What Soil Health Really Means to Me

People ask me to define soil health like there’s a tidy textbook answer. There isn’t. But if you want my definition, here it is: soil health is the continued capacity of that soil to sustain and progress biological life, plant life, animal life, and ultimately human life, and to do it in a way that’s sustainable and gets better over time, not worse.

That’s a tall order. And most of what we’ve done in modern agriculture has worked against it. We’ve spent generations treating soil like it’s just a medium to grow a plant in, something to hold a seed and take an input. We haven’t treated it like what it actually is: a living, biological system. That mindset has degraded organic matter and thrown soil balance out of whack across a lot of ground. Once a soil is out of balance, it gets less efficient, and less able to support the plant, animal, and human life it’s supposed to sustain.

Here’s the thing I want people to walk away with: getting soil back into balance takes a systems approach. There isn’t one silver bullet. It’s the chemical, the physical, and the biological all working together, and it takes real management to get there. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen overnight. But if we actually want healthy soil for the next generation, this is the only way to do it.

There’s a comparison I use a lot with cattle guys, because most already understand it: think about the governors built into a ruminant system. When you run an animal on the redline, ignoring those governors, you cause problems. Soil works the same way. For generations, we’ve been running it on the redline, pushing production without respecting the biological limits underneath it, and we’re seeing the effects.

The good news is that once you understand the core principles, the system can start to heal itself.

Learn more about the Five Principles of Soil Health and the ISS System here.