Posts Tagged: dirt
What's the Difference - Dirt, Soil, Earth?
Soil and agriculture courses are being taught again at Ventura College. This was a commitment of outgoing President, Greg Gillespie. There are only a handful California community (junior) colleges that still teach soils. Luckily Santa Barbara City, Allan Hancock, Pierce, Mira Costa and a few other community colleges in the Central Valley have at least introductory courses in soils. Many of the leading growers in Ventura County got their start in college taking soils courses at Ventura College, then went on to four-year colleges to round out their educations. The community college classes have always been a taste, a dusting of understanding of soils and if someone wanted to dig deeper, they would go on to somewhere like Davis, Fresno, Riverside, Pomona or San Luis. The community colleges are part of the continuum, start there and then go anywhere.
Dr. Jennifer Charles-Tollerup, the incoming Agriculture Instructor at Ventura College, brings a diverse set of experiences including 5 years in agricultural production systems, 4 years in agricultural research and education, 6 years in community college instruction as well as appointments in program development. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Riverside in Entomology with a concentration in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and Statistics along with a Bachelor's from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Biology and Environmental Studies with emphasis in Botany and Agroecology. Jennifer trained as an Apprentice in Ecological Horticulture at UC Santa Cruz's Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. She has worked on market gardens, family farms, and large-scale operations in citrus, grapes, nurseries, strawberries, herbs, lettuces, and edible flowers. Jennifer has used her academic and professional experience to coordinate elementary school garden programs.Jennifer readily supports the mission of the community college, to transform lives through education. Her approach involves building relationships with students and with agriculture partners, connecting the two together, and launching students into their life's work in agriculture. (this from CA Women in Ag newsletter, http://www.cwaventura.com/).More information about the Ventura College Agriculture Program can be found at http://www.venturacollege.edu/departments/academic/agriculture
Soil and agriculture courses are being taught again at Ventura College. There are only a handful California community (junior) colleges that still teach soils. Luckily Santa Barbara City, Allan Hancock, Pierce, Mira Costa and a few other community colleges have at least introductory courses in soils. Many of the leading growers in Ventura County got their start in college taking soils courses at Ventura College, then went on to four-year colleges to round out their educations. The community college classes have always been a taste, a dusting of understanding of soils and if someone wanted to dig deeper, they would go on to somewhere like Davis, Fresno, Riverside, Pomona or San Luis. The community colleges are part of the continuum, start there and then go anywhere.
Dr. Jennifer Charles-Tollerup, the incoming Agriculture Instructor at Ventura College, brings a diverse set of experiences including 5 years in agricultural production systems, 4 years in agricultural research and education, 6 years in community college instruction as well as appointments in program development. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Riverside in Entomology with a concentration in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and Statistics along with a Bachelor's from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Biology and Environmental Studies with emphasis in Botany and Agroecology. Jennifer trained as an Apprentice in Ecological Horticulture at UC Santa Cruz's Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. She has worked on market gardens, family farms, and large-scale operations in citrus, grapes, nurseries, strawberries, herbs, lettuces, and edible flowers. Jennifer has used her academic and professional experience to coordinate elementary school garden programs.
Jennifer readily supports the mission of the community college, to transform lives through education. Her approach involves building relationships with students and with agriculture partners, connecting the two together, and launching students into their life's work in agriculture. (this from CA Women in Ag newsletter, http://www.cwaventura.com/).
More information about the Ventura College Agriculture Program can be found at http://www.venturacollege.edu/departments/academic/agriculture
Come learn the dirt on the differences - ground, alluvium, subsoil, topsoil, mud, muck, marl, mire, smut - there are, but some terms are more subtle than others. Check out your local college for their soils course work.
soil weathered from rock
California State Soil - San Joaquin Series
Many states have a designated state bird, flower, fossil, mineral, etc. In California, the state bird is the California Valley Quail, the state flower is the Golden Poppy, the state fossil is the Sabertoothed Cat, and the state mineral is Native Gold. The state rock is Serpentine which contains chrysolite asbestos which is a carcinogen. It's a beautiful rock, though.
The state soil is the San Joaquin series. The series concept is that a given soil has certain properties like pH, depth, color, texture, etc. that distinguishes it from other “soils” or series. So wherever this soil is found it is given the same name. San Joaquin series is a soil that is found primarily along the foothills of the Sierras in the Central Valley. The name comes from where it is first described, in this case, San Joaquin, but it is found in other places. Yolo series is named after a soil on the campus at UC Davis in Yolo county, but it is also found in San Diego county, and in other states.
A description of the state soil can be found at the link below, as well as the state soils in other states:
http://www.soils4teachers.org/files/s4t/k12outreach/ca-state-soil-booklet.pdf
http://www.soils4teachers.org/state-soils
Soils can be highly variable depending on the context in which they are found. Going to flat old Kansas which is actually flatter than a pancake (http://www.usu.edu/geo/geomorph/kansas.html), the variability from spot to spot across miles can be minimal. But going to a place like Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo Counties of the Sierra foothills, you can't step on the same soil twice. That's because of the terrain and landforms. Where there is natural erosion (yes, it doesn't take humans to cause erosion) or accelerated erosion (this is where humans have often changed the landscape with roads, houses, removing ground cover) soil gets moved around and deposited in different positions and over time forms different soils with different properties. On large tracts of land that have not been altered much, such as avocado orchards, the naturally formed soils can be seen. In a housing tract where soil has been moved around to level and compact housing pads, it is often hard to find a natural soil because it is so highly disturbed. The soil can have been moved from one end of a 100 acres tract to the other with big equipment. It's all one big homogenous mix down to several feet at times depending on the slope.
In many cases, it is still possible to see the natural soils and knowing their series classification, it's possible to learn some of the properties and some of the problems that will be encountered when working with them. Knowing the pH prior to working it means that it could be adjusted before planting. It's a whole lot easier to adjust before planting than when the plants are in the ground.
You can see the soils in your area by going to the USDA-NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) website - https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm - and typing in the area code to find the soil at a given site. It probably isn't the state soil series, but it's your soil series.
For a great text on understanding soils, check out Soils: An Introduction by Michael Singer and Don Munns.
soils
The Best Soils Text
I am frequently asked if I can recommend a book on Soils. And yes, I can. It is Soils: An Introduction by Michael Singer and Donald Munns. The sixth edition recently came out so there's a lot of older used copies floating around on the wed for under $10. This book takes a different tack on describing soils. Instead of tacking the tack of a chapter on Nitrogen another on Calcium etc., it weaves a story of how all the parts are related.
soils
The Surprising Healing Qualities ... of Dirt
To all the lovely people,
I found this article very interesting. I believe that healthy soil produces healthy plants and that is why I continuously work at building my soil see what you think.
The Surprising Healing Qualities ... of Dirt
A doctor discovers exposure to healthy farm soil holds keys to healthy bodies.
YES! Photos by Paul Dunn
Recently I've been enjoying dirty thoughts.
I spend my days in a sterile 8x10 room practicing family medicine and yet my mind is in the soil. This is because I'm discovering just how much this rich, dark substance influences the day-to-day health of my patients. I'm even beginning to wonder whether Hippocrates was wrong, or at least somewhat misguided, when he proclaimed, “Let food be thy medicine.” Don't get me wrong—food is important to our health. But it might be the soil where our food is grown, rather than the food itself, that offers us the real medicine.
You would find little to support these assertions within the medical literature. Enter the terms “soil” and “health” into a PubMed database and the top search results portray soil as a risky substance, filled with pathogenic yeast, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, radon, heavy metals, and pesticides. But move past these grim reports, and you will uncover a small, but growing, collection of research that paints soil in a very different light. These studies suggest that soil, or at least some types of soil, can be beneficial to our health.
The scientists investigating this soil-health connection are a varied bunch—botanists, agronomists, ecologists, geneticists, immunologists, microbiologists—and collectively they are giving us new reasons to care about the places where our food is grown.
Lively soil, better food
For example, using DNA sequencing technology, agronomists at Washington State University have recently established that soil teeming with a wide diversity of life (especially bacteria, fungi, and nematodes) is more likely to produce nutrient-dense food. Of course, this makes sense when you understand that it is the cooperation between bacteria, fungi, and plants' roots (collectively referred to as the rhizosphere) that is responsible for transferring carbon and nutrients from the soil to the plant—and eventually to our plates.
Given this nutrient flow from soil microbes to us, how can we boost and diversify life in the soil? Studies consistently show that ecological farming consistently produces a greater microbial biomass and diversity than conventional farming. Ecological farming (or eco-farming, as my farmer friends call it) includes many systems (biodynamic, regenerative, permaculture, full-cycle, etc.) that share core holistic tenets: protecting topsoil with cover crops and minimal plowing, rotating crops, conserving water, limiting the use of chemicals (synthetic or natural), and recycling all animal and vegetable waste back into the land. Much of this research supports what traditional farmers around the world have long known to be true: the more ecologically we farm, the more nutrients we harvest.
Allergy-fighting microbes
While soil scientists are busy documenting these soil-to-food links, immunologists and allergists in Europe are working above ground to uncover another intriguing soil-health connection, the so-called “farm effect.” Why is it that children raised on ecologically managed farms in Central Europe have much lower rates of allergy and asthma than urban children or those raised on industrialized farms? Once again, almost everything points to microbes—in manure, in unpasteurized milk, in stable dust, on unwashed food and, yes, in the soil. In one study, researchers cultured farm children's mattresses and found a potpourri of bacteria—most of which are typically found in soil.
How soil microbes and other farm microbes protect against allergic diseases is still a matter of debate, but research is increasingly pointing to a new idea which, for lack of a better term, I will call the “microbiome exchange hypothesis.”
Infographic: Michael Pollan Says Home Cooking Might be the Single Best Way to Improve Your Health
The standard explanation for the “farm effect” is the hygiene hypothesis, which contends that early life (including in utero) exposure to a variety of microbes dampens the allergic response of our adaptive immune system. The problem with this theory is that our immune system is surprisingly simplistic and seems to react similarly whether it is encountering the diverse portfolio of microbes on an ecological farm or the relatively homogeneous collection of microbes typically found in an urban apartment or a conventional farm. But what if our own immune cells are simply a backup mechanism to a more sophisticated first line of defense—our resident microbes?
And what if a healthy and diverse soil microbiome can foster a more diverse and protective human microbiome? In fact, newer research suggests that this is the case and that an ongoing soil-to-gut microbial exchange might offer the real “farm effect.”
Gut-level gene swapping
Of course this is all very new—and for me, as a physician, somewhat disorienting. In medical school I was taught that our internal bacteria belong to a private club and that they have nothing to do with the microbes in our external environment. Pathogens such as salmonella or E. coli might pass through, as happens when we suffer from food poisoning or other infections, but their influence was considered to be transient—albeit occasionally devastating. But now that we can sequence the DNA of an entire microbiome, using a technique called metagenomics, we're beginning to connect the dots and we're discovering that genetic swaps can take place between our microbiome and the outside world—particularly the places where our food is grown.
A group of French microbiologists were among the first to document this game of pass-the-gene when they identified the exact same sequence of DNA in two different Bacteroidetes bacteria species, one living on seaweed and the other in the intestines of Japanese people. They concluded that the marine bacteria had hitchhiked their way into the human gut via sushi and other seaweed dishes and passed their seaweed-digesting DNA on to resident microbes of the human host. The end result of this exchange is that many Japanese—and possibly people from other seaweed-eating cultures—have acquired a greater ability than the rest of us to extract valuable nutrients from their nori.
Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford who studies how our environment influences our microbiome, told me that the findings from this nori study are, most likely, just the tip of the iceberg. He believes that we'll continue to discover ways that the microbes in soil and oceans are interacting with our microbiome and playing a huge role in our health.
Rx: dirt
Impressed by the growing evidence that our health depends on healthy soil, my “dirty thoughts” have turned to action. I now tell my patients that food grown in well-treated soil might offer distinct advantages when it comes to scoring the best nutrients and building a healthy immune system. Of course, identifying this food can be tricky since USDA Organic certification, while certainly a helpful guide, does not always lead us to the healthiest farms. Many certified organic farms do qualify as ecological, but some large-scale farms with this certification still till deeply and use approved pesticides—both practices that damage soil and the microbes in it. On the other hand, there are farmers who can't afford organic certification who are implementing the practices of eco-farming, practices that have been shown to produce a rich soil and a thriving microbial population. Since there is no “healthy soil/healthy microbe” label that can steer us toward these farms, my suggestion is to ask this simple question:
“Does the farmer live on the farm?”
Farmers who live on their land and feed their family from it tend to care for their soil as if it were another family member. Going to farmers markets and joining a CSA (community-supported agriculture) are reliable ways to get this type of produce, and supermarkets are also beginning to support local farmers. Remember, the more we demand it, the more they will carry it.
Photo by Paul Dunn
Of course, another option is to grow our own food. Eating fresh-grown food from healthy soil is not an all-or-nothing proposition, and even a daily handful of herbs from a container garden can have a positive impact on our health. Whether it is homegrown or from a local farm, I do mention to my patients that they should think twice before peeling or scrubbing their farm bounty. After all, who knows what beneficial bacteria might be coming along for the ride? By the way, eating fermented farm-fresh vegetables is a great way to get a mega-dose of soil bacteria.
I also tell patients about other (non-edible) health advantages to connecting with healthy farms. For example, although the data is far from conclusive, spending time on a local farm might offer a relatively safe, low-tech prevention strategy for families predisposed to allergies. “Farm time” looks especially attractive if it obviates the need for allergy shots or rounds of antihistamine. Emerging research says time spent working the soil is a means to build community, improve strength and fitness, slow dementia in seniors, and improve school performance in teens. It would be simplistic to promote a connection to healthy farms as a panacea for all that ails us, but it has become an important part of my medical toolkit.
Caring for our dirt
Finally, I have come to see my patients as an integral part of a farm eco-cycle where the flow of health is bidirectional. In other words, our choices directly influence the farm's health, which, in turn, impacts our health. For this reason, composting is a way to nourish local farms and ultimately fortify ourselves. I encourage patients to protect the soil like they protect their bodies. While many of us are aware that chemicals used in the soil might be harmful to us, we rarely consider how products that we use on ourselves or in our homes—such as triclosans, VOCs, parabens, PBAs, PVCs, and lye—might affect the health of the soil and its microbes. (By the way, rosemary or basil extracts make excellent antiseptics, vinegar is the best cleaner, shea or cocoa butter are perfect moisturizers, and diluted baking soda is an excellent shampoo.)
Similarly, while I've long recognized how antibiotics, steroids, and other bactericidal drugs might cause unintended side effects in my patients, I now understand how these drugs can impact the microbial life underfoot and ultimately our own cells.
Certainly, any chemical that decreases microbial diversity will, in turn, decrease the nutritional value of our food. But there is another concern: microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis have recently noted that soil bacteria exposed to antibiotics and other chemicals can develop antibiotic resistant genes which, similar to the nori-digesting enzyme, can be transferred to our microbiome, turning otherwise benign resident bacteria into “superbugs.”
Thinking of a healthy body as an extension of a healthy farm, and vice versa, is a paradigm shift for many of us. But when we consider that all of our cells get their building blocks from plants and soil then, suddenly, it all makes sense. In fact, it is not too much of a stretch to say: We are soil.
Daphne Miller, M.D., wrote this article for How to Eat Like Our Lives Depend on It, the Winter 2014 issue of YES! Magazine. She is a family physician, writer, and associate professor at U.C. San Francisco. Her latest book is Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing (William Morrow, 2013).
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