5 Principles of Soil Health

soil health

Wondering how to make your soil (and plants) thrive? Use these principles of soil health to properly prepare your farm or garden to grow.

The following excerpt is from Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. It has been adapted for the web.

(Photography curtesy of Gabe Brown.)


Prefer audio?

Listen to the excerpt below from the audiobook of Dirt to Soil.


The Importance of Soil Health

Our lives depend on soil. This knowledge is so ingrained in me now that it’s hard for me to believe how many soil-destroying practices I followed when I first started farming. I didn’t know any better. In college I was taught all about the current industrial production model, which is a model based on reductionist science, not on how natural ecosystems function.

farm soil healthThe story of my farm is how I took a severely degraded, low-profit operation that had been managed using the industrial production model and regenerated it into a healthy, profitable one.

The journey included many trials and constant experimentation, along with many failures and some successes.

I’ve had many teachers, including other farmers and ranchers, researchers, ecologists, and my family.

But the best teacher of all is nature herself.

In the everyday work of my farm, most of the decisions I make, in one way or another, are driven by the goal of continuing to grow and protect soil.

The Five Principles of Soil Health

I follow five principles that were developed by nature, over eons of time.

They are the same any place in the world where the sun shines and plants grow. Gardeners, farmers, and ranchers around the world are using these principles to grow nutrient-rich, deep topsoil with healthy watersheds.

1. Limited Disturbance

Limit mechanical, chemical, and physical disturbance of soil. Tillage destroys soil structure.

It is constantly tearing apart the “house” that nature builds to protect the living organisms in the soil that create natural soil fertility.

Soil structure includes aggregates and pore spaces (openings that allow water to infiltrate the soil). The result of tillage is soil erosion, the wasting of a precious natural resource.

Synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides all have negative impacts on life in the soil as well.

2. Armor

armoring for soil health

Armoring the soil is one way to be resilient. The armor is the residue from a previous cover crop and a cash grain crop is growing through the armor. Photo curtesy of Gabe Brown.

Keep soil covered at all times. This is a critical step toward rebuilding soil health. Bare soil is an anomaly—nature always works to cover soil.

Providing a natural “coat of armor” protects soil from wind and water erosion while providing food and habitat for macro- and microorganisms.

It will also prevent moisture evaporation and germination of weed seeds.

3. Diversity

Strive for diversity of both plant and animal species. Where in nature does one find monocultures? Only where humans have put them!

When I look out over a stretch of native prairie, one of the first things I notice is the incredible diversity.

Grasses, forbs, legumes, and shrubs all live and thrive in harmony with each other. Think of what each of these species has to offer.

Some have shallow roots, some deep, some fibrous, some tap. Some are high-carbon, some are low-carbon, some are legumes. Each of them plays a role in maintaining soil health.

Diversity enhances ecosystem function.

4. Living Roots

Maintain a living root in soil as long as possible throughout the year. Take a walk in the spring and you will see green plants poking their way through the last of the snow.

Follow the same path in late fall or early winter and you will still see green, growing plants, which is a sign of living roots.

Those living roots are feeding soil biology by providing its basic food source: carbon.

This biology, in turn, fuels the nutrient cycle that feeds plants. Where I live in central North Dakota, we typically get our last spring frost around mid-May and our first fall frost around mid-September.

I used to think those 120 days were my whole growing season. How wrong I was.

We now plant fall-seeded biennials that continue growing into early winter and break dormancy earlier in the spring, thus feeding soil organisms at a time when the cropland used to lie idle.

5. Integrated Animals

Nature does not function without animals. It is that simple. Integrating livestock onto an operation provides many benefits. The major benefit is that the grazing of plants stimulates the plants to pump more carbon into the soil. This drives nutrient cycling by feeding biology.

Of course, it also has a major, positive impact on climate change by cycling more carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into the soil.

And if you want a healthy, functioning ecosystem on your farm or ranch, you must provide a home and habitat for not only farm animals but also pollinators, predator insects, earthworms, and all of the microbiology that drive ecosystem function.


Recommended Reads

A Guide to Soil Fertility and Crop Health

Testing Soil: Healthy Soil is Just A Test Away

 

Read The Book

Dirt to Soil

One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture

$12.97

Recent Articles

soil health

5 Principles of Soil Health

Wondering how to make your soil (and plants) thrive? Use these principles of soil health to properly prepare your farm or garden to grow. The following excerpt is from Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. It has been adapted for the web. (Photography curtesy of Gabe Brown.) Prefer audio? Listen to the excerpt below from the…

Read More

How to Create Your Own Forest Garden

A forest garden provides a beautiful, bountiful edible landscape at any scale—whether only a few dozen square feet or if you have over an acre to spare. Ready to embark on your own forest garden adventure? Check out these articles for inspiration to get started. Featured image by Dani Baker. The Seven Layers of A…

Read More
permanent beds

Permanent Beds: Designing An Efficient Garden

Permanent beds are going to change your gardening game. This type of garden bed helps improve soil health, ensures crop growth, and is extremely easy to design! The following is an excerpt from The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost. It has been adapted for the web. Designing Permanent Beds The term permanent beds is…

Read More
fieldwork

Simplify Farm Fieldwork: Stop Working So Hard

Looking to simplify fieldwork on your farm? The key is to act like a tree: stop working so hard and let nature do some of the work for you.  The following is an excerpt from The Lean Micro Farm by Ben Hartman. It has been adapted for the web. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and…

Read More
seed integrity

Preserving Seed Integrity: How Far is Far Enough?

While there is a lot of information out there about keeping the “purity” of seeds, the true “pure” seed is a myth. There are still best practices that any seed grower should keep in mind; but once they understand seed integrity and let cross-pollination happen, the real fun begins. The following is an excerpt from…

Read More