Nobody likes being corrected by their mother — even less so when it’s mother nature raining on your parade — but sometimes you have to let the old birds have their say. Today we have one such suggestion from the trees themselves, with all credit to the late, great, and immensely wise Michael Phillips.
Enjoy!
The Root of All Life
It was late spring, close enough to the swampy pits of a Virginian summer that my t-shirt clung to my chest as a steady drip fell off my nose tip and into the tilled mulch below as I shoveled rocky clay for a trio of potted English Lavender plants which waited politely on the sidewalk beside me.
“You’ll need to add fertilizer too,” said my mother while standing in the middle of my son’s developing chalk mandala. “That dirt isn’t good anymore.”
I made a noncommittal grunt, my preferred rebuttal to most of her suggestions. There had been a long running battle between us which I perceived this to be an extension of — a silent conflict, as is often the case with mothers — with her continually reminding me that I really needed to apply Roundup™ to the dandelions menacing my backyard where my children walked barefoot.
But I swallowed a particularly deep and unqualified anger towards this suggestion. Completely unjustified since she was really just trying to help, but there was something so repulsive to the idea that dirt could be qualified as having ‘lost its goodness’ — implying that the very foundations of the earth were somehow rapidly expiring beneath our feet. Intuitively it made no sense: there are ancient forests, jungles, and plains across the world which have persisted for millennia without a single fertilizer truck pitching a load onto it before being spread about tree bases by a team of illegal migrants.
I moved on though. Planted the lavender and didn’t bother with any fertilizer or amendments. The plants grew until they got burned back by a summer heatwave, but then returned and doubled in size by October. They doubled again the following spring and grew gorgeous violet tipped branches that bobbed with the weight of visiting bumble-bees. I logged it as an incalculably small victory over my mother’s well-meaning nagging, but her words still haunted me.
“That dirt isn’t good anymore.”
Who will Feed the Trees?
It may sound like I’m picking on my poor mother here, but I promise you that I’m not. There is a popular conception at play which she was only unwittingly carrying forward — the assumption that dirt has a limited ‘goodness’ after which it must be supplemented with NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) fertilizer either in perpetuity or until the land must be abandoned for a few decades so nature can ‘take care of it’.
For as far back as anyone alive today can recall this has been the orthodox view of land management. Thanks to modern scientific analysis we understand that plants require minerals to survive, so it stands to reason that every plant is consuming all the precious minerals in the ground it rests upon and is locked in a life or death territorial struggle with its rivals for the limited nutrients available on any patch of soil.
The problem is that this is a very mammalian understanding of resource scarcity which we impose on the plants we depend on at our own peril. All life on earth is dependent on the thriving of the photosynthesizers, and with modern technology, energy use, and the sheer quantity of people, the vast majority of the earth’s surface is now under human stewardship, which means the wisdom of man to manage his garden is more crucial now than ever.
While reading The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips for my own research on this topic, I was struck by the immense amount of soil management knowledge which exists but is largely ignored by commercial agriculture and not taught by any kind of public education I’m aware of. It’s very telling how much conversation there is about topsoil runoff and the importance of planting trees, without any support for this kind of Soil 101 education.
The Terra Firma Sea
As children we’re all taught that plants absorb sunlight and conduct photosynthesis to convert it into usable sugars — and that’s about it. Our mammalian brains hear this and intuit that the plants eat what they catch (that’s what we do after all) but the reality is that plants often consume less than half what they photosynthesize; the rest of this energy is pushed down into the root system and released in a slurry of organic carbon compounds (simple sugars, organic acids, and amino acids) called exudate which feeds the surrounding soil ecology.
This broader soil ecology is composed of an overwhelming variety of bacteria, fungi, mites, nematodes, protozoa which can quickly make one’s eyes glaze over. The long and short of it is that bacteria and fungi which consume root exudate and decomposing matter form a base ‘grazable’ layer, beyond which everyone is just eating everyone else. The trees of course are not feeding this community exudate out of charity, the herded bacteria are consumed by the roots, and mycorrhizal fungi play a starring role by bonding directly to the roots before expanding far and wide to both draw nutrients from deeper than roots can typically reach and by building fungal networks across which materials can be exchanged. These fungi also produce gromalin, a spongy protein that coats fungal hyphae (branching arms) but gradually sloughs off into the soil over time, creating a loose but clingy soil which is both invulnerable to erosion and allows air, water, and new roots to easily pass through.
Perhaps this seems trivial at a glance, but it completely upends the ‘consumption’ view of soil as a finite resource and instead suggests we view soil as an ocean of inert dirt (particles of sand, silt, and clay) that is only as bountiful as the ecology swimming within it. And while ocean ecology has water as a medium which sunlight may pass through with minimal loss for two hundred meters, subterranean life swims in light impenetrable dirt. The sun’s energy can only reach this terrestrial ocean via photosynthesizers pushing carbon down into that pitch-black ocean as exudate or decaying matter.
This upends the oppositional view we’re taught to feel towards most plants — the idea we need to hunt down and kill all the world’s unwanted sprouts in the misguided belief they are somehow robbing the soil of richness. The opposite is true. That tall thistle weed hiding from your mower in a fence alcove is absorbing energy and feeding it into your soil biome in communion at some level with all surrounding plants. Should you rip it out and expose a bare patch of earth, light will at best bounce inertly off and at worst burn the exposed biome into a lifeless patch that will need to be recolonized.
And while there is an element of competition between plants in terms of reaching for sunlight and direct root crowding, there exists between them a level of symbiosis which is completely alien to us. Minerals can be requested and exchanged across subterranean fungal networks, hormones shared directing growth, and the thriving of a plant today provides a steady flow of root exudate to support the entire surrounding soil ecology. And throughout all of this, branches are being grown far above Terra Firma, an incredible feast of carbon that will inevitably fall and make the next generation richer than today’s. There is a scientific validity to the folk wisdom of considering a forest as a single mighty gestalt organism, with trees as master symbiotes.
A Shepherd Raising Sheep as Wolves
The challenge is that while humanity possesses this knowledge it is not broadly distributed, and the existing agricultural system has been built for decades on the “plant as mammal” mindset of vast monocultures that are superbly convenient for mechanized harvesting and distribution logistics, but take no account of the soil ecology. Fields are often left bare for long periods, creating blasted out lakes of dirt, only to be mass planted with a monoculture that is provided with NPK fertilizer to make up for the lack of soil ecology to nourish the plants.
This results in the self reinforcing loop we all see:
Without flourishing fungal and bacterial networks, plants absorb less nutrients
Deficient plants experience disease and both greater attraction and vulnerability to pests (plants with deficient soil biome actually overflow with simple sugars they can’t use, which smells like bacon on the griddle to many insects)
Farmers use ever more powerful fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides — slaughtering the mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria and further impoverishing the soil ecology
And while I love our green friends, it is the human cost of this which terrifies me. According to a study by Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin, the average commercially available vegetable today is 40% less mineral rich than its equivalent 50 years ago. If historical data went back another 100 years I’m certain an even greater disparity would be provable. Combined with underripe harvesting practices (and ripening in transit via concentrated nitrogen exposure), today’s monocultured fruit is closer to eating a sugary water balloon than the deeply nourishing produce which our ancestors enjoyed.
As a final concern, regardless of how well you scrub that apple when you get home, you will almost certainly be eating some of those everything-cides. This can directly damage your own gut biome, and it’s worth considering whether the recent rise in neurological and neurodegenerative disorders is in some inscrutable way related to the fact we’ve been coating our crops with neurotoxins for the past several decades. To think there would be no effect would be an odd form of human exceptionalism.
Also as a side note, I suspect this total dysfunction in plant management is a strong component in the popularity and health benefits of people going on ketogenic or carnivorous diets — just a guess.
An Invitation to Symbiosis
All of this is to say that soil ecology is very important. It is why terrestrial food even exists. It is why any of us exist. We have to recognize that we are at the very tail end of an energy chain that begins with the sun touching a leaf, passing through the soil biome, and then returning back into the leaves and branches we either eat directly or eat the herbivores of.
I’ve perhaps spent too much time discussing the issues with our current agricultural system, but based on these principles the solution should be as obvious as it is simple: we need to grow plants in a way that makes sense for plants. Not in maximally convenient columns of earth blasted of all life not hand-selected by humans, but rather something resembling the rich and ever shifting forest-gardens that symbiotes prefer. This is not to say there is never a place for row-cropping, only that we should be extremely cognizant of how we may be impacting the sea of life beneath our feet which sustains us.
This change will happen with or without our support, but the sooner we course correct as a civilization the less damage we will need to rebuild from in both the topsoil and human health. Much like the oil that sustains modern farming machinery, the phosphorus currently mined in great quantities to make NPK is finite and will inevitably have a production peak, following which there will be ever diminishing phosphorus harvests available at increasing costs — the cruelty of this is that the soil will only be more and more depleted by that time if current practices persist, making global-scale famine a plausible scenario.
The very foundations of the earth are rapidly expiring beneath our feet, but the cause is the man-made fertilizer ‘medicine’ based model. Perhaps it is a mistake to even refer to this as an agricultural model, because it holds equal sway over suburban yards and green urban patches as well.
But the cure is real and renewable. There is nothing magical about good soil, it is only a matter of allowing photosynthesizers to thrive and feed the soil ecology. The plants do not need saving, it is we who need to learn how to properly integrate ourselves into their symbiotic network.
Nice ideas. I've often found in my gardening experience that leaving plants to their own devices works out well most of the time. Sometimes they need a little help, but they can mostly take care of themselves.
I love the term ‘exudate’.