The Soil Food Web with Dr. Elaine Ingham
Dr. Elaine has advanced our knowledge about the soil food web for over 4 decades. Widely recognized as the world’s foremost soil biologist, she’s passionate about empowering ordinary people to bring the soils in their community back to life. Dr. Elaine’s™ Soil Food Web Approach has been used to successfully restore the ecological functions of soils on six continents. The courses offered by Dr. Elaine’s™ Soil Food Web School have been designed for people with no relevant experience – making them accessible to individuals who wish to retrain and to begin a meaningful and impactful career in an area that will help to secure the survival of humans and other species.
In our final episode of Remineralize & Heal Your Gut series Dr. Elaine explains the revolutionary potential of restoring the world’s farming topsoil.
Here are the highlights:
The nutrition of a plant is dependent upon the health of the soil
Dirt is lifeless substrate. And soil is dirt filled with life by bacteria, fungi, protozoa, micro-anthropods and earthworms
Aerobic soil conditions provide for healthy plants
Plants produce “exudates” that signal to bacteria and fungi to get specific nutrients for them
These bacteria and fungi mine minerals from stone, silt, clay and organic matter to then deliver them to plants
40% of the carbon plants pull from the air got into the exudates that get fixed by these microbes
The biggest disruption to the carbon cycle isn’t the carbon being put into the atmosphere by hydrocarbon combustion,
it’s the death of the microbes in the soil that fix the carbon.
Industry agriculture through tilling and chemicals, have decimated the soil microbiome predominately in the first 3 inches
If our current farming methods don’t change, we have 60 years left of topsoil.
However if our farming topsoil was restored, in less than 15 years we could completely balance the carbon cycle
All the minerals we need for optimal nutrition exist in the soil but the microbes required to make them available are low or non-existent
Restoring the soil microbes also captures water and in many cases can eliminate irrigation
Dr. Elaine’s consultants have converted most conventional farms into regenerative farms in half a season and gotten yields up to 1000% more
For more info on Dr. Elaine go to https://www.soilfoodweb.com/ or her Youtube channel @soilfoodwebschool
To sign up for our Remineralize & Heal Your Gut Summit go here