Learning the ways of soil, thanks to the Living Soil Summit

In March, The Utah Food Coalition hosted their second annual Living Soil Summit, two days and nine experts sharing knowledge on how to remediate our soils, the theme of this year's summit, how to steward soils, to the benefit of gardeners, growers and farmers alike. Hosted at the Sorenson Unity Center and the Salt Lake City Main Public Library, it brought folks together to enlighten, share and teach on how interconnected soil is to our human health. 

Remediated soils look like healthy food close to home, food security and thriving ecosystems with reduced carbon emissions, said Christy Clay, an ecologist and professor at Westminster University. 

Soil is like skin being the largest organ of our bodies, the most basic feature of a human yet indelible to our continued existence. The soil, the most basic feature of the planet, is indelible to the Earth’s continued existence and thus ours. Without healthy soils, we have the Dust Bowl. 

The summit was a free and accessible forum for knowledge sharing and wisdom in stewarding our soils in a time of industrialized agriculture and toxins. Looking at how to remediate soils from post-industrial waste like in Chicago urban settings or using rabbits in the pasture to elevate soil conditions in Salt Lake City. 

A City Journals reporter synthesized the two days of lectures into a comprehensive breakdown on how to begin growing our own soils to become “autonomously healthy,” like how Sara Skamnes of Crescive Soil Services introduced. The soil becomes a closed loop system of feeding and sustaining itself. Moving away from relying on herbicides, pesticides and other petroleum based chemical applicants. A seemingly radical maneuver in a country obsessed with (oblivious to?) the woes of the petrochemical industry profiting off the demise of the Earth, its people and all nonhuman living beings. Not unlike Big Pharma’s profit off epidemics of ravaged, addicted death. 

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” chronicled the demise of the land when the leftover chemicals from World War II were turned into fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, specifically DDT, which is now outlawed because of Carson’s deeply moving question of “technological progress,” industry and humanity. She exposed the rapid death of the soils, the creatures wiped out in the wake of the chemical use on farm fields, describing the silent spring when there were no birds singing or crickets chirping. 

Pesticides kill the good guys just as effectively as they kill the bad guys. They are nonselective and ravenous to poison whatever they coat. Obliterating the soil’s ability to remain autonomously healthy, becoming more reliant on the petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides in a vicious cycle of extractive, expensive and external inputs. With no resemblance to a closed loop system. 

We are to grow our soil, protecting it like any other organism, because it is living, Andrea Morgan said of Moonshadow Farm on the Wasatch Back. Whether through mycological networks, the predator and prey dynamics, the minerals and nutrients – they all turn dirt into soil. With webs and networks that bring dirt to life. 

As Bleu Adams mentioned, a native Mandan/Hidatsa/Diné chef, restauranteur and guerilla economist, the soil health is directly linked to our human health. “We don’t heal ourselves until we heal the soil,” she said. But in the past 10 years, we have lost 10,000 acres of agricultural land to ongoing urbanization in Utah, Adams said. That onslaught of concretizing what was once green, the industrialization of our society, has led to highly contaminated soil that impacts our everyday lives far more than corn fields would have. 

Every speaker talked on contaminated soils in some capacity, offering their own, often overlapping steps to remediate soils on your specific plot. Valentine Espinoza, in from Chicago with the Advocates for Urban Agriculture, spoke on food access through community garden interventions because of the city’s high lead contamination. Houses with families sit on sites radiating in toxins. The high concentration of manufacturing, former industrial sites, pesticides and chemical applicants have all disproportionately ravaged areas of low income communities of color. According to Espinoza, Chicago has a soil lead level maximum of 400 parts per million. California’s lead maximum is 80 ppm. Utah has a lead maximum of 1.6 ppm, with nonresidential buildings’ maximum of 4 ppm. When Espinoza was evaluating a family’s home in Chicago, it rated 1,200 ppm. With a level so high, Espinoza recommended the children not play outside and they wipe the paws off the dog so as to not spread those contaminants throughout the house. 

Espinoza stated how equal to or less than 100 ppm is viably edible. Adams reminded audience members how reservations are constantly plagued with the consequences of chemical dumping and post uranium mining disproportionately falling on the backs of native indigenous people. Like the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes on the Duck Valley Reservation at the Nevada-Idaho border, it is the shoulders of BIPOC folks that the extractive, industrialist systems that these woes weigh heaviest on. Espinoza uses soil remediation to bring healing back to her community.

Another unanimous agreement across all speakers was their belief in getting your plot tested. Conducting observations while considering getting a professional test done from services like Crescive Soil Services, organizations like Advocates for Urban Agriculture or university resources like UVU’s soil testing program.  

“Soil testing is a useful diagnostic tool to identify problems related to excessive levels of nutrients and salts, high pH, low organic matter, and poor drainage,” UVU Extension wrote. Remediation is site specific and contaminant specific. Testing can get a barometer of where your soil is to start. What is in abundance, what contaminants are present, what nutrients need to be renourished. From there, you can make an action plan. Over the years, test from the same spot, Tony Richards from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food said, allowing observations over years to be accurately comparable. 

Simple field observations can be used to begin evaluating the state of the soil on your plot. Watching how the water is draining, or not, can indicate proper water penetration. Ponding indicates the soil is too compacted. Similarly, if the roots are starting to J hook, there is a compaction issue. Healthy roots are abundant, deep, unrestricted and branching. Healthy plant roots produce exudates that attract bugs to their vicinity. When observing, what creatures are present, or not? Is it a silent spring or an active hub of life? The more activity the better. Active predator-prey relationships are attracted to the exudates on the roots, the predators eat their prey, poop at the foot of the root, fertilizing the soil and the plants. The closed loop system growing ever closer. 

Sara Skamnes described that autonomously healthy soil looks like microbes, minerals and nutrition/energy input in balance. Richards recommends 90-99% minerals, 1-10% organic matter, 95% of that organic matter being dead, the other 5% living organisms. The five steps to regenerative agriculture, Soni Sontag said, a representative from the late Green Urban Lunchbox, can guide the process to building autonomously healthy soil, implementing tangible, readily available methods that promote remediation naturally, with the land, relying on no purchased inputs. 

Step 1: Keep the soil covered. It retains water and moisture, keeping the sun off the subterranean creatures. Avoiding the surface blowing away, especially in this dry desert climate. Cover crops should be used to replenish nutrient deficiencies from crop use, sequestering the carbon from the atmosphere and fixing it into the soil. Cover crops like legumes (beans), field peas and buckwheat can fix lost nitrogen into the soil, an essential element for plant survival. Cover crops, Morgan said, encourages earth worms, keeps the soil moist and intact and rejuvenates lost elements in the balance ratio. Based on the soil test, what is deficient? What has been abundantly used, and what cover crop can be used to restore those? Cover crops also attract pollinators, essential to the prosperity of a harvest. 

Kevin Nash, an independent farmer for the past 15 years now working a plot in Layton, talks on how cover crop is like passive income, an investment for the long term; although not readily harvesting – unless you’re using edible cover crops like field peas and fava beans – others like buckwheat will, in the long term, make him money back by not having to purchase the organic fertilizer and amendments that he currently uses to bolster the land that was once a monocropped alfalfa farm by the previous occupants. 

Like cover cropping, adding compost to beds will ultimately replenish the nutrients lost to crop use. It should be noted that, according to several speakers at the Summit, municipal composts readily available in urban settings are often riddled with heavy metals and it should be used only after testing. 

Morgan and Clay recommend a compost recipe of 10% high nitrogen manures (animal manure), 30% green manures from local land (plant matter) and 60% wood, straw, hay. Leaves and mulch in a compost helps neutralize the batch. Compost needs to be kept aerobic, meaning oxygenated, by flipping it based on the time of year. The summer will be more flips whereas the winter will be less flips in order to reach a temperature of 131 degrees F so as to make sure harmful materials and pathogens are sterilized and stabilized, but no higher than 171 degrees F as to not cook out all the beneficials that make compost alive and digestive. According to Clay, less time spent at high temperatures allowed for more organismal activity and fungus to grow and develop their webs. 

Step 2: Keep roots in soil. This helps produce humus, thick, rich organic matter in the soil. Keeping the roots in the soil helps fulfill step one, keeping the soil intact so as to not release all of the sequestered carbon and nutrients back into the atmosphere. Old plants create great organic matter to be put straight back into itself, like the closed loop system we are working toward. 

Step 3: No to low till. So as to not break up all of the mycological and organismal networks. Tilling overturns the soil, releasing the deeply wanted sequestered carbon and nutrients into the atmosphere, where they are not wanted. It crushes all of our subterranean creatures and their networks of paths that are aerating the soil. 

Step 4: Biodiversity! We want polyculture. Monocrops have to rely on petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers because they are so prone to disease and pests. If an entire field’s worst enemy broke out, like weevils or armyworms, they’d have a field day. With diversity, no one disease or pest outbreak can take out an entire season’s worth of food. Perhaps just the peppers or just the eggplant. Not a whole field’s harvest to the belly of a mite. Biodiversity attracts all of the good bugs, like the pollinators and predators who eat the bad guys. We want to manage for health and not disease the way pesticides and herbicides prey on. Having a diversity of cover crop is similarly important to have a diversity of crop, each bringing back to the soil different elements that are lost over a season. 

Step 5: Animal Husbandry. The manure and pest control by having animals involved brings many-fold beneficials to the soils. Celia Bell raises rabbits in her pasture, adamant of their superiority to chicken keeping. Rabbits, Bell argued, are faster, quieter, with less heat stress in the summers and fewer purchased inputs to their care. They have lightweight, mobile housing, with fewer flies and pests. Not to mention their amazing fur, poop and meat. 

Just as much as food is essential to our survival, so is the act of saving seeds, Casey O’Leary from the Boise Seed Cooperative, said. Because without seeds, we have no food. At this point in industrialized agriculture, seed production has gotten consolidated in the hands of the same petrochemical companies that are advancing the antithesis of regenerative agriculture – becoming reliant on expensive, extractive, external inputs. Seeds become reliant on them and multinational companies controlling distribution that, like O’Leary said, farmers markets with vegetables that are grown from seeds trucked in are not a local food system, or even a regional one at that. Saving seeds from our locale, O’Leary describes how beans for example, pass genetic information on to the next generation, in real time, adapting every season to the climate and soils and place. Better adapting every consecutive generation to the locale. Site specific, every generation is better off than the last, adapting to our place to be their best selves. 

The soil health, like the health of the greater atmosphere, the health of our water, our harvests, is essential to our survival. Without soil we do not have food. Food cannot grow out of dirt. It has to be activated and alive. The Living Soils Summit offered an accessible, free wealth of knowledge for all of us to begin breaking down the systems that have brought us to this perilous moment in our tenure with industrial agriculture. As Adams said, we are waiting for colonization to find its relationship with the land. With some of these interventions, we can begin remediating our soils to steward a more just and sustainable future for generations to come.