For the Love of Soil: Strategies to Regenerate Our Food Production Systems

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For years, many of us involved in regenerative agriculture have been touting the soil health - plant health - animal health - human health connection but no one has tied them all together like Nicole does in For the Love of Soil !" (Gabe Brown, Browns Ranch, Nourished by Nature) Unintentionally, it is appealing to an urban audience to understand these are the chemicals that are being used in agriculture, this is what is in your food chain, and here’s what people are doing on the ground. To get inspired and go, “There’s a massive revolution happening now.” It’s incredibly exciting to travel the world and see the uptake of regenerative agriculture. What that did is it then introduced the paraquat, which is a residual herbicide into my spinal fluid. It sat there for fifteen years. I was told that I had fused vertebras C1 and C2. I went and saw every single bodyworker you can imagine. I’ve got a depth of experience in like Bowen, craniosacral, ortho-bionomy, and acupuncture. You name it. I’ve been to see them. When I was 30 years old, so fifteen years later, I met a chemical detox specialist. He used radionics and ran through a series of questions about, is this environmental? Is this a virus? Until finally, he came down to, “It’s paraquat because I had no idea.” Sharing secrets of the magical properties of mycorrhizal fungi, she laments that we are smiting them with herbicides and pesticides. Her pragmatic out-of-the-box solutions include using spurge and cheatgrass to enlist this won­drous substance to enhance soil health. One way to encourage conventional farmers to step lightly out of the herbicide rut is to reduce non-selective, non-residual herbicides by 30 percent, adding one part fulvic acid (or vermicast extract) to four parts herbicide. This could reduce costs, enhance the function of the herbicide and give the soil a boost. This book gets two enthusiastic thumbs up!

I spent recovering by applying the foundations teachings and my life has dramatically turned around. I have never experienced such vitality and happiness in my entire life. I am so grateful for WAPF. I have become so passionate about physical and mental health as well as farmer rights. I’m so eager to become involved in sharing knowledge about these things.” That’s Eden from Leesburg, Virginia.Here I am, just one person. Let’s say, I know my farmer but I still want to do something on a bigger scale to turn things around because won’t our dollars and won’t our choices impact that business? She tells her personal story of how an herbicide jeopardized her health, though she did not know it at first. She goes over why monocrops are a problem (even organic monocrops), the correlation between chemical companies and pharmaceutical companies, and how personal testing meters are being developed to help us better assess the quality of our food and the health of the soil. In the end, she offers ideas to diversify and regenerate both the land, and our guts, for improved health. Thank you for joining us, Nicole. You’ve had some valuable insights and I’m grateful for your time.

As Andy Rooney would have said, "Did you ever wonder why...' Well, I have wondered why calcium is not even registered in the top three minerals for assessing soil health. "Everybody knows" it is only important to add NP&K! Well, according to Masters, we've been hoodwinked. Calcium is essential.That leads me to one final question about the paraquat in your system. Do you think you’ve detoxed it completely? Is it out of your body? Together with her team of soil coaches, they work alongside producers in the U.S., Canada and across Australasia. Supporting producers who work with millions of acres to take their operations to the next level in nutrient density, profitability and environmental outcomes. I think this is one of the things that we saw come out of that Monsanto case was that they’re making up data. They know the impacts that this is having on either humans, soil, microbiology, or nutrients. They know full well what’s going on and more of these documents that are coming out. I’m not a big conspiracy theorist. I hate that stuff. Unfortunately, it’s big business at play. Why would you stop the gravy train? Unfortunately, it’s people not being connected to the integrity or wanting people in landscapes to flourish. It’s just a business model.

The first chapter had me hooked. Nicole shared her own story about Paraquot poisoning in her teens and how it affected her health and her journey into ultimately becoming an Agro-ecologist, educator and systems thinker. She not only tells her story but weaves it beautifully into the topic of this book. She speaks of chemicals, genetics, epigenetics and more telling the story of human reliance and exposure to these things. She encourages each and every one of us to listen to our bodies, nature and our intuition to build a rich and insightful life. In so doing she builds the reason for having written the book and her love of nature and soil.

Customer reviews

Let’s pivot now and talk about the toxin loading of our soil. First of all, what’s going on and why should it matter to us? What we’re seeing is landscapes are becoming water repellent. They are emitting much more greater amounts of greenhouse gases and have been since we began farming or ranching many of these landscapes. That’s altering the climate. Australia is a horrific example of what happens when that whole water cycle breaks down. Soil, water, and carbon are intimately related. As we start to break down those links, there are consequences above ground. We’re seeing that in regions all across the world. It comes down to how do we start to nurture and develop that gut microbiome in our landscapes to get that atmospheric response. My concern is they’re going to greenwash it as they did with organics but how do we keep integrity in that system? Part of that is looking at what is the output because regenerating landscapes are about the output. Are we increasing the quality of the water that’s coming off the landscape? Are we increasing water-holding capacity? Are we increasing microbial diversity and the food quality that’s coming off the property? As a lay person and amateur gardener, I thought this was a fantastic introduction to regenerative agriculture. The author shares a wealth of wisdom related to weed growth, plant stress, pest activity, water management and soil health. Her work with the pioneering families and agribusinesses (often ranchers) that are adapting these ideas to their own farms and climates (often in the face of overwhelming odds) is eye opening. William Gibson once said that "the future is here - it is just not evenly distributed." "Nicole modestly claims that the information in the book is not new thinking, but her resynthesis of the lessons she has learned and refined in collaboration with regenerative land-managers is new, and it is powerful." Says Abe Collins, cofounder of LandStream and founder of Collins Grazing. "She lucidly shares lessons learned from the deep-topsoil futures she and her farming and ranching partners manage for and achieve."