The miracle of soil and its challenges

Land Institute’s lead soil scientist explains why good soil is so important to the future of people

Laura van der Pol began her session at the Prairie Festival in September by posing a riddle in poetic fashion.

“What gets richer,” she asked, “the more porous it is? Is precious, yet no one wants it in their house? Is a glimpse of your future and mine?

“Look down,” she instructed her audience of several hundred at the Land Institute’s meeting site in Kansas.

Her title is a dead giveaway. She is the institute’s lead soil ecologist. She spends her time in Kansas, at the institute’s headquarters in Salina and partners with Colorado State University, her alma mater, on research projects.

Soil, she said, “is why the Land Institute exists. The plant breeders may think they’re here to work on plants, but I know a secret. You ready? We’re all here for soil.”

Although describing soil as a “miraculous substance,” van der Pol cautioned against getting the wrong impression about her work as a soil ecologist. That work is, she said, “often hot, noisy, smelly and arduous.” As for the soil samples, they are heavy, tedious to process and analyze.

Why was van der Pol drawn to the work of soils?

“Because I felt soil is one place where we, as a species, could agree is important,” she said.

Following, slightly abridged, are her remarks. If you would rather listen/watch, the 13-minute session can be found on YouTube.

“Surely, we can agree that we all need to eat, and to do that, we need fertile soils. That’s why I came to the Land Institute. I believe that perennial grains are the best idea we have so far for how to have both food and soil for generations to come. To understand why that is, it helps to understand a little bit about soils.

Soils exist on a fundamentally different timescale than we do. The soil under your feet right now is about 25,000 years old, and it is a young soil. That means it’s older than agriculture itself, which started perhaps 10 to 14,000 years ago and didn’t emerge here in a significant way until the last 2,000 years.

You could spend an entire career studying how soils develop, but here are the basics: parent material, rocks, interacting with climate, topography, and plant communities over long periods of time allow clays and organic matter to build into an emergent structure that supports and interacts with the life living in and on it. In most places, soils form slowly, less than the width of a human hair in a given year. That means over the past 25,000 years, just over four feet of soil would have formed here, under diverse perennial plant communities with their deep, long-lived roots.

But soils here run deep, in places 30 feet or more, thanks to the erosion of the Rocky Mountains over the past 55 million years and the Smoky Hills River depositing silt and clay across this region for the past 2 million years. So every time you push a shovel into the ground, you’re dipping into an ancient, rich past, one that predates people.

Every year, globally, we move twice as much soil through tillage as all the plant roots and earthworms combined. Plant roots and earthworms secrete juices — rich with enzymes and mucus, a little like our own saliva — that lubricate and liberate nutrients, helping soil stick together so it resists erosion and forming hotspots of microbial life that make nutrients available again. Tillage does the opposite: it destroys that structure and leaves soil exposed to wind and water that will take it away.

And every time we till, roughly half the carbon in that soil that was banked returns to the atmosphere within a decade, where it traps heat as carbon dioxide and methane, driving some of the most rapid climate change this planet has ever known. In this way, soil is like trust, quick to lose and slow to regain.

As Wes (Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute in 1977) so articulately pointed out earlier in this Prairie Festival, we’ve been pushing past our energetic limits with portable liquid fossil fuels only for the past 165 years or so. If we hope for civilization to last another 165 years, for agriculture to last another 10,000, we’ll have to find another way.

The question remains, not can we? I’m sure we can. But will we do so? And will we do so in time?

Here’s where I have some good news for you: soils, agriculture, climate, health — they are all connected. Improving one can improve them all. We love to eat, and the organisms that we rely on most for most of our energy work hard to turn the carbon dioxide from the air into the fruits, seeds, leaves, and roots we love to eat, and the trunks we love to build with.

Plants also feed the soil, and in some cases, deposit as much, if not more, carbon below ground as they do above it. Roots and exudates are more likely to become part of the soil than their leaves or stems. All plants do this, whether they’re annuals or perennials.

But perennials are the backbone of natural ecosystems. Look around: 96% of all plant species are perennial. They grow longer, they root deeper, and form canopies that protect the soil. And it’s under diverse perennial plant communities that carbon-rich, fertile soils develop.

There’s no reason to think we can even maintain what’s left of our soils that we have with continuous annual cultivation. We have an opportunity here to address many of our wicked challenges at once with perennial grains. That’s what brings me to the Land Institute. I study perennial grain crops compared to the annuals we currently rely on, and also to natural ecosystems.

And there’s good news on that front. Perennials help build soil, increase soil carbon, and improved structure that governs water holding capacity and infiltration. They withstand drought better, making them more likely to survive our changing climate and keep feeding us and the soil through harsh conditions. And because they don’t need replanting every year, they often suppress weeds once they’re established, and they require far less fuel and labor than annuals.

Shifting from annual to perennial cultivation means more living roots in the ground, more carbon pulled from the air, and soil and atmosphere improving together.

You’ve probably heard Joni Mitchell’s line from Big Yellow Taxi: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” We feel the truth of this in our bones. It’s such an ancient story, but is it our fate? This is our challenge in this moment. No organism on Earth has ever before consumed resources at the rate and scale that we do. No organism has ever before had to evolve the ability to solve problems that build gradually across generations, across entire civilizations, and on a global scale, like climate change, soil degradation, and water scarcity.

This moment calls us to value the future as much as the present, something none of us are likely inherently good at. This moment calls us to act as if the future matters, not just for our children but for generations after them. How do we do what no organism has ever before had to do: impose limits on ourselves? We have to believe it’s possible to live in a different way. We have to be courageous enough to believe that what we do matters, that it can make a difference. I’m here, digging holes, sieving soils, picking out roots. It’s slow, tedious work, but I believe it will make a difference.

What can you do? I believe you being here makes a difference. The energy and spirit of everyone I’ve encountered here fills me with a deep gratitude and joy, and I believe this feeling can be shared with others, that it draws on something deep within us that maybe we’ve had since before we were even human, the ability to connect and act together to care for those we love. What would happen if we could each inspire others with this feeling that what we do matters, that ifwe can make a difference out of love for those here now, and for love for those who may grow if given fertile ground?

Soils are built incredibly slowly. Carbon is pulled from the atmosphere atom by atom through plant stomata. But every act, no matter how small, adds up. Given enough of us, given enough time, that is how we arrived in this situation in the first place. Lots of tiny actions adding up to global change, though, over an astonishingly short period.

Here we stand on some of the most fertile soil in the world, a gift by countless microbes and plants, wind and water across thousands of years. We won’t be able to rebuild and protect our soils by ourselves, and it might not happen in our lifetime. But each of us can do our part in this moment.

When my daughter was nursing, I was struck by how every atom of her body, save some of the oxygen, first passed through mine. There she was, her own person, made out of what had once been part of me. In the same way, we are all children of the soil and its plant stewards. I want to encourage you to explore and cherish the soils who nourish you, to honor them as you might a loving relative, to honor them with perennial plants. Keep them covered, disturb them as little as possible. If we do this, these soils may nourish us for generations we will never meet.

And what if we could all do this? What if we could encourage others to do the same? We are of this earth. To quote former Land Institute President Fred Iutzi, “We were born for this. We were born for this. We were born for this.”