“My dad Patrick loved telling people that more life could be found in a teaspoon of soil than there are stars in the sky. In reality a single teaspoon of healthy soil can contain as many as 1 billion microbes. This is considerably fewer than there are stars in the galaxy (100 billion), but considerably more than there are visible stars in the sky (somewhere between 2,000 to 5,000 depending on which search result you chose to believe!).

The point is that soil is pretty cool. It’s the foundation of our food system as well as that of the natural world. A healthy soil can retain water like a sponge to help with drought resilience and lessen the effects of flooding, and there is more carbon stored in the soil than in all the plants in the world. For these reasons any decision that’s made on the farm goes back to the soil.”

~ Dreda Darling