The Soil Microbe Myth: Why Microbes can’t Build Healthy Soil by Themselves

Everyone's talking about soil microbes right now. While microbes are crucial for building healthy soil, focus only on soil microbes and your soil will suffer the consequences. Contrary to what most YouTubers tell you, without the other life in your soil, those microbes will starve, suffocate and die. I'm going to show you why you need other soil life and then show you how to get it. In healthy fertile soil, bacteria and fungi are the main beneficiaries of the sugars and proteins released by roots. Those microbes support plant growth. But on their own, who keeps the soil habitable? Who keeps their population in check? The macro soil organisms, the larger animals like the earthworms, the millipedes and the centipedes and the isopods, the beetles, the ants, the termites, the nematodes and even the insect larvae. If our soils aren't truly healthy and we just focus on adding microbes while ignoring the rest of the life in our soil, three devastating things can happen. Microbes can't easily eat large fallen leaves. That's where the macro organisms come in. The macro shredders, they're the soil organisms that chew and break apart all of the leaves but also all of the other plant waste material and animal waste material that falls on the soil. In doing so, they increase the surface area and that makes perfect conditions for the bacteria and fungi to move in and finish the job. Microbes store nutrients like phosphate and nitrogen inside their own bodies. But they don't just give those nutrients away for free to our crops. We need protozoa and nematodes to eat those bacteria in order to release the nutrients they contain in a bioavailable form that plants can use. Without earthworms, beetles and ants tunneling through the soil, opening up passageways for water and oxygen, our soil collapses and and disease-causing pathogens take over. So when we only focus on microbes, we're only looking at part of the equation. A pile of microbes without earthworms, nematodes and all of the other soil organisms is not a thriving community. If you want healthy living soil with a functioning soil ecosystem, this is what you need to do. The first thing we need to do is grow diversely different plants, at least five in any given area, and then grow heaps of vegetation. So that means planting more densely, but also where we can add in layers to our system. This is especially important in warmer and wetter climates. And lastly, we need to grow plants actively for as much of the year as possible to maintain that root exudate supply. Once you've got your vegetation established and doing the work for you, to keep supporting your soil community in the long term, we need to manage that vegetation. So that means chopping and dropping, pruning, adding plants where gaps appear, so that we basically maintain that big vigorous growth of plant biomass and also the supply of that biomass, the leaves and other plant debris, onto the soil. When you do this, you stop chasing microorganisms and start cultivating the full biological workforce and watch your soil transform. If you have any questions on how to do this, ask us in the comments below.