Soil Food Web | Kaelan

A teaspoon of healthy soil contains more organisms than there are humans on Earth. Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods — a complete ecosystem operating at scales we can’t see but absolutely depend on.

Elaine Ingham’s work on the soil food web revealed that plant health isn’t primarily about chemistry (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) but about biology. Plants exude sugars through their roots to feed specific bacteria and fungi, which in turn make nutrients available in forms the plant can absorb. The relationship is transactional: sugar for minerals.

Industrial agriculture treats soil as inert substrate — a medium for holding roots while synthetic fertilizers supply nutrients. This works, until it doesn’t. Chemical fertilizers bypass the biological system, which atrophies from disuse. The soil compacts, loses structure, requires more inputs to produce the same yield. A feedback loops running the wrong direction.

The food web approach inverts this: feed the biology, let the biology feed the plants. Compost, cover crops, reduced tillage — practices that seem slower but compound over time. Healthy soil sequesters carbon, holds water, resists erosion. The systems becomes self-reinforcing rather than self-depleting.

What makes soil biology hard to manage: it’s invisible, slow, and non-linear. You can’t see mycorrhizal networks connecting roots across meters of soil. Benefits appear over years, not weeks. Small interventions cascade unpredictably, as with any emergence system.

This is why indigenous agricultural knowledge often outperforms scientific management in specific places. Generations of observation encode what instruments miss. The tacit knowledge of soil: what it smells like when it’s healthy, how it crumbles in the hand, which plants indicate which conditions.