Fresh Baguettes and Healthy Soil
By Johnny Moore
Prairie diversity above and below ground. Image Source: Tall Grass Prairie Center
January 15, 2024
Soil, like a baguette, is little more than a few raw ingredients mixed together: minerals, living and decomposing organisms, water, and air. But a fresh baguette in Paris, though made from simple ingredients, is far from simplistic. The same is true of healthy soil. A baguette is the masterful suspension of flour, water, and salt, shrouded in an idyllic crust, wrought by the living organisms of yeast and the hot air of an oven. The well ordered ingredients produce a work that is nothing shy of beauty and harmony. An authentic, French baguette, eaten fresh, is irresistibly delicious, nourishing to mind, body, and soul. It is magical.
While it’s rather easy to care about a good baguette, who cares about the soil? Just sprinkle on some fertilizer and things should be fine, right? If there is a weed here or there, just apply the right herbicide and you will be set. What more is there to it?
By the same token, we could scrap baguettes and just eat power bars, chocked full of all the essentials. Eat nothing but your favorite power bars and it doesn’t take long to miss the magic that food like baguettes offer. We desire more than the perfect ration of vitamins and nutrients delivered to us in a compact, scant, industrialized bar. We long for real food.
If you’ve ever tried to push a shovel into rock hard clay, or questioned why your tomatoes developed a blight from the soil, or why your grass is turning brown even though you’ve been watering it twice a day, the answers likely lay in the health of your soil.
Like a baguette, healthy soil can be magical–causing plants to grow and thrive, being easy to dig, free of weeds, and absorbing water like a sponge. However, as the raw ingredients of a baguette need a baker to proportion and bake them, the soil needs its many members to order and organize it. Without those processes in action, we are left with the stubborn, raw ingredients, unyielding to our shovels and unhelpful to our tomatoes. Who are the bakers of the soil world? It turns out there are more than we have yet been able to classify.
In healthy soil, the raw ingredients are orchestrated and processed by innumerable microscopic life forms. These microbes take the raw ingredients of decaying biomass (dead plants, leaves, trees, etc.), minerals, water, and air, and bake the stuff we love and call topsoil. These “bakers” are bacteria, fungi, plant roots, and even animals. They take the raw ingredients in the soil and transform them into life-sustaining, bioavailable nutrients (think baguettes!) for one another and plants. Left to themselves, most minerals and elements are not in a form usable by plant roots and organic matter breaks down incredibly slowly. Plant your tomatoes in rocky or heavy clay soil, and though rich in minerals, your tomato roots may struggle to break down the rock and clay to access and take up the phosphorus, potassium, or nitrogen the plant needs to produce delicious fruit. Plants need the raw ingredients turned into a bioavailable form.
As we know, plants transform sunlight and carbon into organic matter. Plants convert the solar energy and release substances through their roots known as exudates–organic compounds which attract and help foster various bacteria and fungi in the soil. Those bacteria and fungi are the bakers and doctors, feeding the plant the nutrients and medicines it needs to grow and fight off pathogens. This is the beginning of what’s known as the soil food web.
A plant in need of phosphorus secretes root exudates attracting bacteria that can make phosphorus bioavailable to that plant. The bacteria form a relationship with plants which feed them; the plant receives the nutrients it needs from the bacteria while the bacteria feast like kings. As the bacteria thrive, they become the food supply for other soil organisms: bacteria are eaten by protozoa, protozoa are eaten by nematodes, nematodes are eaten by arthropods, arthropods are eaten by birds and small animals. The entire food chain is supported by plants living in the soil.
Vibrant and full of life, healthy soil becomes sponge-like, able to absorb inches upon inches of rainfall, staving off erosion, drought, and flood. Contextualized plant communities are then able to thrive, support themselves and the surrounding ecosystem without supplemental irrigation or fertilizer inputs and with minimal stewardship management. And just as with baguettes, the world of the soil, freshness and abundance, becomes a beautiful and magical place.