Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture

“You’ve got to stir the pot or it burns on the bottom.”

storage ability is called effective rainfall.

we shouldn’t refer to particular plant species as “native” because species are ever evolving, too. We should refer to the landscape simply as an ecosystem of plants.

The soil–root interface is called the rhizosphere,

“plant” potatoes we simply place the seed potatoes on the soil surface and then cover them with a thin layer of second-cutting alfalfa hay, but not too thick, otherwise the tender shoots have a hard time growing up through the hay. As the hay breaks down, consumed by biology over the course of a summer, we simply put more hay around the plants to k

These simple sugars, referred to as photosynthate, are the building blocks of life. Plants transform these sugars into a wide array of other compounds. Many of these compounds are used by plants for growth, however, a significant amount of them are transferred to the root tips where they are ‘leaked’ into the soil as root exudates.”

“If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make major changes, change the way you see things.” It was

“plants take in carbon dioxide from the air and combine it with water to form simple sugars.

Holistic management focuses on the four ecosystem processes and our potential impact on them. Those processes are: the water cycle, the mineral cycle (which includes the carbon cycle), energy flow, and community dynamics (the complex set of relationships of biology within the ecosystem).