S3E3: Soil
Transcript
AH: Allie Horick
MP: Maxwell Patterson
CV: Chris Vanags
JG: Jennifer Gutman
TH: Tori Hoover
LK: Lutz Koepnick
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INTRO
JG:
When I enter the high tunnel at Wonderful People Microfarm, I can’t take my eyes off the tomatoes. They hang above me from their trellised vines, ripening on their branches.
I’m here to meet with Maxwell…
MP:
I’m Maxwell Maxwell Patterson and I’m the farm manager for a wonderful people micro farm. It is an experiential learning farm in Ville, Tennessee. we create programming to educate new and beginning farmers about climate smart agriculture.
JG:
I’ve been coming to the farm for the better part of the past year as a member of their farm and garden training program. Tonya Lewis and Chris Cowley bought the property in 2022, and together with Maxwell, the three have been working to revitalize the land and educate community members. Their vision is to train a new generation of historically underserved farmers to grow their own food using sustainable and regenerative practices.
During my time here, I’ve seen the farm in different stages of production: from the cold thaw of early spring to the colorful bounty of summer. When I meet Maxwell, it’s the first day of September and the high tunnel offers reprieve from the late-summer Tennessee heat. In this shaded oasis, tomatoes and peppers peek out from their dense foliage, and vibrant marigolds help keep insects at bay. On the propagation tables, trays of sturdy seedlings wait for their chance to join the crops outside, where rows of leafy greens intermingle with carrots, cucumbers, and tomatillos. Red okra plants standing several feet high boast bright yellow flowers in full bloom, a cousin of the tropical hibiscus. It’s been a magical summer here, but every season has its end. And in the world of small-scale agriculture, that means a whole new growing season to look forward to…
MP:
What I’m most excited about at the moment is our transition into our fall crops. So far, we have a lot of brassicas. We’re gonna be doing, some cauliflower, some more kale, some cabbages, and then I’m also super excited to test out a couple new carrot varieties that we picked up this year. We’ve had pretty good luck with summer squash this year, but winter squash is tasty and I love it for soup season.
JG:
Though the Wonderful People team only opened ground last year, this 150 by 50 foot plot has grown into a considerable force: it’s the main site for the farm’s educational programming, and its produce has also been used for a pilot CSA program. But beauty and abundance haven’t always characterized this particular patch of land.
MP:
The previous owner had a business that was a cash for junk, kind of thing. And so the land had previously been used to store like old vehicles and trailers, and anything that he had acquired in his business. So, , it was essentially, yeah, just a, a big fallow yard.
JG:
In just a few seasons, the land has been transformed, and a former junk yard has given way to a multispecies oasis.
MP:
Even this year the ecological impact of how many more species of birds and insects, and rodents and rabbits and deer have come into, like the area of the farm has shown me that like diversifying and creating more space for life has a benefit to the ecology. And if you focus on working towards the right type of stewardship, then the things that will change can be huge.
JG:
Who salvages the salvage yard? And how? I often think about these questions when driving around Nashville, where concrete and construction seem to be winning out over our precious few green spaces. I find hope in Wonderful People’s story of regeneration and their mission to transform the community through access to equitable food systems. But where do you begin such a sizeable task?
MP:
I definitely believe that soil is the starting point for. What you understand about plants and how to like, take care of them. But you could generalize it to all life is sustained by, by the soil. this is the part I really have to take care of when I’m taking care of my plant. I’m taking care of the life in the soil.
JG:
On today’s episode, we’re going to momentarily table the fruits of our labor to consider what makes them possible. Soil may seem stagnant and innocuous, a necessary medium for a more spectacular show above ground, but for anyone who works closely with soil, the real magic happens beneath the surface–in the tango of roots and microbes, bacteria and fungi. In the dense darkness of soil.
We’ll hear more from Maxwell about why healthy soil matters in the world of regenerative agriculture, and we’ll also talk about the science of soil with Vanderbilt professor Chris Vanags. But soil is more than science: soil connects us to a sense of time and place–at once rooted and transient, connected to the past and pointing to the future. We’ll explore the metaphorical richness of soil through the work of Nashville-based artist Allie Horick, whose soil quilts ask us to reimagine soil as a medium of time, loss, and legacy.
Part I: The Wonder of Soil
JG:
I’m at Shelby Bottoms Greenway in East Nashville, Tennessee with Dr. Chris Vanags, director of the Peabody Research Office and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Chris is taking me to Shelby’s hidden pond, a place I’ve visited many times before but apparently knew very little about.
CV:
Okay so we’re gonna go out to a site, it’s called Hidden Pond. It’s an artificial wetland. It was created, to compensate for a water body within this hydrologic unit that was disturbed. And so we were interested to know what the soils look like developing under a compensatory wetland.
Most soils, they develop over tens of hundreds of thousands of years, and we don’t have that amount of time. But wetlands develop in five to 10 years. So we can really see soils changing in that small period of time in a meaningful way.
JG:
I see why Chris feels so drawn to Shelby’s Hidden Pond. It’s so much more than what it has long meant to me, which is a quiet place away from the hustle bustle of the world where you might be lucky enough to spot a green heron or resident beaver. I never thought about what was there under my feet all along—an active site of soil study where the deep geological process of soil formation could be tracked in real time.
JG:
While researching this episode, I’ve learned a lot of wondrous facts about soil.
Deep soils as we know them today have existed for less than 10% of our planet’s history and their development played a critical role in making the planet hospitable to human life about 500 million years ago. The abundance of life in soil is difficult to measure or classify. One gram of soil can easily contain a billion or more bacterial cells, several miles of fungal filaments, and millions of other microorganisms. 58% of the planet’s biodiversity is found in the soil and 90% of the species that live in soil have yet to be named. One fact that brings this astonishing biodiversity into perspective is that a single teaspoon of healthy soil contains more microorganisms than there are people on the planet.
While these figures might make soil seem exotic, research also shows how human beings are critically linked to it. 99% of the food we eat depends on soil and the same groups of bacteria that dominate soil’s rhizosphere—or the root sphere—also dominate the human gut. Soil also makes us happy. One bacterial strain readily found in soil has been found to increase serotonin in the prefrontal cortex, reducing stress and anxiety. Maybe that’s the reason Pigpen never wanted to take a bath…
Soil impacts us. But we also impact soil. And with the advent and growth of industrial farming, this impact has largely been of grave consequence. It can take several hundred years for one inch of topsoil to develop, and scientists estimate that the US is currently losing soil at a rate 10 times faster than nature’s ability to replenish it.
So how does a habitat this diverse, necessary, and downright mysterious remain so underexplored? Perhaps it says something about modern attention spans or the value we tend to place on visual spectacle over banal infrastructure. But many people who are invested in the planet’s present and future health believe it’s high time we bring soil into the spotlight.
So what is soil, exactly, and how did it come to be?
Chris explains soil as an ecosystem.
CV:
The idea of considering soil as an ecosystem, has to do with the way it functions and the way that other organisms function in that ecosystem. And so the fungi that are there, the bacteria that are there. Um, even the roots, right? All those things have to, get along. They’ve all evolved to be in that system together.
JG:
Healthy soil develops over time through the symbiotic relationships between the parts of this ecosystem; air, water, microbial life, organic matter–all must work in tandem to give soil its unique, multi-level structure.
CV:
It takes a long time to develop soil structure. For example, if I take a bucket of soil and I dump it out onto the ground and I let it sit there. Initially it’s just particlesscattered all about randomly. But over time, organisms will flow through that system and they’ll create channels and roots will go through that system and those channels will allow water to go down into the soil.
It also enables gas to be able to go in and outta that system. And so as the structure slowly develops, it becomes better at transmitting water and better at transmitting gas.
And the things that over time help to create more and more structure are the fungi that are in there those tendrils sort of come out and they create these masses as well as things like earthworms. So earthworms will secrete mucus as they crawl through.
And they’re also consuming soil and pooping it out. You can always tell when a soil is healthy once you see worm casings in there because worms have been actively involved in it.
JG:
It takes many years for healthy soil to develop its structure, but understanding how soil came to be in the first place requires a tour through the deep time of geology. Maxwell tells the history of soil formation through the concept of ecological succession, which describes the stages by which landscapes gradually develop from bare rock to mature forests.
MP:
what you could describe our planet as in like a grand scheme early on, it was like a large mass of rocks that then got populated by small biology like fungi that had an effect on how to deteriorate or change the form of these rocks. From there you have later stage organisms maybe liken or weeds or small shrubs or plants that can survive in a rocky environment. They create waste or carbon from the buildup of their leaves that drop, and that creates your first layer of soil.
And then the organic matter mixes in and creates your soil, food, web within that. so now you have microbiology that can digest the mineral content within your soil, but then you also have the digestion of decaying living matter. And so that mixture is what creates your tilth or structure of your soil. But again, all these things and all these changes in material size happen over millennia if not billions of years in a certain environment.
JG:
Plants thrive in contexts that have emerged through extended processes of disturbance and, yes, interference. As Maxwell tells me, the most fertile agricultural lands tend to emerge somewhere in the middle of the timeline of succession—in the sweet spot where planes make contact with forests and where fungi come into a generative ratio with bacteria.
MP:
We’re pretty lucky because Tennessee is an environment that’s heavily forested. So we just have a lot of organic matter in most places. All of Tennessee used to be partially covered by water. And so even up here on this ridge, we have a very silt loam soil mixture. So it’s reminiscent of the bottom of a lake in that it has very fine particles that have been deposited over time. But it’s also really rich minerally.
JG:
This liminality is optimal for cultivating all sorts of life in the soil. But the life of the soil, much like human life, depends on stages of dormancy and decay. And though it may not be the first thing that comes to mind, death is of course a consequential point of contact between humans and soil.
Part II: Soil Quilts
JG:
Soil is often referred to as a medium. It is, after all, a medium for growing plants. But soil is also an artistic medium with material and symbolic properties that have attracted artists for millennia—from prehistoric cave drawings that used soil as pigment to contemporary earthworks that facilitate large-scale encounters with soil environments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many artists who work with soil explore themes of place, memory, and ancestry. Nashville-based Allie Horick is no exception.
AH:
My name is Ally Horick. I am a visual artist, based outta Nashville, Tennessee. I work across, disciplines and mediums. Most recently that’s been more in a sort of sculptural, installation based realm.
JG:
Allie and I met this past summer to discuss her magnificent soil quilts, which are exactly what they sound like–quilts made entirely out of soil.
AH:
My soil quilt is a temporary installation piece composed of soil collected from different family cemeteries and grave sites laid out in the pattern of a family quilt made by one of my great grandmothers. I installed it in the gallery space, and at the end I swept it up. So I still think of it as existing as a piece. It is just now like a single pile of mixed soil.
JG:
At the time of our interview, I had only seen photographs of a soil quilt that Allie exhibited in 2023. But I had a chance more recently to see her second soil quilt piece in person at Coop Gallery in Nashville, this one with an even larger and more intricate pattern. Both pieces look like colorful, folk-inspired sandboxes. Except you wouldn’t want to play in them for fear of disturbing their perfect, uniform symmetry. Allie achieves this precision by creating stencils based on the quilt she’s trying to replicate.
AH:
I took, a photograph of one of the quilt squares and I brought it into Photoshop and Illustrator and vectorized it, and used a laser cutter to make the pattern cut out of a little block of wood.
JG:
Allie builds her soil quilts to scale, meaning they’re the same size as the quilts they’re based on. Her first installation was about six by eight feet.
AH:
I made the platform myself because the size was so specific and I knew I wanted it to be raised a little bit and also that specific gallery did not want, soil directly on the ground. But I had drawn out a grid pattern on that as well to help line things up. And then I just moved the stencil one at a time. And poured the soil in each one and patted it down a little bit and then moved it over.
The placement was very intuitive. I had all of my samples lined up in clear containers so I could see them, and I tried to spread them out a little bit. And I thought about that somewhatlike, okay, this one is a little bit darker, so maybe I’ll put a lighter one next to it. But beyond that I didn’t map it out. Really
JG:
There’s footage online of Allie installing her first soil quilt, and she offered open house hours for people to watch while she installed her more recent piece. What you notice while watching Allie work is the granular attention she brings to each nook and cranny of the quilt’s pattern. Each block has a design of various shapes and colors that are repeated with variations in a grid. Allie also makes wonderful use of borders that create vivid contrast to the main pattern.
AH:
I had vastly miscalculated how long installing that first one would be. I think it. Was probably around 20 hours over the course of three days.
JG:
There’s something mesmerizing about watching Allie fill each shape with different colored soil. It’s like when you finally step away after being absorbed in a small corner of an adult coloring book page to bask in the dazzling intricacy of the full picture. In fact, the most striking feature of the quilt, together with its neat geometric lines, is what it achieves with color.
AH:
I didn’t realize how rich, the difference in colors would be. I remember describing it to a colleague of mine, and he was like, it’s dirt. What if it’s all just brown? Or like, what if it all looks the same? I was like I know soil and it’s not gonna be like that.
Soil looks different based on the local conditions and the composition of the soil, how much iron is in it, different minerals and stuff. And was sort of struck by the idea of what it would look like to visualize that in a gallery setting of like laying soil out on the gallery floor. And noticing the different textures and colors and the idea of a Quilts was an element of that I think because when you fly over a landscape, it looks like a patchwork quilt a lot of times.
JG:
The aesthetics of soil make up one well of inspiration for this project, but the other comes from a desire to connect with her family history. To make the quilt, Allie collected soil from 27 gravesites across Tennessee and its bordering states, some dating back to the Revolutionary War.
AH:
Livingston, Tennessee is technically the town where my maternal grandmother grew up but really it was a much smaller town sort of adjacent. When I was initially visiting that cemetery and reconnecting with that specific loss and doing a little bit of research I realized how many ancestors I had buried within a 10 mile radius of that area and all these little small local cemeteries
And that was a really interesting process. Of visiting all these different types of cemeteries and grave sites. I have this memory of driving by myself to the cemetery for the first time. And I’m sure I’d been there before, but I didn’t really have a memory of ever visiting it before. And driving through these back roads in this sort of hilly landscape. and there was mist rising off the hills and this just like visceral sense of feeling. Like I knew a place I hadn’t really ever been to before.
JG:
It’s a peculiar sensation, isn’t it? That uncanny familiarity you feel with a place you’ve never been but where you have deep roots. It’s no wonder, then, that Allie’s response as an artist was to give those diffuse connections form.
AH:
I viewed the quilt as a sort of self-portrait made of these disparate elements in terms of all of the samples are collected from cemeteries and grave sites where I have ancestors buried and so they’re all elements of me or that represent me, but from different places all pulled together into a single whole.
I also love the connection to women and feminine work and materials and labor. I think women tend to be lost more in, tracing ancestry because they often lost their last names.
JG:
By gathering the dispersed traces of her familial past, the soil quilt helps to tell a story about Allie’s forbearers. But she also wanted to better understand how soil itself tells stories of time and connection. She told me about a process called…
AH:
soil chromatography
JG:
I ask Allie to explain…
AH:
It’s sort of a layman’s slash pseudo scientific way of looking at soil composition. You take filter paper that’s absorbent and you soak it in a silver nitrate, which is a photo sensitive chemical. And then you prepare a soil sample with sodium hydroxide. Which then you also soak into the dried filter paper with the silver nitrate.
And you expose that to light and it creates these really interesting patterns and different colors from that soil sample. From which you can get a rough idea of the composition in terms of like sand versus clay and specific minerals or metals in the soil. Um, so in a sense it’s a portrait of a specific soil sample.
Interference: A Portrait of Soil
TH:
Ok, can I cut in here?
LK:
Of course, Tori, what’s on your mind?
TH:
Well, I’ve heard of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Portrait of a Lady, but a portrait of soil? This feels like new territory….
LK:
Indeed it does. But think about the word you just used–territory. Does it remind you of something soil-related? Tori, you’re a wine lover, aren’t you not?
TH:
Oh! Are you talking about terroir? That’s what we’re getting at, right?
LK:
Yea, terroir! That lovely term in the world of wine that refers to the environmental conditions that make wine possible, not to mention distinctive.
JG:
It’s interesting you guys bring this up. Maxwell had a helpful way of breaking this concept down and connecting it back to the soil.
MP:
It’s commonplace in things like Somalis, to have tasting notes and variations based on the soil that the grapes were grown. And I think it’s sometimes lost that every single product that we eat or consume, has that same variation based on the soil. So that’s why Tennessee grown tomatoes might taste a little bit different from Florida grown tomatoes. And especially depending on whether that’s like South Florida, whether that’s northern Florida, whether that’s West Tennessee or whether it’s east Tennessee. And it’s all based on how rocky or organically rich, those soils are in the mineral content.
TH:
Ah, yes.
LK:
And from what I understand, terroir refers to more than just the topsoil in which grapes are grown; it’s the whole food web that underlies the topsoil too.
MP:
If you work your way down in like the, complexity of the kingdoms, you got plants, and then you can work down to like the, small organisms that live in the soil amongst the plants, the anthropods.
And then further down you have the microorganisms that live in the soil that consume some of the soil biology, end nematodes, worms, different things like that. They eat things, they excrete things. And then those excretions either absorb by your plant or they bring something that your plant wants around and then will absorb.
TH:
Okay…nematodes and worm excretions–not exactly what I want to have in mind when sipping on a nice glass of wine. But this *is* interesting. It’s like every glass of wine you drink or tomato you eat is imprinted with the unique conditions and dynamics of its landscape.
LK:
Right—terroir doesn’t impart a specific flavor, per se, but something more complex. Depth, dryness, tartness, mouth feel—the whole experience depends on an ecosystem of qualities that can never be exactly replicated.
TH:
So, Lutz, I guess what we’re saying is, cheers to the nematodes?
LK:
Yes, and salute, humble worm!
Part III: Learning Loss
JG:
Though her origins are in photography, Allie’s interest in materiality and the photographic object soon inspired her to work with natural materials like wood, sawdust, beeswax, and ash.
AH:
when I started college, my, initial major was ecology and biodiversity, and then pretty quickly, I realized that I loved learning about, those concepts, but that approaching it as a scientist was really challenging for me ’cause I was interested in personal connections that I had with landscapes. I was interested in the relationships and the stories.
JG:
Allie’s journey into soil began with some of her earliest experiences of loss.
AH:
I guess, starting point for me with the soil was exploring loss of my maternal grandparents that happened in early childhood and visiting the cemetery where they’re buried and the soil there is so like deeply red and super fine and just coats your hands. I remember doing some early visits to that cemetery. Just thinking about that loss and finding myself visually really attracted to that soil and just like picturing I think what it would be like to be covered in that soil and did a performance piece where I covered myself in the soil from that cemetery.
JG:
Soil may serve as a powerful metaphor for place and people, but Allie’s soil quilts also evoke a quite literal connection to soil through death and burial.
AH:
The idea of burial and bodies decomposing and becoming part of the soil is really interesting to me. When you’re buried, you’re, covered in, in a blanket of soil in a sense. Burial is like, the most intimate connection we’ll ever have with a landscape in terms of being reintroduced into it and becoming part of it. Finding something comforting in that like one might by being covered by a blanket.
JG:
Whatever comfort the soil quilts may provide is temporary. At the end of their time in the gallery, Allie sweeps the soil into an undifferentiated pile.
AH:
I think there’s an expectation that it would’ve just challenging emotionally to let go of it. But it didn’t feel challenging. And maybe was also an exercise in letting go. Loss is so hard because you realize what your connections are to others, right? They’re revealed through that loss.
And so I started to think a lot about what are relationships in an expanded sense? What are my relationships to non-human beings to non-animal beings, to the environment? And if I have strong relationships with those, why would I not mourn them in the same way?
Interference: The History of Soil Erosion
TH:
I’d love to cut in here, if I may.
LK:
Of course, Tori, what’s on your mind?
TH:
Well, I’m really struck by Allie’s discussion about loss and mourning as it relates to her soil quilts. And I can’t help but think about how much we have lost, as a society, in our relationship to soil and our natural environments
LK:
I’ve been thinking about this too, Tori. Allie’s soil quilts seem to implicitly acknowledge the fact that soil has become so precarious in the modern world.
TH:
Right! I’ve heard soil referred to as “the skin of the Earth,” and we’ve collectively done some serious damage to that skin. Like, next level scars.
LK:
So true. I feel like the elephant in the room of this episode is the Dust Bowl…
TH:
Totally. In my mind, the Dust Bowl was like an object lesson in a model of agriculture that takes more than it gives back to the land.
LK:
And soil erosion is a problem that’s still very much with us. According to a 2023 study supported by the National Science Foundation, soil in the Midwestern U.S. is currently eroding at rates up to 1,000 times faster than it forms.
JG:
You know what–Maxwell actually lent some historical perspective on this topic.
MP:
Historically, agriculture has always been a super labor intensive job. And so. As industrialization happened, we had machines that came through and did these things. Machines gave you an advantage. But they also froze a new problem, which is compaction.
TH:
Compaction, huh? I thought the threat was more epic dust storms and airborne particles?
JG:
Yea, it was—but that kind of soil erosion is a byproduct of compaction, which disrupts the delicate structures that hold soil together.
TH:
Ah, I see—so soil wouldn’t be as affected by wind and drought if it was held in place by plant roots and fungal networks and the glue-y byways of microbial life.
JG:
Right, and the events that led to the Dust Bowl were really just the start of a longer saga of soil erosion that continues into the present day. Things got even worse after WWII when, as Maxwell explains,
MP:
We figured out that we can avoid having to weed by spraying things like glyco phosphates on the soil, which kill broadleaf competitors to the, the grassy crops that we’re farming. what we’ve come to find out is that glyco phosphate has a huge detriment to the biology that’s in the soil. And then we also know that machinery both compacts the soil and also just tears up the biology in the soil.
This extraction based system searches to take plants and make them into factories where they give us what we want and then we don’t have to give them anything except these chemicals. But the balance in the ecosystem is a lot more complex than that. And so we continue to take out things without realizing how much we’re not giving back.
the detriment of carbon loss from tilling and from conventional farming has just been depleting and depleting the health and the carbon within our soil. Eventually we won’t be able to sustain feeding the people we have been if we don’t change our agricultural practices.
TH:
So in this scenario, conventional farming leads to a mass starvation event? It reminds me of the Mad Max franchise and the role of the last fertile oasis in the post-apocalyptic imaginary.
LK:
Not too mention the carbon that’s produced from transporting produce across the country to keep our grocery aisles stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables year-round.
TH:
I know, right—like, I shouldn’t be able to buy strawberries in November. Yet here we are—obliviously out of touch with seasonal growing cycles. I have to admit, though, I find it hard to imagine a world where people are satisfied with eating only what’s in season where they live.
LK:
True, but this is the model of Community Supported Agriculture, right? The growing popularity of these market models does give me some hope.
JG:
Speaking of, I think it’s about time we get back to the farm…
Part IV: A Case for Doing Less
JG:
In their exploration of loss and memory, Allie’s soil quilts do more than meditate on family lineage. They also gesture toward the death of soil itself and the care that it will take to weave its broken webs back together again. In this vein, you might even say that regenerative farmers are quilters of a sort. Theirs is a patchwork of rotating crops and moisture-retaining mulch and compost piles teeming with happy worms. The philosophy and practice of permaculture is based on the principle that land management should mimic nature and that diversity breeds strong, resilient ecosystems.
Chris explains how regenerative practices rehabilitate depleted soil.
CV:
If you practice regenerative agriculture. Over time, you should build up the amount of organic carbon in the soil. And so it does a couple things. Number one organic carbon holds onto nutrients really well. It also holds onto water really well. And so it increases the, it’s called the cation exchange capacity. The ability for the soil to hold onto nutrients and then release them to plant. But it does the same thing with water as well, right? And so those soils that have an increased organic carbon function a lot better.
JG:
The process of carbon banking may sound complex, but in practice, the first steps couldn’t be more straightforward.
CV:
Our soils are depleted in many cases. Two to 3% of their weight, has been depleted. And so if you can just get that carbon back into the soil and many times, you know, the way to do that is just stop tilling it. Because when you till soil, that organic carbon oxidizes and off gases.
And in many cases. It’s a lighter lift to do these types of practices. You’re doing less to the soil.
JG:
Maxwell also touted the benefits over time of developing ecologically minded practices, like no-till farming.
MP:
You don’t have a lot of physical labor after a while. Like that is one of the things that’s so interesting about the system is L till is supposed to make all the tools that you use obsolete. The broad fork. I’m supposed to not have to use that after a certain amount of time ’cause it’s used to break up compaction. If I’m doing my job correctly, then the compaction stops in the soil and then I just have some good healthy soil I can just keep planting into.
JG:
The idea that doing less can add up to a whole lot more in the world of regenerative agriculture is certainly appealing. But sometimes people need to be taught to let go enough to let nature correct course. Chris believes that this lesson can be gleaned from paying attention to what soil does when you leave it alone for a while. He tells me about the “Soil Your Undies” challenge, an initiative to make citizen soil science feel fun and engaging.
CV:
the Oregon Extension Office had that brilliant idea of like bury a pair of underwear and seeing how they degrade over time and using that as a way to get farmers to think about their practices.
So the farmers are bearing the underwear to understand their soil health. And so it’s purely intuitive. You bury a pair of underwear over time, the microbes in that soil and the fungi in the soil will help to decompose that underwear, or the cotton parts.
And then you harvest it, and then you see how much has been, degraded over the course of two months, which is typical growing season. And the remarkable thing is it’s very repeatable. It’s predictable and it’s also really a fun way to just do science.
JG:
It’s not just farmers who can take part in the “Soil Your Undies” challenge; it’s open to anyone with a pair of cotton undies and some dirt to bury it in. And it’s that accessibility—as well as its, uh, cheekiness—that makes it so effective.
CV:
If I had my wish, I would wish that everybody felt like a scientist. We engage in science all the time. And we just aren’t conscious of that. I think that soil is a great place to get people to understand that they are scientists because they can bury a pair of underwear see what happens and then be able to draw on their own intuition as to why it happened that way.
JG:
Intentional observation can transform our perspective, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Knowledge is an active transfer between people and their environments, moving as though through mycorrhizal networks.
MP:
You can’t get to where we are from not listening to the people who’ve done it before. The inherent humanness that’s necessary for you to pass these specific skills down is what attracts me to it. You can’t learn how to steward plants without understanding, like the Milpa system, the three sisters system has been on this continent for a thousand, like longer than our country has been around.
That long scale observation of nature is something that humans have to pass to each other. It’s like, this is not even something that belongs to me, it belongs to the land itself.
JG:
Soil is a great teacher, and we can learn more from it than the science of growing food. Soil also models relational and epistemological tenets, like the importance of fostering diversity and challenging monolithic ways of thinking.
MP:
That’s one of the things that I respect the most about that soil practice is like, there’s no good and bad. It’s all one. There’s no good and bad bacteria or fungi. It’s all life. And that’s the same with humans in our history is like trying to make sure that we protect and continue on what is not good or bad, but just the human experience. And that’s like the glue that holds the soil together. In that same way. It’s like having the diversity of all what makes us up is what holds us together rather than trying to manufacture, pick out the best.
JG:
Approaching soil as an analogy for life has the power to heal ecosystems and societies. It can also encourage people to re-evaluate deep-seated stereotypes that exist around agrarian life.
MP:
there’s a lot of stigma that exists that I think is currently being fought against when it comes to black farmers. I think in our community there is this huge move towards raising ourselves up through education to give ourselves opportunities in more metropolitan scenarios to kind of release this agrarian lifestyle that would define us as a people for a large part of our history in America.
I think as we moved into to industrialization, we began to prioritize that type of working man more. People who were former veterans had come home and worked in factories for years of their lives and were the breadwinners, and that was our culture as Americans. But the farmer fell from being what was our backbone. In black culture, we wanted to escape that past, but I think the agrarian subculture has a power to it.
JG:
Maxwell offered an example.
MP:
The caricature of black people in watermelons has been so negative for so long. But when you look into the history of it, it was because there was former slaves who became sharecroppers, who were able to lift themselves into prosperity and middle class living from growing and selling the fruits, which were indigenous to Africa originally, melons. And so what that tells me is that we had a historical affinity and ability to grow things and to take care of land well. And that gave us that opportunity of change. I think those stories of transformation should be upheld.
JG:
Reconnecting with agrarian lifestyles can be a way to reclaim difficult histories and carry forward legacies of land and food sovereignty.
MP:
I don’t want to be robbed of this connection with the earth. I think that the stigma can create this separation from ourselves and nature that I think is worse than whatever. Racial epitaphs that we may be fearful of, like being disconnected from what is life and grass that we can touch, um, will trap us just as much as the idea that we’re only able to work land and be in fields.
I came from a STEM background, and I think especially students who have interest in those fields and their application to agriculture at this point to where we can more consciously take care and feed people without making such a huge negative impact on our environment.
That’s gonna take those brains, it’s gonna take that brightness inthose kids. And so I encourage those kids to look into applying those skills to this industry. ’cause it’s not a dead industry. There’s still revolutions to be made as long as there’s people we gotta eat. And so figuring out ways to do that. Not destroy the planet, it would be awesome.
JG:
Chris also sees education as the lever for creating meaningful, long-term change in how we relate to our environments.
CV:
I had a teacher who really was not interested in teaching. Like she just wanted us to take tests and just get through the semester. And because it was a subject that was so near and dear to me, I rebelled very strongly against that. And I actually failed Earth science. I am probably one of the few PhDs in earth science who have failed earth science, but that was the motivating factor for me to get into STEM education.
The idea of education can look different. And especially in middle school, when we are losing a pipeline of motivated learners because we’re basically training them. That mistakes are bad, right? That it’s wrong to make a mistake.
So if you memorize something, you’ll get it right on a test, and that is not science at all, science is a exploration. It’s about making mistakes. It’s about learning from your mistakes. And that’s not always an easy thing to pull off in the classroom, which is why a lot of teachers avoid it. But from my perspective, it makes for an educational experience that’s meaningful. That’s authentic and, and one that’s very impactful.
Conclusion
JG:
I don’t come from a STEM background. My interest and concern in the environment developed through reading fiction and watching movies. If someone told me that we were losing topsoil at a precariously rapid rate, I might not be able to connect with that loss in the same way as when I first read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
While we need scientists to understand what soil is, what it does, and how to heal it, we need storytellers and artists to help us feel why soil matters and how we’re connected to it. Allie’s soil quilts move us to think about what it might feel like to be covered in soil; more specifically, in the soil of our ancestors.
At the farm, soil is available to our senses in a different way. I’ll never forget the day I helped Maxwell make soil balls for the young seedlings that we were getting ready to plant in the field. I spent an afternoon pressing handfuls of wet soil into compact balls around the delicate root systems to give them more space to grow before they went into the ground. This was a whole different kind of soil intimacy—not a glimpse of the moment we all become one with soil, but an act of nurturing its future development. According to Maxwell, that point of contact with soil is key to inspiring a broader appreciation for the environment and our place within it.
MP:
Farming can create the crossover to where ecology means more to people. Because they see the direct influence it has on us.
JG:
I look at the black earth caked beneath my fingernails and know it’ll take some elbow grease to get it out. But I also relish the fact that I’m taking part of my day’s work with me and leaving something of myself in the Wonderful People garden. And I guess my takeaway is this: if soil is where we will ultimately return, why not try to leave the ground a little better off than it was when we got here?