Soil Health Quotes

“Soil is not just a substance, soil is the soul.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“When you live from the land, which ultimately all of us do, soil is everything. Forgetting this is at our peril.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“We live in what we perceive to be a broken land—fires ravage our western boundaries, acid rains water our failing crops, and our climate is trying to kick us out—but it is our relationship that is broken and relationships are easy to fix. They require humility, acknowledgement, openness, and shared language. Really, if they require anything of us at all, they require us to stop talking and to start listening—listening for the hope that they have stored deep within their ageless marrow, deep below the punishing reach of the plow and the spade, deep below the place where technology’s roots can reach, but shallow enough for photosynthetic processes to penetrate. Yes, grass can do that.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To be means to be useful; to have means to profit at the expense of use. Profit and use, control and relationship.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To move conservation forward—to move toward ethics and regeneration and holism—we must first learn to see so that we can learn how to speak so that we can learn how to know better.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Without this [Soil Food Web system of bacteria, fungi etc], most important nutrients would drain from soil. Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life.

Here is the gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...]

Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...]

The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...]

The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Few realize that a great deal of the energy that results from photosyntheisis in the leaves is actually used by plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These secretions are known as exudates. [...]

Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates (including sugars) and proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts and grows specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist on these exudates and the cellular material sloughed off as the plant's root tips grow. [...]

During different times of the growing season, populations of rhizosphere bacteria and fungi wax and wane, depending on the nutrient needs of the plant and the exudates it produces. [...]

Plants produce exudates that attract fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants since they evolved. Soil life produces the nutrients needed for plant life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle by producing exudates.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“If you really want to be a good gardener, you need to understand what is going on in your soil.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Some of the most clear-cut examples of desertification are those that have occurred on farmland because the resulting declines in crop yield are relatively straightforward to monitor. Fields on which just a single crop is grown year after year, so-called ‘monocultures’, will slowly become degraded, as studies on cropland in the semi-arid Pampas of Argentina have shown. The long-term cultivation of millet has affected both the chemical and physical properties of soils. The depletion of nutrients means that larger amounts of fertilizers have to be applied to maintain crop yields, while declines in organic matter and soil stability have meant a greater susceptibility to erosion.”
― Nick Middleton, Deserts: A Very Short Introduction

“Without the herbivore, grass is without value. Without the valuable cover of grass, the soil is without life. Without life, the terrestrial world becomes valueless and simply unhappy. The uniform diversity of the meadowland demonstrates that value co-creates the valuable via the tool of time. Time and value. Seeing and being. Grass is nothing at all. The community of grass is all.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Dark Cloud Country: The 4 Relationships of Regeneration

“Because when we have a system in which wealth depends on processes that destroy natural capital, we're only kidding ourselves.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth