Episode #301
Frank Ashwood: The World Beneath Our Feet

Dave Chapman 0:37
I read the book, and it’s breathtaking. Would you call yourself a soil ecologist or a soil zoologist?

Frank Ashwood 0:45
Wow, I hadn’t thought about that. I should probably call myself a soil zoologist in the sense that I’m really interested in the soil animals. But really, by day I go by soil ecologist, because it’s the interactions between the soil animals and their surrounding environment that I study. So maybe both, I guess.

Dave Chapman 1:06
That’s great. There’s so much power in that study of ecology, which is a fairly new science – the last 150 years or so. I’ve read other scientific books about soil, and honestly, I found them boring. I did not find your book boring, even an entire chapter on subsoil. It was amazing to read a chapter on subsoil and not find it boring.

Dave Chapman 1:40
You’re very good at exploring and delighting in all of these small animals. Just for the people who totally skipped science class, in this case, small animals are arthropods, insects, not little furry voles or mice.

Frank Ashwood 2:02
That’s right. The little animals, particularly in the subsoil level and in the other chapters as well, are largely arthropods, which are animals with an exoskeleton. Jointed legs is what arthropod means. They’re things that we would recognize as insects or arachnids, like spiders and that kind of thing, or even smaller things like tardigrades, which are relatives of insects and other arthropods. They’re very small, only visible with a microscope.

Frank Ashwood 2:30
But these are a slightly different form of animal life to us in that they don’t have a backbone; they’re invertebrates. Whereas all of our bones are on the inside, they rely on a hard exoskeleton to keep their insides in.

Dave Chapman 2:44
One of the things that you do throughout the book is to weave together the ways in which this very large number of animals is crucial to our survival on this planet. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anybody do it so well. Could you talk a little bit about why that is?

Frank Ashwood 3:11
Certainly, yes. The soil contains, at our last best estimate, about 60% of all the biodiversity on Earth, and that’s probably a massive underestimate, really. Much of the life on Earth, much of its diversity, is in the soil, and we rely on it. It’s the interactions between all of those organisms that actually fuel all of the cycles that we require happening in soil: carbon cycling, nutrient cycling. That keeps plants growing.

Frank Ashwood 3:40
Ninety-five percent of our food, human food, comes from the soil. It’s grown on the soil, and that can only happen because there’s all the nutrient cycling, water cycling, carbon cycling happening in the soil, and that’s largely driven by the life within it. We really rely on that life for our own survival. Even our medicines, things like antibiotics – most of our life-saving antibiotics come from microorganisms in the soil.

Frank Ashwood 4:08
Without that, we would have no form of defense against diseases. We rely on soil so much more than I think most people appreciate.

Dave Chapman 4:17
I’m a farmer, and I’m constantly in conversations or debates in which people don’t agree with you – people from agriculture who see the soil essentially as a substrate, and you can nuke it if you want. In fact, they do nuke it. They’ll come in with methyl bromide or something to try and wipe out what’s living and start over again, constantly. Starting over every year, they’ll hit it with a soil fume again if they’re growing a crop like strawberries.

Dave Chapman 4:59
You have a very different vision from what I would call the big ag mainstream idea of how all this works.

Frank Ashwood 5:08
The issue really with coming in and, like you said, nuking the soil or wiping the life out of it is that you need that food web, those interactions between lots of different organisms within the soil, in order to actually keep the soil functioning healthily and to grow those crops. If you wipe that out, then you become dependent on artificial inputs, fertilizers and that kind of thing, to keep the soil fertile enough, and that’s not a sustainable practice to keep doing.

Frank Ashwood 5:38
You’re constantly drawing organic matter and nutrients out of the soil but not replenishing it as well. The issue, if you wipe out the life in the soil, is you keep it stunted at this early – what we call a successionary – stage. Life moves in waves into new environments, and it takes a while for things to establish and for resilient webs of life to build up.

Frank Ashwood 5:59
If every year you go through and you plow or you add some fumigants, you’re really stunting what I would call ecological succession. You’re stunting that to just the pioneering species that can quickly move in, use up some limited available resources, and then die.

Frank Ashwood 6:15
So you’re not building up these complex interactions between very different organisms that you need to be able to actually keep the soil functioning. That’s the main issue with doing things in that traditional intensive agricultural approach: actually, you end up depleting the soil rather than allowing it to develop and continue to self-sustain in that way.

Frank Ashwood 6:37
It’s not really sustainable, and, worst-case scenario, it can lead to things like soil erosion, which we can talk about. You can lose topsoil very quickly, and we’ve seen that a lot in the U.S. with the Dust Bowl, for example, that disaster that happened. That’s where you just aren’t maintaining the soil, and all you need is some freak weather events, winds, floods, and you can lose your topsoil. It can take 1,000 years for just a few centimeters of topsoil to naturally regenerate, and you need about 15 centimeters of topsoil to grow most crops. It’s not a sustainable approach that we’re currently taking.

Dave Chapman 7:15
Now, okay, explain it so somebody who doesn’t know what you’re talking about would get it. You’re saying if we’re not protecting and encouraging the life in the soil, you can end up with a dust bowl. How does that happen?

Frank Ashwood 7:34
The Dust Bowl happened because the natural prairie systems had deep-rooting grass that was holding and anchoring the soil together there. When pioneers came in and farmed that, they took out the grass. They put in shallow-rooting crops, which they then took out every year, and so essentially that anchorage of the soil was lost.

Frank Ashwood 7:53
Then very rapidly, you saw that topsoil just blow away, literally blow away in the strong winds that happen there, and so that lost a non-renewable resource in that regard. It’s still going to take many millennia for that soil to come back. When I talk about the soil food webs and the things that we need to keep soil sustainable, I’m talking about interactions between different organisms like decomposers, shredders like millipedes and slaters or woodlice.

Frank Ashwood 8:20
You need springtails. You need mites. You need earthworms. You need all these different organisms working together, because they all do slightly different things and they help to process the organic matter and the nutrients in the soil. Particularly in the case of earthworms – maybe not so much in the U.S. There are still some native earthworms in the southern parts of the U.S., although we can come to the invasive earthworms of North America later if you like.

Frank Ashwood 8:46
But you need these organisms in the soil that chew up and bind organic matter with the mineral part of the soil – the sand, the silt, and the clay. It’s through the action of their feeding and their burrowing and all these interactions that they actually lock away carbon and nutrients within the soil. They take it from the surface, from the litter, and bring it down. As they chew on it and they poop it out, that’s when microbes can move in.

Frank Ashwood 9:11
They’re the real chemical factories of the soil, the bacteria and the fungi, and they’ll unlock those nutrients and make them available to plant roots. That system can keep going. It’s a holistic cycle, really. The plants grow, they die, things break that down and release the nutrients back into the soil, and then the plants can use them to grow again.

Frank Ashwood 9:33
So if you interrupt that cycle, you’re stuck looking at how you can put in nutrients yourself. That’s why we become so dependent on fertilizers, for example, in agricultural settings, because we’re not letting the soil do what it naturally would be doing.

Dave Chapman 9:48
I think that this was the traditional argument for organic agriculture, and it’s interesting: the early books – Sir Albert Howard, “Soil and Health”, Lady Eve Balfour, “The Living Soil”. They were talking about exactly what you’re talking about. They didn’t have the depth of scientific experiments to necessarily support it or explain it, but their observations, I believe, were pretty much held up by all the work that’s come since then, of going, yes, they were right.

Dave Chapman 10:27
We need to cycle all of this. We need to guard this precious resource of organic matter in the soil. Again, I know you just said it, but why is organic matter a precious resource?

Frank Ashwood 10:45
That’s a good question. There’s a few reasons. Firstly, it’s largely what gives soil structure. Soil structure is hugely important because that’s what helps it to hold on to moisture. You talk about moisture retention and resilience to drought and that kind of thing – it’s actually largely the organic matter within the soil that helps the soil to retain that moisture. It helps to give it structure to relieve compaction as well.

Frank Ashwood 11:10
If you lose the organic matter from soil, then it can be very easily compacted or lost to erosion, as I mentioned earlier. But it’s also precious carbon. We’re talking about precious soil organic matter. It’s carbon. It’s locking away carbon from the atmosphere. As we’re staring down the barrel of climate change getting worse, we need to be thinking about how we can get more carbon locked away in the ground rather than lost to the atmosphere.

Frank Ashwood 11:36
There’s more carbon stored in the soil than there is currently in the atmosphere, and we want to keep it that way. But if you do things that disrupt the soil and leave that organic carbon exposed, then it can rapidly be decomposed by organisms and respired up into the atmosphere.

Frank Ashwood 11:54
There’s a whole load of reasons why we need that organic carbon, all that organic matter, in the soil. We need to be taking more approaches in agriculture that allow us to actually lock away carbon and lock away organic matter than we currently are, largely.

Dave Chapman 12:10
I know that you’re familiar with some of the arguments of land sparing. It was in your book; you mentioned it. We had a conference two weeks ago, and we had a debate between an agroecologist from Berkeley named Tim Bowles and Michael Grunwald, who’s a journalist who has written for the New York Times about this. He’s a follower of Tim Searchinger’s, who’s a lawyer at Princeton who has calculated that we can’t afford to grow food organically because the yield per acre or hectare is less. Thus we need more hectares, more acres, and that means we’ve got to cut down more trees and move into more marginal land, and it becomes a downward spiral.

Dave Chapman 13:06
But in order to address our exponentially growing population, we have no choice, or we hit a tipping point for climate change. Now, this is a complex thing. I’m just giving a very cartoon version, but when I first heard it, I thought it was insane. I thought, “This can’t be right.” But I’ve tried to take it seriously and really consider, am I misunderstanding it?

Dave Chapman 13:38
I would really love to hear your response to that challenge. If the way that I farm gets a lower yield per acre, per square foot, per square meter, than somebody who’s intensively using chemicals, is their path perhaps better for climate change than mine? It’s a really tricky one.

Frank Ashwood 14:02
It depends, I guess, is the answer, and such a wishy-washy response. But I think it depends on the timescales you’re thinking along. It’s possibly true that taking an organic or a regenerative agriculture approach to farming, the yields aren’t necessarily going to be as high as intensive agriculture, because it’s not geared towards such intensive output. So there is an argument to be made that actually we need a diversity of farming approaches in order to be able to feed a growing population.

Frank Ashwood 14:32
Maybe moving away from as much meat production, so that we’re not using as much land for livestock, is a pretty solid argument for that as well, I think. But also, I would ask, can we afford to keep going down the intensive agricultural approach in terms of the sustainability of our soil resources to keep growing food? Because I think that’s the thing that’s not necessarily factored into this sometimes.

Frank Ashwood 14:56
How many farms do we still have left in 50 years if we keep going down this approach? Can we afford… I think it’s a short-term way of thinking to say, okay, we just need to continuously, intensively, agriculturally farm this in order to feed the population, without considering what impact that’s actually having on the sustainability of the soil resources on those farms. Can they continue? Our generation might be okay, but what about the future generation?

Frank Ashwood 15:22
Can they still grow food if we continue to farm in that way? I think it’s a serious conversation. I think it’s a debate that needs to be had, and like you said, it’s very complex. I think there will be a need for many approaches. There will still be a need for intensive agriculture in the future.

Frank Ashwood 15:40
I think that’s inevitable, but I think that it needs to be balanced with a more sustainable – I want to say regenerative or organic – approach in many places as well, to balance out the sustainability of those soil resources. I don’t know if that answers your question, because it’s quite a difficult one to just answer in a one-off. But I think we really need to be thinking about it, not just in the short term, but also in the long term as well.

Frank Ashwood 16:07
That’s another framing for that argument: what can we actually seriously afford to keep doing? Can we keep going as we are for future generations? The fact that we’re losing topsoils at a rate that’s 10 to 20 times faster than we can possibly replace them – with our current approaches, I can’t see that upping the intensity of that is going to help anybody.

Frank Ashwood 16:27
I think we do need to take it seriously, and we need to seriously consider how we’re going to use our land resources to feed our populations, especially as they grow. But it can’t just be by increasing intensive agriculture, because down the line there’ll be nothing left to farm on. We do need to have that serious conversation and think about all options, really.

Dave Chapman 16:48
I agree. I’ve become a fan of the book “Limits to Growth”. Have you ever encountered that book?

Frank Ashwood 16:57
No, I haven’t.

Dave Chapman 16:59
It first came out in 1972, and it was a big deal. It was early computer modeling from MIT, and a team of people did all this modeling.

Dave Chapman 17:08
One of them, Dana Meadows, wrote the book that was the popular version, so people could understand, because they felt we were up against limits to growth. Looking at it from a systems point of view, we were really going to be in trouble unless we addressed it. So they were making this plea for change at a point in time where they felt we could still avoid catastrophic outcomes if we could just change our path, and they almost succeeded.

Dave Chapman 17:45
They almost did. They got the attention of Congress, and they were speaking to world leaders around the world, and then they just got crushed by the industry. They were just portrayed as charlatans and fools. I think their thinking has remained solid and really worth hearing and thinking about: what are the limits to growth? To me, when I hear that argument, I go, well…

Dave Chapman 18:16
I think we better start dealing with exponential population growth if we want to survive on this planet, because it’s true that if that continues, I don’t think it matters if it’s chemical or organic, it won’t be enough, and we will face what all species face when they don’t have a feedback loop.

Frank Ashwood 18:41
We need some predators.

Dave Chapman 18:44
We need some predators. We’re the predators, I’m afraid. That’s right. We’re a little bit out of balance. I’ve seen the same thing happen with aphids in a greenhouse, because in a greenhouse you don’t have natural predators. You can bring them in, but they can grow, as I’m sure you’re aware, very explosively.

Frank Ashwood 19:06
Yeah, or they can clone themselves, which fortunately we can’t do yet, so that’s good. They’re working on it, though, aren’t they? Any more in our favor for boosting populations…

Dave Chapman 19:16
That’s right. Good. We’ve only scratched on, and I don’t know. It’d be fun to go a little bit more, just circling around. You have this whole book, and this is a really good place to dive much deeper. But I’m trying to understand why it matters to us all. How can we explain to Joe Plumber and Jane Banker that it really does matter to you what happens to the springtails and the millipedes? It really does matter. We’re not being poetic. Why does it matter?

Frank Ashwood 20:01
It does matter. They’re doing a lot for you, whether you realize it or not. Hopefully, after reading the book, people will realize what they’re doing for you. I alluded to it earlier in saying that we depend on soil for 95% of our food. We rely on it for antibiotics. We rely on it for a lot more than that. We rely on soil for climate regulation. We rely on soil for plant production. Most of your listeners will appreciate that.

Frank Ashwood 20:29
Most of the things that we actually need as humans to survive on the planet come from soil, and come from healthy, functioning soil. There’s not much point having an inert medium on the ground that’s not doing very much. It’s not going to do the things that we need. And the organisms within it maintain the soil for us. We don’t need to do anything.

Frank Ashwood 20:50
We just need to leave them alone, let them be, or help them sometimes if we’re having a disproportionately negative effect on the surrounding land. They’re just plodding on, unaware of the benefits that they’re giving us. They’re just living out their daily lives, and there are decisions that we can make in our daily lives that either help or hinder the health of the soil in our surrounding environment.

Frank Ashwood 21:15
That’s how you garden, how you go about managing any surrounding soil in your area. Are you taking an interest in protecting the soil? My argument in the book is, I would like more people to just take a look, take an interest, go out and roll a log, roll over a rock, take a look underneath, and see what’s crawling around. Because I think we don’t think about it on a day-to-day basis.

Frank Ashwood 21:40
I do because it’s my job, but most people don’t think about soil life day to day because you’re busy. You’ve got lives. You’ve got a job. You’ve got the kids. You’ve got whatever. Soil’s an opaque medium. You can’t see through it. You can’t see the stuff that’s in there. It’s easy to dismiss it. It’s just what’s out in the garden. But actually, soil is the reason that we really have terrestrial life on Earth. We wouldn’t be here without soil.

Frank Ashwood 22:08
And it needs our help more than ever because of the way that humans are managing the Earth at the moment. As we’ve alluded to, we’re losing soil at a crazy rate. My plea is that people just go and take a look and see if they can find some interest or fall in love with soil a little bit, maybe after reading the book or taking a look at the photographs in there, and just appreciate the diversity of life that’s actually there.

Frank Ashwood 22:34
Because, like I said, 60% of the world’s biodiversity is in the soil. Some of it’s incredibly beautiful and charismatic as well. A lot of people wouldn’t appreciate it until you see it. So my plea is that people just give it a go and then see for themselves if they can appreciate that it’s important, because we rely on it now more than ever.

Dave Chapman 22:55
You talk in the book about the loss of biodiversity on the planet as an existential crisis equal to climate change. This is serious. Why are so many species in danger of dying? I can’t remember the numbers, but it was a really high rate of species extinction that we’re facing now, unprecedented except for probably when a comet hits the planet. But otherwise, and maybe not even then. Maybe the arthropods did better when the comet hit.

Frank Ashwood 23:44
Well, the springtails have lived through four mass extinction events, at least.

Dave Chapman 23:49
That’s right. So are we facing a mass extinction event for these invertebrates? For many, many of them?

Frank Ashwood 23:58
I don’t think there’s any argument anymore that we live in the Anthropocene, which is a new geological age, which is defined as the age of the humans. We’re having this huge impact on extinction rates of animals in the wild, organisms in the wild. I can’t remember the figure. It was either 100 or 1,000 times greater than natural extinction rates that you would expect at the moment. I think it was 1,000.

Dave Chapman 24:25
I think it was 1,000, if I remember.

Frank Ashwood 24:27
It was 1,000. I didn’t want to overstate it. I think it was 1,000 times greater than natural background extinction rates. And the thing with soil is that, because there’s relatively few people studying it compared to the charismatic megafauna – your tigers and your lions and pandas and all that kind of thing – we don’t really know quite how much we’re losing before it’s lost.

Frank Ashwood 24:45
That’s quite troubling, because a lot of these organisms that we could be losing could be quite important in ecosystems for helping them to function, or even useful to us as humans. They could be a really important source of chemical resources or medical resources, like I was talking about antibiotics earlier.

Frank Ashwood 25:11
We don’t really know what we’re losing before we lose it, and that’s really quite disconcerting. But extinction rates in the soil are probably equivalent to or higher than we see above ground, and that worries me.

Dave Chapman 25:25
Frank, yeah, it worries me too. But I’m getting more worried as I read your book. Honestly, I couldn’t quite feel it in my bones, but it’s becoming more true. I think that what you’re describing is somewhat similar to what Rachel Carson was describing in “Silent Spring”. She was looking at this apocalyptic destruction of species because of the pesticides that we were using, and it woke people up.

Dave Chapman 25:57
I won’t say that it solved the problem. It did lead to the banning of DDT, and it certainly created a new understanding that really didn’t exist before she wrote that book.

Dave Chapman 26:03
She really accomplished something, this person. Of course, she was tremendously abused by the chemical industry for writing it. Do you think that what we’re facing right now, due to our rapidly changing soil conditions, both due to climate change but also due to land use – do you think that this is on a par with “Silent Spring”?

Frank Ashwood 26:42
I shan’t say I think my book’s on a par with “Silent Spring”. No. But yeah, I think so. I think it’s a well-timed release of this book, because I want to draw attention to the fact that actually we do need to seriously start taking into consideration soil protection, nationally, internationally. It is certainly on a par.

Frank Ashwood 27:07
I would argue probably even worse than the use of pesticides in ecosystems, because soil is being depleted across the world in a multifaceted kind of way. There’s multiple different stresses on soil: deforestation, intensive agriculture, land use change for human habitat expansion. And all that time, we’re still putting all of our demands, if not more, on the soil that we have still kept aside for farming.

Frank Ashwood 27:35
We’re converting the world’s organic-rich grasslands into farms. That’s a major carbon store, that sink, that we’re untapping and potentially loosening out into the atmosphere, just worsening the effects of climate change. Because soil is so intricately linked into all of these different things like climate change, erosion, all of these other issues that people are facing around the globe, or that the planet’s facing, it’s really hard to not see that it’s one of the major factors that is going to affect, I guess, our survival on the planet.

Frank Ashwood 28:12
Really, it’s if we can actually continue to protect these sorts of resources, because we’re depleting them at such an unsustainable rate. And really, there’s still quite inferior national or international regulations about soil protection. In the EU, they’ve just passed the EU soil law, which is actually, for the first time, really putting soil protection at the forefront of things, but still the biological component of that is missing.

Frank Ashwood 28:42
There’s no mandatory soil biological health monitoring as part of that EU law. We’re starting to get there, but actually it’s still not quite there, and we need to keep pushing. I’m hoping that this book will inspire some people to talk to their local policymakers, the local politicians, and say, “Hey, look, what are you doing for soil? What are you doing to take soil protection seriously?”

Frank Ashwood 29:08
Just start to have a bit more of that conversation on both the national and international scale, because it’s not until that happens that I think legislators will really wake up and start to seriously consider it. We need to build pressure behind that, I think. With “Silent Spring”, Rachel Carson was great at getting that sort of conversation on the table, really shocking people and getting people to really think about this.

Frank Ashwood 29:37
So I’m hoping that something similar can happen for soil protection in the very near future.

Dave Chapman 29:44
Frank, how much do you think that the use of pesticides impacts the life in the soil? I know it does. I know that they’re quite aware of unintended consequences. With soil fumigation, they’re trying to kill what’s in the soil, but for a lot of things, they’re just trying to kill some insect or bird that was going to come and eat the crop, or they’re trying to kill the weeds. There’s a lot of biocides that are used in modern agriculture.

Dave Chapman 30:19
How much of a devastating effect do you think that’s having cumulatively on the invertebrates in the soil?

Frank Ashwood 30:28
We know that it does. A lot of fumigation is for things like nematodes in crop systems and everything. Some of these are very non-target chemicals, so they’re not target-specific, and they will affect other invertebrates just as much as they affect the thing you’re trying to kill.

Frank Ashwood 30:46
Certainly in those where you’re doing soil fumigation, you’re going to be having a bigger impact on the other invertebrates there. It’s basically the same as what we were talking about earlier, where you just reset that food web. You’re going to knock back the ability of the soil to function for decades, potentially, if you carry out repeated heavy impacts, because the half-life of these chemicals can actually be quite long sometimes. They can stay bound within the soil for quite a while and continue to impact organisms that consume or interact with that soil. One of the things that worries me as well is anthelmintics, the anti-worming medication that farmers will give to livestock.

Frank Ashwood 31:28
Because those pass through the cow pretty quickly, and the residues are still in the cow’s dung. If that’s consumed by earthworms, then those are affected in exactly the same way as the parasitic worms, the tapeworms and things that they’re trying to deal with in the cow. There’s only so much hammering that these organisms can continue to take and actually survive. So, yeah, it does worry me.

Frank Ashwood 31:54
I can see the need for these things, but at the same time, if there’s other approaches that can be taken, so crop rotation rather than fumigation or whatever, then I think that’s a much better and more sustainable approach than to constantly rely on these chemicals as our go-to approach. And it’s cheaper as well. All of these pesticides and fumigants and things – it’s quite an expensive way of dealing with stuff.

Frank Ashwood 32:20
It’d be much more cost-effective to take more natural approaches, arguably, I would say crop rotation, so you don’t build up populations of those host-plant-specific pests in the soil.

Dave Chapman 32:32
One of the challenges, of course, that the poor invertebrates face is that they have champions like you, and on the other side, there are champions like Bayer and Syngenta, and they have a lot more money. They have these huge microphones for influencing policymakers, but also influencing farmers, and they’re very effective at it. I don’t mean in any way to diminish your impact.

Dave Chapman 32:58
I just see that it’s David and Goliath here, Frankie and Goliath, and it’s a challenge, and we have to all be aware of that. Whatever happens next, we know that it’s formidable, the inertia.

Frank Ashwood 33:19
I don’t want to see Syngenta or Bayer go out of business, but I think it would be nice if we could balance our approaches sometimes in these things.

Dave Chapman 33:29
Well, I’d like to see them turned into hundreds of much smaller companies, and not be so dominant in controlling the conversation and the outcomes.

Frank Ashwood 33:39
Definitely.

Dave Chapman 33:39
Bayer invented aspirin. That’s been a great boon. They invented heroin, which for people who are dying in great pain is good. But they invented some very bad things too, and they’ve not been great global citizens. I’m curious about… What you’re describing is a very unvirtuous cycle, where if you’re using pesticides and it’s having this negative impact on the life in the soil, the soil isn’t functioning as well as a naturally wonderful place for plants to grow. So it requires more fertilizers, and it’s less healthy, so it requires more pesticides, and more fungicides, and more herbicides, and it just keeps becoming more and more?

Frank Ashwood 34:43
It can often happen. Obviously every farm’s different, and everyone’s doing different things. Generally, I think it’s fair to say that actually, when we step away from just trying to take the more natural approach towards these systems, what you do find is that you start to deplete various chemicals, various important minerals, and then you need to start inputting those yourself, artificially, and then you get dependent on that cycle.

Frank Ashwood 35:10
It could become some sort of negative feedback loop in which you find yourself having to maintain those inputs in order to keep productivity up. So then it becomes a question of: is that sustainable? Is that affordable? How long can you continue to do that? And is there a better approach? I suppose, take a short-term hit and step back and actually try and let the soil recover, and try and get those natural cycling systems going in place, and add organic matter, add some mulch.

Frank Ashwood 35:40
Add some compost. Add whatever, and just try and actually get it going naturally, because these things happen in nature. But the problem is when we come through and we start to manipulate the land, actually, we interrupt those cycles. If you think about it, most land cover would have been forested or grassland. You’ve got huge amounts of organic carbon going in there every year in the form of litter that’s being broken down by all of the life in the soil.

Frank Ashwood 36:09
You’ve got the natural system cycles going: nitrogen, carbon, other nutrient cycling. It’s just a closed loop, and it’s going round. But the moment we come through and we cut down the trees or we clear the long-term grasslands and we start putting in annual crops, you’re interrupting that cycle in a pretty severe way, and so those inputs aren’t going in the same as they would have been.

Frank Ashwood 36:34
So then we need to start manually managing that system, and that comes with a cost.

Dave Chapman 36:39
Have you ever heard of the book “Farmers of Forty Centuries”? It’s an old book. It was written about 1910, maybe 1915, by a guy who worked for the USDA. He did a walkabout, and he went to Southeast Asia, and he was studying all the agriculture there. He was looking at land, some of which had been continuously, intensively farmed without chemicals for 4,000 years. Not all traditional farming or all pre-chemical farming was great.

Dave Chapman 37:18
Obviously, many civilizations collapsed because they weren’t able to be truly sustainable. Not everything in China was truly sustainable. But he was looking at farmland that had been in continuous intensive agriculture for 4,000 years. It was clearly a pretty sustainable system, and gosh, did they ever treasure their organic matter.

Dave Chapman 37:48
They would build really nice outhouses by the road, so people would stop and use the outhouse, and they would get the manure for their field. It was such a different attitude from what we have towards organic matter now.

Frank Ashwood 38:07
Was it Roosevelt that said, “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself”? That’s right.

Dave Chapman 38:15
Of course, he was really talking about the Dust Bowl, because they got to experience it. Can we talk about living soil versus… I don’t know, let’s call it industrial soil. We could say dead soil. I doubt that it’s totally dead, but let’s say it has much less life, much less diversity. You studied both kinds. You have a beautiful description of a very malnourished soil that was used on the landfills to cap it.

Dave Chapman 38:53
Could you describe what’s the difference when you study the life in those two kinds of soils?

Frank Ashwood 39:01
Yeah. My PhD was actually looking at very disturbed land, former landfill sites in East London. I was looking at how we can try and restore the soil on those to be suitable for growing trees, and I was looking at how earthworms and organic material, organic waste, might be applied to try and actually get soil development going in these – not lifeless, but pretty damaged – soils. No soil is ever truly lifeless, I suppose.

Frank Ashwood 39:26
But it depends what’s in there and what it’s doing and how much diversity really is there. These soils, we can often call them man-made soils or Anthroposols, sorry – so human-created or heavily human-influenced soils that you often find in urban environments. They tend to be, if they’ve been made by people… The ones I was looking at were actually crushed building waste that was mixed with a bit of screened topsoil and then reapplied and used to try and grow some grass on it.

Frank Ashwood 39:51
It was pretty ropey in terms of nutrients, but also the pH was pretty extreme. Very severe compaction, because there was very little organic matter in there. It was essentially what we would call parent material, which is the basic building block of soil: crushed rock or weathered rock. That’s where the mineral component of soil comes from.

Frank Ashwood 40:16
But in a lot of the urban scenarios, what we often see is that those soils, especially if they’ve been man-made, haven’t always been done in a way that will actually allow them to develop very quickly into what we would call a true soil.

Frank Ashwood 40:31
They’re lacking organic matter; they’re relatively new, so you’re relying on natural colonization of those soil resources by organisms, which can take decades for things to move in, to get wave after wave of different animals, and for the soil to build up to a point where it can actually support different animals. Different soil animals have different requirements from the soil before they can actually survive there, in terms of moisture content, organic matter quality, pH, nutrient availability – all these things that take time, that can take centuries or 1,000 years to actually naturally happen.

Frank Ashwood 41:07
We’re trying to accelerate in urban environments, and try and chuck some crushed building waste down and call it soil, more often than not, and that just doesn’t really work. What I saw when I was looking at those urban soils was that, largely, they were at this early successionary stage where you’ve just got early pioneering mites and things that blow in on the wind.

Frank Ashwood 41:30
Maybe some nematode worms that can easily get in there, and they’re not really doing much for soil development whatsoever. They’re utilizing whatever small bits of organic matter are available, and they’re just eating that and respiring it. It’s not until many years later that other things move in that feed on them.

Frank Ashwood 41:48
Then you start to get a little bit more development going, or you get some plants growing in there, and you get some litter or some organic carbon being put in by the plants and their roots. Then you actually start to see soil development take place, where soil structure starts to build, with the root exudates or the poo from the earthworms that have eventually made it in, where they’re binding soil together with carbon that they’re feeding on. It takes many years for this inert, essentially dust, really, or crushed building waste, or crushed rock, to become what I would call soil, anything resembling soil, because it hasn’t got that life in it.

Frank Ashwood 42:28
It’s easy to look at soil and think of it as a medium. I think you said that earlier. It’s just a growing medium. It’s got minerals, it’s got water and a bit of organic matter, but it’s actually the life in the soil that makes soil work. You could see on Mars the same kind of… They call them paleosols. It’s just weathered rock, basically. Without life, that’s basically what we would have here on Earth.

Frank Ashwood 42:52
But it’s actually the living organisms that make soil function that are missing in a lot of these urban or human-created soils. So then the question is: how can we accelerate that? What can we do? Are there things that we can do to actually try and speed up that natural process of soil development? Because we need to start creating better soil resources – we’ve talked about losing them. We need to take steps to actually try and build more soil.

Frank Ashwood 43:18
That’s a whole area of research: what interventions can we make, or do we need to step away and do nothing? Because half the time the answer is actually leave it alone. Sometimes we get so obsessed, as humans, with trying to manipulate everything and speed everything up and cut corners and get to the end quicker. Sometimes the answer with soil is actually just leave it alone. Just stop interfering with it.

Frank Ashwood 43:44
Quite a lot of the issues that we have with soil are because we just keep messing with it, and sometimes we just need to step away. That’s a hard message to hear sometimes as well.

Dave Chapman 43:55
No, well, I get it. One of the things about “The World Beneath Our Feet” that struck me was the vision of big time. You’re talking about millions and even billions of years in it, and this forest has been virtually undisturbed by anything outside of its own ecosystem for 130 million years, and you go, well, I actually can’t really comprehend time that long.

Dave Chapman 44:27
I can say 130 million, but it’s beyond my ability to truly understand that, and it makes me realize that even if we screw this all up and make a mess of it, we will be disposed of, and the planet will continue, and it will rejuvenate. It will regenerate. It does that.

Dave Chapman 44:51
I’ve been involved in debates about what organic means, and I became involved in it because there were industries, large corporate players, who wanted to certify hydroponic production as organic, and we said, “That’s crazy. It’s against the law. It can’t be.” The law says soil health over and over, and there’s no soil at all. They just use shredded coconut husks, or for some things they just use water. But it’s the same difference, and then they give a liquid feed.

Dave Chapman 45:33
The plant is 100% dependent on the fertilizer input, and we got into some strange arguments about that. But I just wondered… Somebody told me that down in Peru… I said, “Is all the berry production in Peru hydroponic?” He said, “No.” He said, “Well, yes.” I said, “Wait, what is it?” He said, “Well, a lot of it is being grown in containers, so they’ve got the shredded coconut husks, and by a lot I mean a lot.”

Dave Chapman 46:10
“Right now I’d say the majority of berries, even the majority of organic berries sold in America, are grown hydroponically.” And it’s like, wait, how did that happen? He said, “But even the stuff that’s grown in the ground, it’s essentially hydroponic. There’s no life in the soil, and it’s all liquid feed, 100% liquid feed.” That’s kind of the soil I was wondering about when you say, well, industrial soil versus living soil. Nobody is being a steward to that soil.

Dave Chapman 46:52
They’re just using it as something to hold the roots while they drip in the feed. What would it look like if you looked in there to see what was living?

Frank Ashwood 47:06
No, never thought about that. That sounds like it’s really just being used as a growing medium, not a soil, isn’t it? That’s just treating it as anchorage, I suppose.

Frank Ashwood 47:16
What would be in there? That’s a really good question. There’s always going to be something in there. You’ll find there will be some mites. There’ll be some springtails. There’ll be something there, but there’ll definitely be some nematode worms or something in there – maybe some that they don’t want, probably. What I doubt you would see is a nice functioning food web in that medium.

Frank Ashwood 47:42
I think you alluded to earlier that there’s always going to be something around, and that’s the wonderful thing about soil: there’s always going to be some life. But it’s the interactions between a diversity of life that actually make soil function and make it do the things we need it to do. I don’t think you could really expect to see any kind of proper food web in that situation.

Frank Ashwood 48:10
I’d actually be quite interested to see what was living in there, actually.

Dave Chapman 48:15
That’d be quite interesting.

Frank Ashwood 48:16
That’d be something. What it’s doing, I don’t know.

Dave Chapman 48:23
Let’s do a project. I’d like to see what it’s like.

Frank Ashwood 48:26
Because it’s interesting from a hydroponics perspective, because actually I’m looking at more of a freshwater system than a soil system. It’d be looking at a lot of water-living invertebrates in there rather than… I guess that’s a question for a freshwater ecologist, actually.

Dave Chapman 48:48
It would be very interesting to study it, though, wouldn’t it? Just to see what the difference is. I’m fascinated by what the difference in the food is. I just interviewed a man named László Barabási. He’s a physicist from Hungary who’s in the U.S. He’s at Northeastern and Harvard, and he’s studying all the things that we don’t study in our food.

Dave Chapman 49:15
There are 200 compounds, chemicals, vitamins that we study, and we know kind of where they should be. And then he said there’s 130,000 that we know of that we don’t really know what they do. He calls it nutritional dark matter. He said, “But what we do know is a lot of that nutritional dark matter is in fact where we get the things that sustain our lives, that make us healthy.” It’s not just calories. It’s not just fat. It’s not just vitamins.

Dave Chapman 49:52
We need vitamins. If we don’t have them, we’re in trouble. But if we do have them, it’s fairly simple. But this is not simple. It’s just like the soil food web. You’ve got such complexity that it’s challenging to study it. How do you decide whether this compound and that compound? What should the ratio be for your body to take good advantage of it? I think food grown in a really living soil, grown well – we won’t need to study it, but we will be fed by it.

Dave Chapman 50:28
It will do good things for our bodies. But when we’re trying to understand how to replicate that… I love the thing that you did, where you went around to some farmers, some regenerative farmers in Australia, and you brought your kit. Maybe you could describe how you sort out what’s living in that soil beyond a microbial level, at a slightly bigger animal level.

Frank Ashwood 50:59
Well, this is actually something that listeners could do at home if they want to see what’s living in their soil. You can relatively easily create your own soil animal, arthropod extraction kit at home. There’s a thing called a Tullgren funnel, which is named after a German entomologist named Albert Tullgren, who came up with it. Essentially, what it is is a lamp. You need an Anglepoise lamp and an old-school light bulb, a halogen light bulb, on it.

Frank Ashwood 51:26
You need it to emit heat and light, so no LEDs here, just an old-school bulb. You take a sample of soil or litter or whatever you want to extract the animals from, and you just put it on a sieve over a funnel, put the lamp over it, and then put a cup or something underneath that, and just leave it for a day or two. Soil animals have this thing called negative phototaxis, which is a fancy way of saying that they don’t like light, and also heat.

Frank Ashwood 51:53
They’ll move away from the heat source, which is the lamp above the soil. They’ll move downwards, and they’ll fall through your sieve, and they’ll go into the little cup at the bottom. Then you could use just a hand lens, a reading magnifying lens, or if you’ve got a little eyepiece, or even a camera. If you have a microscope at home, even better, but most people don’t.

Frank Ashwood 52:16
But you could just take your cup and have a look at what’s in there, and you’ll be amazed by the amount of life that’s coming out of the soil, just in your garden or in the litter. The one thing I would caveat that with, though, is check it regularly, because all of the predatory things that drop out in there are going to be instantly eating all of the other things which drop out in there. It’s kind of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Frank Ashwood 52:43
You want to check it quite regularly to see what’s actually coming up. It’s something you can do at home, really low cost, and it’s a nice way of actually visualizing what’s in this impenetrable medium in your garden that you never normally see, and there’s a huge amount of life going on in there. When I went around those farms in Australia, I was actually taking my camera as well. I was taking some photographs of these creatures.

Dave Chapman 53:11
You said that they were so excited to see that the way that they were farming was working, that there was more life in their soil because of the way they were farming. They believed it, but this was the first time it was really shown to them. It was kind of revelatory, wasn’t it?

Frank Ashwood 53:29
For them and for me as well, because it was so… For them, they were taking various regenerative agricultural approaches based on the specific conditions of their farm. Different places in Australia have different challenges. In Queensland, it was very much trying to manage drought. In Tassie, in Tasmania, they’ve got more rain than they need, so they have other issues.

Frank Ashwood 53:52
But what they were all doing was taking various approaches to try and manage the soil in a more sustainable way for the life in the soil on their farms. But like you say, they hadn’t really seen the organisms that they were trying to save. They just knew that this was something that they needed to be doing, and they were hoping for the best that it would work.

Frank Ashwood 54:13
So it was really rewarding, for them and for me as well, when I got to go there and actually show them that patch of ground where they’ve managed to retain some moisture, and there’s some grass growth there and it’s lush. Then you dig up some soil, and there’s some earthworms there. There aren’t earthworms in the surrounding bit, but there’s earthworms there, and suddenly they can see that the approach that they’re taking is actually working.

Frank Ashwood 54:40
That was the first time for a lot of those farmers that they’d actually seen the organisms themselves that they were trying to bring back and trying to save for the sake of their soil quality. And it was rewarding for me, just being able to actually see that look of astonishment and that passion in the farmers. Deeply rewarding to me, to feel like, actually, you know what, this really does matter. This matters to a lot of people.

Frank Ashwood 55:06
This is a fight worth fighting, I think. I think there’s a lot of people that would benefit from doing that, just trying to take a look and see what’s happening in their local patch, and hopefully I could give them the same kind of passion to start taking more protective measures as well.

Dave Chapman 55:23
Well, hopefully your book will inspire people to do that on their own. I see it’s wonderful to have the pro from Dover come in and do it, and you go, “Oh my God, look at that!” It doesn’t require… As you say, people are very busy just trying to survive, but to have somebody come in and they know how to do this, and “Let me show you.” They go, “Oh my God!” I’m sure it doesn’t take very many visits before they completely get it.

Dave Chapman 55:51
They already believed it, but you said they were really excited to see it. Much of what we do, we can only say, well, the food tastes really good.

Dave Chapman 56:01
It’s healthy. Things are good. But this is looking at the life in the soil from a different perspective. One thing I want to ask before we go: I was struck… In your book, you talk a little bit about organic. I thought you talked even more about regenerative. I don’t think you mentioned agroecological at all, and I’m just curious. When we talk about, well, how do we save the soil? How do we create the change?

Dave Chapman 56:31
There are going to be many ways to approach this, but in my mind, you have to have movements. You’ve got to have people getting together and saying, “We’re not going to do it that way. We’re going to do it this way, and we believe in that, and we’re going to say it publicly.” That’s why I am part of the Real Organic Project, because I think we need to rekindle the organic movement.

Dave Chapman 56:59
I think it’s as important, or more important, than it ever was, and it struggles because it can be colonized by large corporations that aren’t interested in organic. They’re just interested in the name because they want to appeal to customers, and they won’t necessarily do the right thing. I’m curious. I see that happening much more so even in regenerative, because there are no rules.

Dave Chapman 57:29
There’s no agreed-upon definition, and so you’ve got the actual worst players of big food and big chemical in there saying, “We’re regenerative.” I’m just curious, what are your thoughts? I don’t want to have you start a fight, but I am curious about your thoughts about this.

Frank Ashwood 57:51
I think you hit the nail on the head there, really. I think the main issue with regenerative agriculture is: how do you define it? It can mean almost anything, really. I’ve seen it from both sides. There are the big players that move in and say, “Yeah, we’re regenerative because X, Y, Z.” But you can say that because there’s very little definition, or you can talk to 100 different people and get 100 different definitions of what regenerative agriculture is.

Frank Ashwood 58:18
You also have some people that I’ve met that are not big ag, but they’re… I don’t want to say snake oil salesmen, but they’re selling unproven, scientifically unproven, holistic kind of approaches and selling that under the same kind of banner as regenerative agriculture. There’s a lot of people that are potentially just… And I think some of them mean well, but I think it’s cashing in on this lack of definition. I think so.

Frank Ashwood 58:44
I think one of the things that really needs to be hammered out – and I know there are people working towards this. The regenerative agriculture consortium that I was working with when I went around those Australian farms, that invited me to go and do that, is called Soils for Life. They’ve got a definition on their website, so they’ve put up a definition of what they consider regenerative agriculture to be, and they’ve put some bullet points out for that.

Frank Ashwood 59:10
That’s a good starting point: actually saying, well, regenerative agriculture is this. It means this. It means this. It means this. Then what we need is some sort of, I guess, global commitment to that, for people to buy into that and say, okay, this is what this means, and then you can regulate it. But it’s not until it’s properly defined that you could actually start to do that.

Frank Ashwood 59:32
At the moment, it’s not in many places, and so then it is open to abuse by players, big and small.

Dave Chapman 59:38
At this point, the big players have so much sway in it. I don’t think they’re going to be uprooted. I keep waiting for a real regenerative movement, the way there’s a Real Organic movement. I think there is a groundswell for it.

Frank Ashwood 59:53
Groundswell is the name of a regenerative agriculture festival in the UK. But I see it. There’s one here in New Zealand, where I’m currently based, called Underground Festival. There’s one in Australia, which is Grounded Festival. These are annual events where regenerative agricultural practitioners will get together. There’s a big one in the UK, Groundswell. I think there’s one in the U.S. as well. There’s quite a big one in the U.S.

Frank Ashwood 1:00:18
I can’t remember the name of it now, but there are quite loud and quite big growing movements, and I suppose the challenge is to actually try and link these all up. I know that they do communicate with each other, but it’s trying to build up that… There’s power in numbers. Eventually, I think it could be successful. I think it’s just continuing to build that momentum.

Dave Chapman 1:00:41
Frank, what do you think that they might have to offer that isn’t in organic, that is not intended and clearly practiced by organic? Most of what I see being called regenerative is organic agriculture, except they add chemicals, and the no-till’s almost entirely using herbicides, and they’re very quiet about it. But it’s the way it is. It’s what it is. So I’m just curious: is there something?

Dave Chapman 1:01:14
Is there some reason, aside from not wanting to give up chemicals or some anger at something that has been established? I’m just trying to understand: why would people think that was better?

Frank Ashwood 1:01:30
I’m not sure it’s my place to say, but I think, in my mind, I guess I immediately think that it’s a question about productivity. I suppose it’s this kind of flexibility of approaches. We talked about this a little bit earlier, which was how can we balance productive output and the demands with actually our ability to produce food for growing populations, with organic or regenerative or whatever approaches. And so I guess… Well, I mean, I’m not a regenerative agricultural farmer.

Frank Ashwood 1:02:00
I probably shouldn’t speak on their behalf. But what I would say is it’s probably just this question about flexibility of options: what approaches can we take to realistically feed growing populations? Is there still a need in some places for chemical approaches, balanced against organic approaches in another place, or whatever? And I guess regenerative is a bit of a broader, more umbrella term that will include organic approaches but will also leave the door open for some alternatives where they’re needed, is what I would think.

Frank Ashwood 1:02:31
But I’m certainly not an advocate or a spokesperson for either, really. I’m not qualified to say. But I guess that’s where my mind wanders. I think that’s probably looking ahead and looking at how we are going to feed the growing population. I suppose we probably do need to be mindful of: are there places where we still need to have other approaches or not? Because, yeah, can we…

Dave Chapman 1:03:01
Well, we don’t need to worry about that, because we’re not going to get rid of chemical agriculture in a hurry.

Frank Ashwood 1:03:05
Well, this is true.

Dave Chapman 1:03:07
We don’t need to think about how we’re going to protect it. It protects itself very well, and it’s got huge momentum. So the question is, what do we believe we should evolve towards?

Frank Ashwood 1:03:19
And we haven’t talked about agroforestry either, which is another approach, which is quite… I quite like agroforestry as a mixed land use kind of approach, which I talk about briefly in the book, but probably not as much as I would have liked to have, because I think that shows real promise in terms of mixed land use.

Dave Chapman 1:03:38
Frank, we’ve talked for a while. I don’t want to abuse your generosity. Is there anything you’d like to say in closing about your work and your hopes?

Frank Ashwood 1:03:52
I would just say that if people are kind enough to buy and read the book and you enjoy it, my plea is to reach out to have a conversation with somebody, whether that’s a friend, a colleague, preferably a policymaker, and say, “Soil is important. Here’s a couple of facts. Here’s a couple of interesting things I learned about why soil is important and why you should think about soil.”

Frank Ashwood 1:04:17
Hopefully, we can help to build this kind of conversation about soil protection and get it the same kind of attention that “Silent Spring” got. I guess, let’s get soil protected.

Dave Chapman 1:04:29
That’s right. All right, Frank Ashwood. Thank you very much.

Frank Ashwood 1:04:34
Thank you. Thanks for having me.