What we all have in common
As the sun warms the rows at Joe’s Garden in Coburg and the soil temperature begins its climb from 8C towards the critical 14C marker, trillions of bacteria will go from almost dormant to dividing every few hours.
The hungry bacteria will go to work breaking down dead roots and leaves that have accumulated through the winter.
More sunlight equals more photosynthesis and the plants will begin producing sugars, much of which they’ll pump out around their roots to attract the bacteria.
The bacteria gobble up the plant sugars and attract hungry protozoa. The protozoa gobble up the bacteria and drop their nitrogen poop, which is happily taken up by the plant, which in turn grows bigger, generating more sugar to grow bigger roots and feed more bacteria, which attract more protozoa, which poop out more digested bacteria, which feeds plants and the cycle goes on.
In 1999 microbiologist Elaine Ingham turned the eyes of a generation of regenerative farmers down a microscope revealing a community she called the soil food web.
Before Ingham arrived many of us believed soils were simply a medium you put fertiliser on, which plants then sucked up through their roots.
In countless workshops, courses and field trips Elaine Ingham translated two decades of painstaking soil science research into stories that everyday people could understand and apply to their own situations.
She was fond of describing plant exudates as putting out cakes and cookies for bacteria to feed on. Ploughing a field was never the same after Elaine described the effects of too much “slicing and dicing” on delicate strands of beneficial fungal hyphae.
Her passion for compost and compost teas and the machinery to make them on a broadacre scale helped farms kick their dependence on artificial fertilisers and sprays.
In short, Elaine Ingham made the soil food web something we could never unsee.
Farmer and writer Wendell Berry’s bird’s eye view of the erosion of farming communities could not seem further away from Ingham’s insight into the microbiological underworld, but a famous Berry quote “The earth is what we all have in common.” reveals they have been telling the same story just on different scales.
Like Ingham, Wendell Berry helped us see a world that was previously unseen.
In his groundbreaking 1977 book The Unsettling of America Berry revealed how Big Agriculture was hollowing out the rural American communities around him and helped launch the sustainable farming movement.
From his cabin on a 125 acre farm in Kentucky Berry wrote dozens of books, novels and poems railing against corporates who siphoned profits away from farmers and called out the concentration of land into larger farms and fewer hands.
He wrote on paper during daylight hours refusing to use electric lights because the coal fired power was supplied by strip-mines that were eating up local rural land.
Berry decried the increase in farm debt and dependence on machines and helped people understand that there was no way to separate agriculture from culture.
He advised in his young readers slowness, stillness and the concept of “enough.”
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry died last week. Elaine Ingham died earlier this year.
Have a great week.
Chris
