Your Health and Soil Health—Affected by the Fixers, the Mixers, the Vampires and the Skeletonisers 

Our good health is linked to a range of beneficial microorganisms in our body, particularly in our guts.  However, we have inadvertently destroyed many of these by eating highly refined foods, overuse of antibiotics and other unhealthy practices. Likewise, intensive agriculture has often reduced soil biodiversity which is essential to long-term plant health, through reduced organic matter, overuse of inorganic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, and heavy tillage.  To get soils back to better health, they need a diverse range of functional soil organisms, a good supply of organic matter and reduced tillage, among other things. Healthy soils grow healthy, nutrient-rich foods, with fewer inputs and fewer consequences to the environment.

There are ~one billion soil organisms in every gram of soil, equating to an astonishing quintillion (10¹⁸) or a billion billion in one hectare of topsoil (10 cm).  Biodiverse soils have thousands of different species, including ‘good, bad and ugly’ microbes (bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and others) and larger species such as mites, nematodes and earthworms.   These include many well know organisms such as beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria through to more bizarre ones such as  ‘vampire’ (vampyrellid) amoebae which leave perfectly round puncture (aka ‘teeth’) marks in the cell walls of their prey (fungi and algae) through which they suck the juices out. There are also microshredders, young oribatid mites, which ‘skeletonise’ plant leaves, thus helping in organic cycling.  Many organisms, such as earthworms, ‘mix’ components in the soil, assisting in important nutrient cycling and waste reduction.

 Each field, pasture and woodland has a unique soil food web affected by the various organisms living in that soil. When the biodiversity is changed or decreased by unsustainable practices, the food web is altered. This often has undesirable consequences not only for the environment but also for what is growing in that soil and thus for our food chain and our health. Intensive producers need support to change to more sustainable practices as this can be a difficult and sometimes costly process - think capacity building and outreach, focussed research, financial and market incentives.

Learn how to make farms more sustainable both economically and environmentally in our Sustainable agriculture course or read some of our Sustainability ebooks