The Soil Food Web, Archaea & the Origin of Earth

Everything on Earth starts with the soil.

For billions of years the living topsoil has been accumulating naturally, and in only the last one hundred years we have abused its bounty to the point that in some places it is literally running out.

Soil doesn’t just happen by chance, it is manufactured through a very deliberate process based around the work of what is collectively called the “soil food web”. There is another universe under our feet made up of an intricate web of life encompassing tiny micro-organisms, or microbes, that are charged with the most important work of all — growing soil.

Think about the soil food web like the web of life in the ocean. The big fish eats the little fish on down to the plankton that represents the base of the oceanic food chain. Microbes are the “plankton of the soil”, or the base of the terrestrial food web. Research shows that this is literally true.

Microbes support the earthworms that feed the birds, which inevitably nourishes and culminates up the food chain to nourish people. Now make the connection that essentially every modern conventional farming practice works against the fundamental soil building activity of microbes — tilling, fungicides, artificial fertilizers, mono-cropping, and the list goes on.

How did our agriculture become so counter-intuitive? How did we get so far away from the point?

Back in the 1500’s Leonardo da Vinci said, “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” This statement remains true to this day, with estimates telling us that science has only identified 5 percent of bacteria and 10 percent of fungal species based on the rate of discovery. Why are we so malicious towards something we know so little about?

Evidence of how little we know is all around us. For instance, the description of one of the central concepts in our understanding of Nature was recently redefined. The term “symbiotic relationship” was first used by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 to describe lichens. For almost 150 years lichens were understood to be an alliance between a single fungi and a single algae, but a pioneering scientist named Toby Spribille recently overturned this textbook…