Do you ever give much thought to the Earth? We walk on it, raise animals on it, build our houses on it, and depend on it for sustenance but some of us might not give it a second thought. This is an episode where we talk about why we need to. The soil is in trouble and we need to look at how we can restore its health to regenerate it and cultivate it in a way that is good for the Earth itself and for each of us. This is Episode 256 and our guest is Nicole Masters. I am so glad that you said that just because it has that label doesn’t mean that it’s been produced on a small scale. Like in whole foods. I sometimes see these berries. I’m a big berry girl. I love berries. It says organic, so I think, “That’s great,” but I know their motto crops of berries. It’s done on this huge scale. Tell me, how does that damage the soil? What’s wrong with that if it’s organic?

It’s so complex. This is a good thing coming from an ecology standpoint. It’s a whole system issue that we’re dealing with. When they go and do research, they go and look at, “Let’s look at a cow. How much methane is it emitting? Bad cow.” Instead of, “How does that work in nature? What is that system in nature?” After the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, they went in a year later to find out what was the fate of that oil. Although Masters uses scientific methods to determine her proposed course of action, she convinces the reader that the best device to determine soil health is the lowly shovel; She does not leave home without it. A shovel lets you visualize the color and the soil aggregates, smell the aroma, count the earthworms, and even discern if legumes are fixing nitrogen. Add a refractometer and determine the brix of your plants...and your weeds. Why would you care about the weeds? "Make sure you are not farming/or ranching for weeds!" If the weeds score higher than your crop, think about how you will accommodate your crop rather than your weeds.

Customer reviews

For the Love of Soil' is a land manager’s roadmap to healthy soil, revitalized food systems in challenging times. This book equips producers with knowledge, skills and insights to regenerate ecosystem health and grow farm profits. For years many of us involved in regenerative agriculture have been touting the soil health - plant health - animal health – human health connection but no one has tied them all together like Nicole does in “For the love of Soil”! " Gabe Brown, Browns Ranch, Nourished by Nature. " I think this is one of the things that we saw come out of that Monsanto case was that they’re making up data. They know the impacts that this is having on either humans, soil, microbiology, or nutrients. They know full well what’s going on and more of these documents that are coming out. I’m not a big conspiracy theorist. I hate that stuff. Unfortunately, it’s big business at play. Why would you stop the gravy train? Unfortunately, it’s people not being connected to the integrity or wanting people in landscapes to flourish. It’s just a business model.

Unintentionally, it is appealing to an urban audience to understand these are the chemicals that are being used in agriculture, this is what is in your food chain, and here’s what people are doing on the ground. To get inspired and go, “There’s a massive revolution happening now.” It’s incredibly exciting to travel the world and see the uptake of regenerative agriculture. For years many of us involved in regenerative agriculture have been touting the soil health – plant health – animal health – human health connection but no one has tied them all together like Nicole does in “For the love of Soil”! Gabe Brown, Browns Ranch, USA No, if you look and think a lot of the big agri companies are also your big pharmaceutical companies. Bayer, for instance. They are peddling the same stuff.Let’s pivot now and talk about the toxin loading of our soil. First of all, what’s going on and why should it matter to us? The case studies, science and examples presented a compelling testament to the global, rapidly growing soil health movement. “These food producers are taking actions to imitate natural systems more closely,” says Masters. “... they are rewarded with more efficient nutrient, carbon, and water cycles; improved plant and animal health, nutrient density, reduced stress, and ultimately, profitability.” Brix measure the dissolved solids in the setup of a leafy plant. We’re using that as a tool to look at how much sugar and dissolve solids? How well is that plant photosynthesizing? It’s an indicator in the field. Whereas, these new meters are new infrared, spectroscopy, so they need to be correlated with those specific crops. At the moment, you can test maybe twenty different crops, apples, pears, and those obvious ones. There’s a lot of calibration that’s still required to test it but some of these new meters will tell you where in the world was this grown, which is cool. People can correlate that this has come from this property. It’s taken all of these things for a while but now it’s a hand meter. Masters views healthy soil as “the gut microbiome of the planet” and shares many insights about soil management. Although most readers likely know that using synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is counterproductive, Masters makes that fact explicit. Just like us, plants need air! Soil compaction, one of the inadvertent results of synthetic nitrogen application, suffocates plants and destroys the infrastructure formed by the termites, dung beetles, ants and earth­worms that let plants breathe easily. Her favor­ite won’t-leave-home-without-it device is the lowly shovel. A shovel allows visualization of soil color and its aggregates. One can smell the aroma, count the earthworms and even discern whether legumes are fixing nitrogen. Another essential tool is the simple refractometer, which measures the Brix (solids or “sugars”) in a plant. She tests crops and weeds, because if the weeds score high, and the crops score low, an adjust­ment is needed. “Make sure you are not farming or ranching for weeds,” she advises.

Most people seem to have some malady that is or is not explained. Years of misery and many doctor visits to no avail; then, a practitioner pointed to Paraquat, the first flag in this book. Who would have thought bare feed as a child in a foreign land would be the culprit. We have all seen dust blowing in the wind as working (tilling) the soil disrupts the soil infrastructure. Do the people tilling realize that the most valuable substance in their soil is what is darkening the sky? It is humus, the final breakdown of organic matter, with a structure even finer than clay. Humus is an amphitheater, if you will, in which soil microorganisms thrive. Mycorrhizal fungi; how many people know about its magical properties? How long will it remain a secret? How long will we smite it with herbicides and pesticides? Who would have thought that it can be promoted by the so called "scourge" of spurge and cheat grass?Masters questions why the top minerals “es­tablished” for soil health (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) do not include calcium. Accord­ing to her, we’ve been hoodwinked. Calcium plays an essential role in soil health. Eden, thank you for your testimonial. I loved hearing your story. Each of you is welcome to write a Letter to the Editor that we might include in an upcoming journal. You can also rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts so that we might read a shout-out of yours as well. Thanks so much for reading. Stay well. Y hasta pronto. Deep inside, with all that you were going through, you knew it was something else. Paraquat is an herbicide. I’m guessing it’s like a Roundup or something. Is that right?

Yes. I used a quote there from Stephen Jenkinson who talks about hope. Hope is mortgaging the future. Hope is something that you hold out as some comparison. Something that you’re going to cling to and pray for as opposed to what’s happening is happening now. We need to be focusing on the things that we can do now. Hope is the other side of hopelessness. We go from being feeling overwhelmed to maybe the Knight in shining armor is going to roll up. If I’m hearing you correctly, for fifteen years, you didn’t know what was the cause of your problem. William Gibson once said that "the future is here - it is just not evenly distributed. Nicole modestly claims that the information in the book is not new thinking, but her resynthesis of the lessons she has learned and refined in collaboration with regenerative land-managers is new, and it is powerful. She lucidly shares lessons learned from the deep topsoil futures she and her farming and ranching partners manage for and achieve. The case studies, science, and examples presented a compelling testament to the global, rapidly growing soil health movement." (Abe Collins, cofounder of LandStream and founder of Collins Grazing) Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Nicole Masters.

Ok, so I'm struggling with how to rate this book. As a regenerative farmer myself, and an organic farming consultant with 25 years experience, I want to love this book because any helpful attempt to further the regenerative ag movement is worth 5 stars! Books like this are so badly needed, now more than ever! But, this book has it's share of problems. If I'm comparing it to other regenerative ag books that received a 5 star rating, this one would probably get a 3. But I want to be generous and give it a 4. Here are the problems. Some of the operations I work with, they’re measuring things like the bio-digestability of grains. They’re measuring no residue of chemicals. They are measuring increases in Omega-3, trace elements, or vitamins in the food that they’re producing. That’s what I want to see. We start to get down to, what is this food quality? Can we improve the quality that we’re buying? There are a few spectrometers in different types of meters that are being released in 2021 and 2022 that are going to be ones that consumers can hold and measure for themselves what is the quality of this produce, which is exciting. Our human microbiome probably has 50% of the diversity that it used to have and less specialized organisms that can help you deal with stress. As we start to lose that microbiome in the soil, we no longer have the enzyme-producing organisms, the hormone-producing organisms, or organisms that are creating those vitamins.