Have you ever thought about what creates good farm soil? In conventional agriculture, we’re often told that it’s all about nutrients — some soils have less and others have more, and the goal is to amend our soils to make them fertile. But Korean Natural Farming teacher Chris Trump says this sort of thinking misses the point.
"A lot of the conventional systems don't foster soil life. It's kind of the opposite. So if you have a decrease in soil life, you are now going to rely on kind of spoon fed nutrients. You are now the sole provider of nutrients for your crops."
Korean Natural Farming takes a different approach. Instead of thinking about nutrients, KNF farmers like Chris focus on relationships.
"We all learn about photosynthesis in biology class, the sun hits the leaves, the plant uses its water it's accumulated, and that sunlight to create carbohydrates and things that it uses for its structure and its branches and its leaves and fruit production," he said. "And it takes some of those excess carbohydrates down into its root zone and opens shop and creates an exudate field."
An exudate field refers to an area where a plant is secreting something. In this case, the plants are secreting glucose, or sugars. And local microbes — bacteria and most importantly fungi — come to trade nutrients that they’ve collected in exchange for this sugar. Chris says he thinks of it kind of like a bake sale:
"They're selling baked goods to microbes. But really, it's an exchange. It's a symbiotic relationship that plants create with fungi in the root zone because the fungi can be chewing on sand, silt, or clay—rocks—100 feet away, 200 feet away, in some cases, a mile away. And bring those digested minor minerals to the root zone in exchange for the sugar in a continual process."
These relationships and exchanges between plants and fungi and bacteria form the foundation of the soil food web.
"That relationship and that increase of microbial life as those relationships are fostered foster the whole rest of the soil community," he explained.
"So earthworms breed based on food source, they eat bacteria. If your soil is alive abundantly, mommy and daddy worm get together and say, let's make a lot of babies. And then they're living 18 inches down and coming up to eat in the surface. And so they're creating porosity or water retention, you increase water holding capacity in your soil as your microbial life grows. But um these relationships are more complex than all of academia understands right now we understand almost nothing of the interaction between microbes in a community, and we understand very little about microbes in general, especially beneficial."
What Korean Natural Farming practices do instead of trying to understand every detail of these relationships, is to observe them and to attempt to boost the amount of life in the soil. Rather than applying specific nutrients to crops, KNF farmers go out into undisturbed forest or prairie areas, collect a bucket of dirt, which is full of indigenous bacteria and fungi, and bring it back to their farm to feed the micro-organisms carbon and get them to multiply.
"Natural farming has something unique in that it has a very nuanced process for making compost, really focused on specifically focused on fungal production or fungal multiplication," Chris said.
The end product is essentially shelf-stable fungal spores — kind of like a powder that you can pull out when you need it and mix with water to boost soil life. This is especially important for many modern farms, because fungi are the easiest microbes to destroy in a soil and the hardest to bring back.
"They’re the ones that go the fastest. And they don’t blow back in the wind, they don’t kind of show back up unless they’re brought by a deer pooping in your field or a bird flying over and dropping, fungal spores are too heavy to travel very far. And so if you’ve destroyed your fungal populations for big farms or many neighboring big farms, there is no fungal life, it doesn’t come back unless somebody carries it. So these are tools kind of re-establish diverse but also indigenous microbial life."
Chris Trump reminded me that the tools that Korean Natural Farming uses to foster soil life aren’t really new — they’re practices that farmers all over the world followed in different ways before the so-called Green Revolution. But in the Western World, we threw them out two or three generations ago and replaced them with spoon-fed chemical nutrients. Today, we’re just beginning to understand why the older practices worked and how they fostered healthy soils. For
