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? 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! 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? She has been providing agricultural consulting and extension services in Regenerative Agriculture since 2003, and is the Director of Integrity Soils Limited. It’s so complex. This is a good thing coming from an ecology standpoint. It’s a whole system issue that we’re dealing with. When they go and do research, they go and look at, “Let’s look at a cow. How much methane is it emitting? Bad cow.” Instead of, “How does that work in nature? What is that system in nature?” After the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, they went in a year later to find out what was the fate of that oil.

Without dumbing down the soil science (and it’s full of references for people who want more..) Nicole explains in clearly understandable ways how soil works and what we can do to stop harmful practices and grow better. Nicole is an independent agro-ecologist, educator, and author of For the Love of Soil. She is recognized as a knowledgeable and dynamic speaker on the topic of soil health. Let me set something straight right here at the outset. This is not a conversation for farmers. It is for each of us, regardless of where we live and what our livelihood is. Nicole helps us understand the part we each play in the health of the soil. She tells her own story and how her passion for soil health came about. She discusses the toxic load that the world is bearing and how that also plays out in our health as well. Finally, she discusses steps for turning things around for the Earth’s sake and our own. Brix measure the dissolved solids in the setup of a leafy plant. We’re using that as a tool to look at how much sugar and dissolve solids? How well is that plant photosynthesizing? It’s an indicator in the field. Whereas, these new meters are new infrared, spectroscopy, so they need to be correlated with those specific crops. At the moment, you can test maybe twenty different crops, apples, pears, and those obvious ones. There’s a lot of calibration that’s still required to test it but some of these new meters will tell you where in the world was this grown, which is cool. People can correlate that this has come from this property. It’s taken all of these things for a while but now it’s a hand meter.

Customer reviews

I am so glad that you said that just because it has that label doesn’t mean that it’s been produced on a small scale. Like in whole foods. I sometimes see these berries. I’m a big berry girl. I love berries. It says organic, so I think, “That’s great,” but I know their motto crops of berries. It’s done on this huge scale. Tell me, how does that damage the soil? What’s wrong with that if it’s organic?

We have all seen dust blowing in the wind as working (tilling) the soil disrupts the soil infrastructure. Do the people tilling realize that the most valuable substance in their soil is what is darkening the sky? It is humus, the final breakdown of organic matter, with a structure even finer than clay. Humus is an amphitheater, if you will, in which soil microorganisms thrive. That is exciting. I’ve heard of the brix meter that measures the amount of minerals and such in the soil itself. Explain how these new meters are going to work that consumers may be able to use. This is fascinating, even though it is complex. I like how you’re breaking it down for us. I want to ask, you wrote the book For the Love of Soil . Who was your target audience for that book?

That whole argument and I get that people are feeling overwhelmed. They want to feel like they’re making a difference but the problem is the industrialization of food. Going vegan, if you continue to eat industrial food, you’re just as big as a problem because you’re then eating soy products. You’re eating processed products that come from on no-Bali or something instead of looking at how do I eat local. A lot of beef is raised on land that would never be suitable for crops anyway. A lot of the statistics that you see about meat are all based on what happens in a CAFO. I don’t eat CAFO meat. I’m not interested in eating an animal that’s basically been sitting in a yard its whole life. Our guest in this episode was Nicole Masters. Visit her YouTube channel at IntegritySoils.co.nz for more resources. For a letter from a recent journal, “As a dancer, I always struggled to maintain my energy levels and my physical and mental health. My health hit an all-time low the summer before my senior year while I was living in Phoenix dancing with Ballet Arizona. I was attempting raw veganism and I grew very thin and had no energy for ballet. Let alone energy to put toward living a vibrant, joyful life. I searched for answers and finally, I discovered the Weston A. Price Foundation.” Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Nicole Masters. 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.