting to ask questions about the use of antibiotics and growth hormones in milk and meat production, animal welfare standards, and the impact of industrial farming practices on the environment. People with such concerns are still a minority, but it’s a vocal minority and a younger demographic. In 2020, people who normally wouldn’t take much interest are considering such issues too – in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, perspectives change: food, where it comes from, and how it is produced has become an important and urgent topic.

As a commodity farmer or meat or dairy producer, you can of course try to produce more in order to survive. And you can hope for better prices, and for the agrochemical industry to come up with some magical fix to fight the weeds, increase the milk yield, or make your beef cattle pile on the pounds with less feed. And as a last resort, there is always the farm bill and crop insurance. Or you do what so many farmers were forced to do during the last US farming crisis in the 1980s: you sell the farm or lease the land to your neighbors and move away in search of work.

But there are farmers in the US who take a radically different approach: they work on ways to reduce their input costs and achieve a better margin. And that’s where healthy soil comes into the equation. Carbon-rich soil teeming with soil life, from earthworms to microbes and fungi, will be so fertile that no or very little chemical fertilizer is needed. These farmers will use whatever regenerative agricultural practice they can in order to get their soil into optimal condition. They do so because it makes their farm (more) profitable. As a side effect, the carbon rich soil they are creating benefits the environment by reducing the CO2 level in the atmosphere.

It’s called farming with nature. To farm this way makes sense. It’s a win-win situation. So why is everyone not doing it? Because it’s difficult and farmers who try are on their own. Literally. There may be no other farmer in the same or even the next county who works with regenerative agricultural practices. Soil, climate, elevation, average rainfall – all these factors will likely vary. Each farmer will face unique problems and will have to find his or her own solutions. And the problems don’t stop at the farm gate – there is market access, infrastructure, sourcing seeds, tools, and machinery – how to deal with each of these issues is for the individual farmer to work out. It takes real resolve to do all that in a rural community under scrutiny from the conventionally farming neighbors, those who are likely to discuss every mishap and failure at length in the coffee shop.

This book attempts to make the case that regenerative agriculture can help farms to become and stay profitable while delivering climate benefits as an advantageous ‘side effect’. And the following chapters will look into what we can do to help and support farmers. We all eat food several times a day, and with the food, we buy and the meals we cook we make choices: we can either support organic and regenerative farmers or food conglomerates and the agrochemical industry.

Regenerative agriculture isn’t one thing. What practices a farmer can employ, what works, what might work and what probably won’t work depends on a huge number of factors, including climate, longitude and latitude, elevation, and the farm’s history – improvements may be much slower on very degraded soils that have been intensively farmed for a long time.

With that in mind, the research for this book turned into a number of road trips, with my husband, Martin, doing most of the driving and taking pictures on the farms while I kept asking yet more questions.

We started out in Hawai’i to see the sites not featured in any travel guide. Agrochemical companies operate their test sites away from palm-fringed beaches and fancy hotels. These test plots are essential for the development and maintenance of parent lines for hybrid and genetically engineered seed varieties and involve the use of extraordinary amounts of herbicides and pesticides. Hawai’i is like ground zero for anyone wanting to observe the effects of excessive, long-term use of agrochemicals on soil, water, and air quality.

The Hawaiian Islands are rather small, with steady trade winds. Since the agrochemical companies came to Hawai’i in the 1990s many communities are being exposed to drift and pesticide-laden dust. While it may not be possible to directly link exposure to health problems occurring at some later date, it is possible to say that health professionals see some diseases – like asthma, skin problems, and rare cancers – at a significantly higher than average rate. Hawaiians⁵ have fought hard for legislative change, and in 2018 regulations were passed that give better protection to schools and allow better access to information. The anti-pesticide campaign also revived interest in the ancient Hawaiian farming system that provided food at a time when importing perishable goods was not an option. Today, about 80% of food is shipped from the US mainland. But more Hawaiians are growing their own food, and some run successful, profitable farms while training and educating a new generation of young farmers.

Regenerative agriculture gathers traction, not just in Nebraska

Our next trip took us to the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, and an organic grain farm in upstate New York. At Rodale, a long-running comparative field trial has established the benefits of organic and regenerative agricultural practices for the soil. The techniques are put to the test on an organic grain farm in northern New York. ‘Every field tells a story,’ says Klaas Martens, who runs the farm. Keen observation and adjusting farming methods accordingly has a lot to do with the commercial success of the farm. The organic feed and seed business operated by his wife, Mary Howell, is another element.

Before settlers turned the Midwest and the High Plains into the agricultural ‘heartland’, most of the region was covered by native prairie grasses. Wet grass prairies in Iowa, tall grass prairies as far to the east as Ohio, short grass prairies as far to the west as Colorado and Texas in the south. Since these prairies were plowed into farmland a lot of topsoil has been degraded or lost altogether. Some farmers are trying to stem the tide. They use regenerative agricultural practices to rebuild their soils and their businesses.

In fall of 2018, we drove through Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas to visit some of these farmers. Rainfall – or the lack of it – proved to be a decisive factor: regenerative farming is different in a dry area; a higher average rainfall gives farmers a lot more options. But all the farmers and ranchers we visited ran diverse and profitable businesses: from cattle raised on short grass and mixed grass prairies to growing wheat, corn and soy. Some of the farmers work with cover crops, produce seeds for other growers, and run a seed business. They market directly or through a cooperative, they sell online – through brokers or through an auction. They produce to fulfill individual contracts or do their own processing. All of them assess and evaluate their options and look for new ones: they think about branding, adding more value on the farm, diversifying, scaling down, and stacking businesses. And they see themselves as part of a regenerative farming community. Each farmer has to take decisions that work under the particular circumstances of their farm, but they are eager to share their experiences, their failures as well as their successes. What works on one farm may not work on the next, but it might spark an idea that eventually leads to a solution. ‘Diversity’ was a term that came up in every conversation and in different contexts – from biodiversity to diversity of farm animals, from companion cropping to ‘crazy fields’, from diverse farm businesses to diversification in marketing.

The last leg of our trip brought us to California. Farmers in the Central Valley produce the majority of all fruit and vegetables consumed in the US. Nuts are another important high value crop – walnuts, pistachios and almonds; 80% to 90% of the world’s almonds come from California. The state has extremely fertile agricultural land, but its southern part in particular has experienced long periods of drought. The most recent one lasted six years – from 2011 to the winter of 2017/18.

Fruit and nut growers are particularly hard hit by climate change. The winter months are not as cold anymore, and are interspersed with warm periods, meaning trees don’t go into dormancy, the rest period they need to stay healthy and productive. We visited a walnut grower who is developing new ways of farming and improving soil health to keep his orchards profitable and in production.

The northern part of the Central Valley is well known for its rice farms. The Lundberg Family Farm is the largest organic rice producer in the US, with its own lab and nursery. How to grow organic rice successfully and profitably is something the Lundbergs had to work out for themselves, including breeding new rice varieties that are suitable for the local climate, as California differs from most other rice-growing areas.

We met Bryce Lundberg on a beautiful and warm day in early November. It was nearly the end of our trip. We took our time driving back to Chico, stopping to watch the huge flocks of migratory birds settling on the wetlands at dusk. The next morning, the ‘Camp Fire’ started. With roads blocked and traffic around Chico at a standstill, the meeting with Cynthia Daley at the CSU Chico Farm was postponed till the following day. By then our conversation took on a sense of urgency, heightened by the surreal but literal experience of ‘darkness at noon’.

There is no escaping the fact that ‘nature’ is a finely balanced system. Humans are part of it and everything we do has consequences within this system, good and bad, intended and unintended. Improving soil health might be one of the rare win-win moves we can make. Regenerative farming practices can be employed with the intention of maintaining or increasing farm profitability while having a beneficial effect on the climate and the environment, too.

The connection between regenerative agriculture, soil quality, environment, climate and profitability is not just important for farmers, it matters for all of us. If we understand the system, if we know how our food is produced, and if we actively support regenerative farmers, we can mitigate climate change a tiny bit with every bite we eat. ‘Eating is a political act’⁶, said journalist and author Michael Pollan in a discussion about his book ‘An omnivore’s dilemma’. With regenerative agriculture, we can turn eating into an act of environmental protection and an active contribution to climate change mitigation.

This book is about flipping the perspective and farming with benefits: for profitable farms, healthy food and a greener planet.

Initially I intended to write this book only in my native tongue, German. But the weeks and months spent writing took me back to the US, the farms we visited, the conversations we had, and I thought: I owe it to the farmers to tell their stories in English, too. I started translating and rewriting the German version in the fall of 2019. Just a few weeks in the devastating wildfires in Australia broke out. The story long since has been a global one. The struggle of regenerative agriculture, keeping the farm profitable and dealing with the challenges of the climate crisis concerns us all.

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1 Regenerative agriculture is not a standardised term but rather a collection of practices. Certified organic agriculture can be a form of regenerative agriculture but there are exemptions. For this book I am using the term as defined by the NGO Carbon Underground: Regenerative Agriculture is a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density. Regenerative agriculture improves soil health, primarily through the practices that increase soil organic matter. This not only aids in the increase of soil biota diversity and health, but increases biodiversity both above and below the soil surface, while at the same time raising both water-holding capacity and sequestering carbon at greater depths. This draws down climate-damaging levels of atmospheric CO2, and improves soil structure to reverse civilization-threatening human-caused soil loss.

https://secureservercdn.net/184.168.47.225/02f.e55.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Regen-Ag-Definition-7.27.17-1.pdf

2 https://www.4p1000.org/

3 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-resolution-1155146

4 http://wssa.net/2018/06/scientists-confirm-first-case-of-waterhemp-with-six-way-resistance/

5 Sometimes ‘Hawaiian’ is used to describe people of Polynesian heritage whose ancestors first settled on the islands. I am referring to citizens of the State of Hawaii, whatever their ethnic origin may be.

6 https://www.cornucopia.org/2008/11/michael-pollan-eating-is-a-political-act/

Good news from the underground

Earthworm heaven

‘It is so much more complex than we could ever imagine,’ says soil microbiologist Kris Nichols. ‘When I was an undergrad student, we thought we knew about ten percent of soil organisms. Today we think it’s maybe one percent.’

Nichols doesn’t really have time to talk; she’s in the middle of moving. Until recently, she was responsible for soil research at the Rodale Institute¹, but now she has decided to return to the Midwest, where she grew up. For her, soil biology is far more than an interesting research topic. Healthy soil with a functioning soil biome is the basis of life; literally, it is essential for plant growth, for healthy crops, healthy food, and the future of the planet, she says. More people need to know about these connections, and not just farmers, but anyone who eats.

Nichols is a scientist, but also a practical farm consultant and educator. She wants to work with anyone willing to engage with what turns out to be a fascinating but complex topic: nothing in nature is linear, everything is part of a cycle, a system and a network – and ‘much more complex than we could ever imagine’.

Soil biologist Dr. Kris Nichols

When Kris Nichols talks about soil biology, it’s like the visit to a planetarium, but in reverse: while astronomers use gigantic telescopes to discover new galaxies, soil biologists like Nichols peer through electronic microscopes that reveal to us the otherwise invisible world underground.

It’s a complex world with infrastructure and transport systems where pretty much everything is available – at a price in the right kind of currency. The most commonly accepted ‘payments’ are the simple sugars which only plants can produce. Through the process of photosynthesis, they are able to use sunlight in order to convert carbon dioxide and water into simple sugars. The plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and release oxygen – this is why green spaces, particularly in cities, are so important: plants clean the air.

From its leaves the plant sends some of the sugars down to its root system, where they can be ‘traded’ for pretty much everything needed for growth and more photosynthesis: water, different minerals, and trace elements like nitrate, phosphorus and potassium, but also calcium, sulfur, zinc, magnesium, iron, and copper. Some of these minerals may be within direct reach of the roots but remain inaccessible because they haven’t been ‘processed’ or are not part of a more complex molecule that the plant can utilize. And this is where soil organisms come in: bacteria and algae, fungi, worms, insects, arthropods such as millipedes, nematodes, and protozoa. All of them have a job to do. One teaspoon of soil can contain five billion bacteria, 20 million fungi and one million protozoa and algae. A functioning soil ecosystem will be densely populated. Of course, not every organism is there to contribute to photosynthesis and the wellbeing of the plants we see above ground. Each has a life of its own. It feeds, excretes, eats, and gets eaten, and thereby fulfills some function within the (soil) ecosystem. The division between a world above ground and another one below is rather arbitrary: it’s not just plants that have roots in the ground and other, mostly green parts visible, such as leaves, blades of grass, stalks, branches, and needles, above ground. Earthworms ‘import’ food by dragging rotting organic substances from the surface deep into the soil. Other soil organisms then transform this organic plant or animal material into soil organic matter (SOM), something you’ll hear a lot more about in this book. A high percentage of soil organic matter is an important numerical indicator for a well-functioning soil ecosystem. A second indicator is biodiversity: the more species there are, the more different and specialized roles they can fulfil, each contributing to the system running more smoothly and efficiently. And this isn’t just true for soil, but ecosystems in general: the biggest problems arise in monocultures. With chemical fertilizer, farmers can cover the plants’ basic nutritional needs, but monocultures also turn out to be like a land