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

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Calcium, Potassium, Iron and Vitamin C with Dr. Robert Thompson

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Mineral Balancing with Jon Sasmor