The symmetry between my work in regenerative agriculture and studying human health never ceases to amaze me.
Our understanding of the function of the soil is accelerating at breakneck speed and yet leading soil ecologists admit we probably know less than 1% of what is really happening in the soil below our feet.
Early farmers better understood the importance of soil health even though they may not have had the science to explain what was really going on. Pre-war, mixed farming understood the need for rotation, composting of manure, and building humus through grazed grass fallows so our soil could feed our plants and abate disease.
The green revolution – led by the brightest and best reductionist scientists – focused on specialisation for production. The soil was considered a medium to hold up a plant rather than a living system; consequently, it was treated like dirt!
In these decades billions of pounds of research were poured into better understanding how to manage plants and animals to achieve high outputs. Nearly all of the current agricultural practices and recommendations were shaped and influenced by the research into what is required to make a plant grow.
Based on these findings we decided upon the most important nutrients to use for plant growth (N, P, K), we bred the species of plants that best responded to those nutrient applications, and we chose the breeds of livestock that fattened quickest on these specialised grasses and grains.
Unfortunately, with our eye pressed firmly to the microscope lens, we completely missed a fundamental factor; that a plant is in fact a holobiont.
A holobiont is an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit.
Unlike a human whose gut is enclosed within a physical body, a plant’s gut is made up of the living organisms in and around the root zone in healthy living soil. These organisms solubilise the minerals that plants can’t access and ‘feed’ the plants in exchange for sugars made in photosynthesis.
When studying a plant in a lab, the soils used for the experiments are sterilised and homogenized so scientists can ensure a consistent experiment. There are ZERO living organisms in that soil!
Without these organisms, a plant essentially has a stomach but no gut. The plant is only able to take up a tiny fraction of the nutrients floating in the soluble pool. It responds dramatically to additions of N, P, K because it STARVES otherwise!
This is the equivalent of studying how humans digest food by thinking of our stomach as a furnace that simply delivers calories of energy and our colon as simply as helpful waste plumbing!
Oh, wait!
Pasteur vs. Béchamp
At a critical juncture in the development of science in human health, there were two friends who had developed two very different theories for the cause of disease in humans.
Louis Pasteur with his germ theory and Antoine Béchamp with his terrain theory.
Germ theory proposed that microorganisms were the cause of many diseases; this paved the way for antibiotics and vaccines for which most of us are very grateful today.
Béchamp claimed to have discovered that the “molecular granulations” in biological fluids were actually the elementary units of life. He named them microzymas—that is, “tiny enzymes”—and credited them with producing both enzymes and cells while “evolving” amid favourable conditions into multicellular organisms.
Béchamp also denied that bacteria could invade a healthy animal and cause disease, claiming instead that unfavourable host and environmental conditions destabilise the host’s native microzymas and decompose host tissue by producing pathogenic bacteria.
Unlike the germ theory, the terrain theory explains why some people get sick while others, when exposed to the same pathogens, do not.
As with most things, there is truth within both of these theories. Unfortunately in the West we have adopted germ theory to the expulsion of almost every other theory of health. Our medical research, theories, practices and protocols are almost entirely through the tinted lens of germ theory.
What we have learned from studying ecology and applying it to our regenerative agriculture systems is that when an ecosystem is in an early stage of succession – such as after a volcanic eruption or fire or damaged by modern agriculture practices – the limited diversity and complexity of the ecology facilitates the boom and bust in populations of organisms. The sort of organisms that thrive here we often call ‘weeds, docks, thistles, willow herb for example.
However, in a natural system, an ecosystem will gradually increase in diversity and the connections between these organisms become highly interactive. Instead of a species of bird only having one species of insect to eat it has ten, in turn, those insects have thirty species of plant to thrive on instead of two and pollinators have hundreds of flowers to feed upon. The whole system thrives regardless of whether it’s a dry year or a wet year – there’s always some species doing well.
Similarly, in the soil the complexity of organisms increases in step with the above-ground ecology. Different plant species produce root exudates, each with a variety of different nutrients and chemical signals which then interact with a wide range of soil organisms, each with a specialism such as nitrogen fixation, phosphorus uptake or trace element scavenging.
In these complex systems, mycorrhizal fungi extend the reach of plants and connect plants together so they can share nutrients and protective plant chemicals. The whole system becomes more resilient and resistant to disease, drought and flood.
In regenerative systems, we encourage farmers to reframe ‘weeds’ and instead think of them as an indicator of a system out of balance. Organisms can only thrive when we create the perfect conditions for them to thrive.
When farmers use a herbicide to kill the ‘weeds’ it further reduces the complexity of the whole system leading to more weeds. As an alternative we can advance the system complexity beyond the conditions that suit the dominant organism. This can be done by adding more species into the sward and in a cropping rotation introducing diverse herbal leys.
Meanwhile, since the 1990’s we have been discovering that us humans also have a system of microorganisms that is a lot like a functional soil food web.
We, humans, are actually composed mostly of microbes. Estimates vary but probably in the region of 100 trillion of them. Microbes outnumber our human cells ten to one, weigh more than 2kg and the number of genes in one person’s microbiome is 200 times the number of genes in the human genome.
Most of our soil food web lives in our gut, particularly the large intestine. The microbiome is the genetic material of all the microbes – bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses – that live on and inside the human body.
Just like in the holobiont that makes up the plant and soil these organisms help and benefit us in far more ways than they cause us disease.
Many help us to digest food, support our immune system and produce important nutrients such as B vitamins B12, thiamine and riboflavin, and Vitamin K, which is needed for blood coagulation and so so much more.
A healthy microbiome has been shown to influence our ability to maintain a healthy weight and maintain a positive state of mind. It can even drive our behaviours, happiness and addictions.
Autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia are associated with dysfunction in the microbiome. Autoimmune diseases appear to be passed on in families not by DNA inheritance but by inheriting the family’s microbiome.
The field of epigenetics is exploding and I have no doubt that over time we will learn nearly every expression of a gene is influenced by our environmental conditions including the health of our internal ecosystem.
So equally when we disrupt our internal ecosystem then our gene expression and overall health suffers.
Interestingly what damages our complex and resilient soil food web in the soil too is highly damaging to our human microbiome.
Tillage, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, irrigation with toxic water, antibiotic use and additions of highly digestible nutrients leads to damage and destruction of the complex, diverse and health-supporting microbiome and facilitates creation of a simplified low successional environment that is more prone to population explosions of pathogenic organisms.
“Antibiotics kill or inhibit the reproduction of pathogenic bacteria and cause dramatic changes in normal human microbial communities… previously established colonies may be overtaken by colonies of different and potentially pathogenic species.”
In human health, a diet of refined foods laced with these farm chemicals is surely going to reduce the complexity of your own internal defence system. In addition, most people are not only exposed to the antibiotics fed to livestock but are taking multiple courses of these microbiome disrupting interventions over their lifetime along with an increasing number and variety of other pharmaceuticals.
The incredible advances in medicine have made it possible to kill the ‘weeds’ that cause us people so many issues but with every intervention, we are reducing our capacity for resilience.
At what point will we start to look at the root cause – our drastically simplified inner ecology. In our modern world – especially the West, we now have a population whose internal ecosystem is in the lowest stages of ecological succession. We make perfect hosts for invading pathogens.
Unless we want to stay on a treadmill of ‘weed killers’ with ever diminishing effectiveness and increasingly severe unintended consequences, we have to proactively rebuild our health and well being. It’s not in the interest of those selling the weed killers to encourage this – it’s up to us.
Just as in nature, we need to add diversity and build connections. We need to redesign the way we grow food towards life-enhancing systems and build a healthy, complex and robust microbiome.
Eat many different real whole foods grown in healthy soils, spend time in the sun, spend time in nature, drink lots of pure natural water, take functional and restorative exercise, get a good night’s sleep, manage your stress and build a strong sense of community.
We will continue to explore the pro-active and pro-nature ways of building resilience through our primal living series.
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