Earth day: Farming BEGINS with THE soil

Rita Abi Ghanem, PhD
Agricultural Consultant
AG Consultant Service, LLC

Feeding the World: The Importance of Stewarding Soil Microorganisms
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The 21st century features many advanced technologies—self-driving cars, drones, robots, etc.—but we are still facing one big challenge that technology may or may not be able to solve for us: How can we sustainably feed the world while maintaining a safe environment and preserving our natural resources?

In farming, it always begins with the soil. Good farmers farm crops, great farmers farm the soil. Important to having great soil is building an active and diverse microbiome that will structure the soil and move and process nutrients in ways most beneficial to plants. The more microbes there are in a soil (and the greater the diversity of those microbes), the more fertile that soil becomes. Thus, careful husbandry of the soil microbiome will successfully contribute to better yields to fight hunger while preserving Earth’s resources.

It’s hard to even conceptualize how much life is going on in the soil around a plant: in fact, a teaspoon of soil contains around 50 billion microbes. Microbes are the living engine of soil. These microbes perform many functions essential for helping plants reach their genetic potential, including:

• Breaking down plant and animal matter into humus and releasing soluble minerals.
• Fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere (rhizobia).
• Protecting plant roots from pathogens (mycorrhizae).
• Improving soil aggregation and porosity for better water infiltration.
• Degrading soil pollutants.

Those benefits create an environment favorable for seed germination, transplant survival, and root growth. As a soil scientist, some of my top recommendations for stewarding the soil and its living microbiome include:  

• Reducing or eliminating soil fumigation that affects beneficial microbes.
• Keeping soil well-drained and as salt-free as possible.
• Reducing tillage, to build soil organic matter.
• Rotating crops to provide diverse organic matter to the soil and break down disease cycles.
• Adding carbon and the appropriate amounts of environmentally safe nutrients to soil to help grow beneficial microbes.

​An entire world exists in just a handful of soil, and the tiny beings within it hold the key to successful crop production. As we steward our fields for sustainable crop production, we must make sure to consider the effect our practices are having on those essential microorganisms—the living engine of soil.