The Living Soil Handbook Introduction

Introduction
C onfession: I have never actually grown anything in my life.

I have never constructed a leaf or imbued a flower with an
appealing fragrance to draw in pollinators. I have never sewed roots through
soil or traded carbon cocktails with soil microbes in exchange for nutrients.
I am just not that cool.
In the 11 years I have been farming, all I can claim credit for is making
the conditions right (and sometimes, admittedly, very wrong) for food and
flowers to grow. If a customer thanks me for growing the food they pur-
chase, I feel like a fraud. I feel as though I couldn’t possibly take that credit.
My job—indeed, the job of any grower—is not to grow food but rather to
facilitate that growth. Something else entirely does the growing.
That “something” is a complex community of living organisms—both
macro and micro—that work in conjunction with air, water, sunlight, car-
bon, and nutrients to grow plants. Humans aren’t the creators here. I repeat:
We simply make the conditions right for crops to grow and make food—this
is the literal definition of cultivation.
Three Principles to Farm By

In this book I blend my experience stewarding living soil with the realities
of making a living as a professional grower. The very short version of that
knowledge is this: Getting what you need from the soil comes down to first
asking the soil what it needs. And it is true no matter where you live. What
the soil needs to thrive in humid Florida is largely the same as what it needs
in dry Montana. It comes down to three basic principles:
1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.

2. Keep the soil covered as much as possible.
3. Keep the soil planted as much as possible.
I first came across these three principles several years ago as a beginning
farmer reading about conservation agriculture and soil health. My wife,
Hannah, and I were suffering through some crop failures and I sought guid-
ance on what we were doing wrong. The books and articles told me that,
1
The Living Soil Handbook
although we could apply sprays and try a variety of techniques to protect

crops, the best way to fight plant disease and pest pressure was to nurture
soil health. And the best way to do that? Follow those three principles.
Unfortunately, the books and articles weren’t overflowing with guid-
ance on how to follow those three principles. The texts used terms such as
interplanting and no-till or cover cropping but did not offer much technical
detail on how to execute those practices. Somewhat frustrated, we began
experimenting on our farm with eliminating mechanical tillage, trialing
different mulches, and interplanting multiple crops together in the same
bed to see what liked growing together. In 2018, I started The No-Till Market
Garden Podcast, and my motive was to help others and myself by having
conversations with farmers who were experimenting with low- or no-tillage
methods to discover, and then share, what they’d learned. Farmer Jackson
Rolett and I started No-Till Growers (www.notillgrowers.com) to aggregate
(and create) videos, talks, podcasts, and articles. Later we employed grower
Josh Sattin to make detailed technical videos and host a bimonthly live
show on YouTube called Growers Live. On that show, Sattin interviewed
growers, and anyone could log on and ask those growers specific questions.
The goal of all these ventures has been, and is, the same—to answer the
question what does the soil need to thrive? Ultimately, through these experi-
ences and many conversations with agronomists, growers, and scientists,
I’ve learned about a range of widely applicable technical solutions for
keeping the soil as undisturbed, as well covered, and as fully planted as
possible. In this book I work to flesh out the details of how to employ those
principles not just on a farm like mine, but on any farm. My hope is that
anyone, anywhere will be able to use this book as a guide to designing the
right system for their context and soil—that is, to put those three principles
into practice.
That system might wind up looking similar to the shallow compost
mulch system Hannah and I use at Rough Draft Farmstead in central Ken-
tucky (USDA Hardiness Zone 6b) as described in chapter two and
throughout this book. Or you may find that some or all of our methods won’t
work for you. For example, you may not have access to the rich and plentiful
compost that we enjoy here in horse country. Furthermore, you might not
have the abundant rainfall we do, or the relatively generous number of frost-
free days. Environmentally, you might be opposed to the use of plastic silage
tarps—and not without reason. To account for that, I’ve set up this book as a
choose-your-own-adventure of sorts. And no doubt, an adventure it will be.
Before I wrap up these introductory thoughts, however, I want to have
an obligatory pause and reflect on two crucial words that show up in each
of the three guiding principles: “as possible.”
2
Introduction
Figure 0.1. All of our practices at Rough Draft Farmstead, from mulching to cover cropping
to interplanting, are part of our goal to protect and nurture the soil.
Marry. Those. Words.

When the practice of no-till is a grower’s primary tool for stewarding
the soil, “as possible” must be their mantra. These words are beautifully,
even pristinely, the essence of no-till agriculture. They encourage the
grower to be reasonable. “Yes,” those words remind us, “pulling carrots
disturbs the soil. Raking disturbs soil. Animals disturb soil. It’s okay. Just
disturb the soil as little as you possibly can in your context.”
Though avoiding soil disturbance as much as possible is important, the
enterprise of creating and protecting living soil isn’t beholden to the goal of
no disturbance ever. Indeed, I believe each farmer will discover that their
path to stewarding living soil evolves as much through dedication to no
dogma as it does to no disturbance. As long as you use a given tool to pro-
mote soil life and biology, you are advancing toward the goal. This means
keeping an open mind about soil practices that can create temporary soil
damage, because those practices may ultimately create a more friable soil.
Sometimes promoting soil life involves using a disc or tiller to work in com-
posts and amendments, especially when starting a new garden. Other times
it includes broadforking a bed to break up compaction, which allows for
3
better water infiltration and soil respiration that in turn promotes photo-
synthesis—a central goal for growers, as I explain in chapter one. The genius
of the broadfork is that, although it causes some significant disturbance in
the moment of use, its action can actually enhance soil conditions. And
when a broadfork is used in harmony with the guiding principles of caring
for living soil, it’s a tool that eventually renders itself obsolete.
There are other good reasons to abstain from dogma, too. For one thing,
soil science is ever-evolving, and future discoveries could change our under-
standing of what helps the soil and what hinders it. For another, some
practices that shouldn’t succeed sometimes do, while practices that should
succeed sometimes don’t. One example of this dichotomy is interplanting
with carrots, which are not a very competitive crop. Most of the time, sowing
carrots around other crops doesn’t turn out well for the carrots, and yet, some
growers end up with excellent results. Soil biology is profoundly complex and
dynamic, and it will take some time to dial in your growing systems and build
up your soil’s health. At first, you may have to undertake more disturbance
than you’d like or more than you see other growers doing. Don’t worry about
all that—focus on what your soil needs in your context and it will thrive.
Figure 0.2. Living pathways between beds of okra: keeping the soil covered and planted
as much as possible.
4
Introduction
Make good decisions for your farm business, as well. Run trials. Start
small. Test a couple of different methods in a few beds rather than remaking
the entire farm with a no-till system you’ve never tried before. Ultimately, if
you’re doing things right—keeping the soil planted, covered, and managed
with low disturbance—your production and sales will reflect it.
The Original Stewards

Vastly underrepresented both in this book and in conversations about
regenerative agriculture are the contributions of indigenous populations—
the people who employed the stewardship model of soil management for
thousands of years before being dispossessed of their lands or shipped
across the ocean and enslaved. Like many Americans, I am descended from
colonizers and slave owners. And I firmly believe we owe it to the indige-
nous and Black populations to avoid claiming their style of agriculture as
our invention. No individual alive today is the originator of concepts and
practices such as land stewardship, living soil, permaculture, conservation
agriculture, or mulching. Being conscious of that can help to repudiate the
hubris that led European settlers to violently force indigenous people from
their lands and force African slaves to do the work of tending the soil and
harvesting the crops. We are simply discovering what indigenous popula-
tions knew intuitively for thousands of years: that our role is not to force
anything in Nature, but to listen to it, to steward it. In that way, agriculture
that focuses on living soil is not an innovation, it’s an apologetic response to
the many wrongs forced upon the land and for the attendant harm and loss
suffered by many people.
At its core, The Living Soil Handbook is a book about making that apol-
ogy to the soil. It’s about leaving behind the forceful-agriculture mindset
and enabling the soil to do what it naturally wants by once again engaging
in regeneration. It’s about rebuilding that relationship with the land, study-
ing it, and constantly working to understand it. As in all relationships, you
will make mistakes—and as in all relationships, it is recognizing and owning
those mistakes that will keep the bond alive.
I’ll conclude with this thought: The dusty land deeds and rusty barbed
wire fences that define the physical boundaries of farms cannot contain the
environmental harms of forceful agriculture. Our waterways are full of
eroded soils and leached-out chemicals that originated on farms located
miles away. Bird and insect populations are declining all over North Amer-
ica and in many other places around the world. The health of communities
is diminishing, and one reason for that is the lack of nutrients in, and the
abundance of pesticide residues on, food grown through conventional
5
agriculture—agricultural practices that attempt to force the soil into doing

what the farmer wants. The remnants of pharmaceuticals consumed by our
sickened communities join the waste stream and, along with nitrates and
phosphates from synthetic fertilizer, end up in our lakes and oceans and
drinking water.
Chemically farmed soil does not heed borders, but living soil is not fully
containable, either. Healthy, vibrant soils clean our water and bring back life.
The effects of farms rich with living soil spill out into the communities, too;
but instead of sterilizing or poisoning the environment, these farms enliven
their surroundings. The populations of birds and bugs that are attracted to a
healthy farm environment also enrich the larger ecosystem well beyond the
gardens where they reside. Moreover, living soil provides for the grower,
economically and emotionally. That’s what living soil and no-till are all
about: care for the soil and the soil will care for you and your community.
And if you do it right, you’ll never grow anything again.

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Introduction

C onfession: I have never actually grown anything in my life.

Three Principles to Farm By

1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.

although we could apply sprays and try a variety of techniques to protect

Marry. Those. Words.

The Original Stewards

agriculture—agricultural practices that attempt to force the soil into doing

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