Soil health is a very popular term these days. It seems to get tossed around without… well, without much context.

The reason I say that is that the definitions that are offered for soil health seem a bit too ambiguous. As in, there are a lot of missing pieces that the “official definition,” as highlighted below, doesn’t cover.

It also tends towards another term that irks me to no end.

From the USDA NRCS (United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service), soil health is defined as,

… the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.

Continued capacity? Really? That’s soo… soo sus.

Like it aligns with the very same simple definition of “sustainable” (from Oxford Dictionary via Google):

… able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.

The whole premise of soil health is well-meaning, don’t get me wrong. It’s trying to emphasize the importance of soil as a living thing, as opposed to just dirt.

(Dirt = combinations of sand, silt, and clay.)

Soil, in the past, wasn’t identified as a living, functioning ecosystem 30 years ago because much of that pontificating about bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and more couldn’t be measured. It wasn’t quantifiable.

And in science, when you can’t quantify something, it’s not exactly going to gain traction as something legitimately worth studying in the scientific community.

Thankfully, that was just 30 years ago, and not today. (But, as I write this, it’s amazing how far we’ve come… I was just a wee lass 30 years ago, to be honest…)

That said, I think it’s time we upgraded the term “soil health.”

See, it goes back to what I pointed out above about how it suspiciously aligns waaayyy too much with “sustainable.”

Let me back up. Sustainable was the big term about the same time that the term soil health popped up; actually, now that I think of it, it was about a decade before.

It was a new-fangled term that idealized the concern for the environment and living ecosystems. “We must protect our ecosystems,” and sustainable seemed to be the coveted term that had more luster than “conservation.”

(Ironically, both terms are synonyms of one another!)

Of course, the definition highlighted the need to prevent the further depletion of our finite, and precious resources, being water, forests, mined non-renewable resources, native ecosystems, and more.

A step in the right direction in raising awareness of how we’ve been taught to treat the land. But, we know now that it’s just not enough.

As one rancher put it, that I absolutely love, “Why should we sustain a degraded resource?”

Again, let me back up.

The degraded resource this fellow was/is referring to is our soils, and our land base. Our agricultural practices have been treating the soil like dirt: like an inanimate, lifeless growing medium. Applications of NPKS (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur) fertilizers and pesticides, as well as extensive amounts of tillage, has contributed to the degradation of our soils, both in cropland and pastures.

Records have shown the huge loss of topsoil of several feet due to these degenerative practices. Losses in soil fertility, increased issues with pests and weeds, and fears of impacts of drought have prompted a steady increase of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to combat these issues.

Yet, none of these inputs has solved anything. No weed has been completely wiped off the face of this earth. No pest has either. Soil isn’t being conserved. And, farmers aren’t making more money doing all of this (except the big dudes who keep getting bigger and bigger).

The same can be said for gardening. Paralleling the recommendations that farmers get from agronomists about fertilizing, using chemicals to grow food on vast acres of land, and having to till on a regular basis during the growing season (pre-harvest and post-harvest, specifically), gardeners are getting–and following the same advice. Yet, they too have neither eradicated no weed nor pest.

Soil is also degrading on these tiny post-card properties. (Let’s not get into my pet peeve about lawns… yet.)

By the time the term and proceeding recommended actions of sustainability came out, people have no been shown to focus efforts on, well, conserving what they have.

But, again, why must we sustain a degraded (and degrading) resource? It doesn’t make sense.

Telling us to sustain what we already have is like trying to establish that what we already have, degraded over the last century or so, is normal. It’s a symptom of what I’ve heard others call the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.”

In other words, the poor quality food, the poor quality food, the under-productive land we are supposed to care for, is completely normal.

Folks, it’s not normal. Not by a long shot.

That’s why I despise the term “sustainable.” I’ve had folks argue in favour of sustainable in that it’s a means to stop the degradation in order to help us move forward to better soil, better land, better people, and better health. I mean, they have a point, but we can’t be sustaining what we’ve got in order to move forward. Sustainability implies that we just stay where we are, and that’s that.

No. No, no, no, no.

We can’t do that. Look at how many health issues that we have, from cancer to autism to dementia to obesity, diabetes and heart disease; how our weather patterns have shifted in a way that we’ve not seen for many, many years, and so on. We have to do better.

So, why must soil health be a reflection of this sustainability crisis mindset we need to get out of? Why does soil health need to be a “continued capacity” to be a living entity when it can be so much more?

Also, how does “soil health” create action to encourage people, like my fellow gardeners, to care for their gardens better than they thought possible?

To me at least, it doesn’t. Soil health seems to be more of an ambiguous term synonymous with just doing a bunch of measurements and assessments and… that’s it.

Just like soil scientists would consider “soil quality” a means of measuring and assessing the… heh, quality of the soil. This presentation through Agriculture Canada points out how soil health is very synonymous with soil quality, and rightfully so.

So, where’s the “so, what?” Where’s the direction that must be taken after soil health is assessed?

Umm… do you know?

See, this is what I mean when there’s so much missing about the term “soil health.” It’s to the point where I don’t like it anymore, just like I don’t like the term “sustainable”.

Again, it’s fantastic that we’re raising awareness about how much LIFE is in the soil, and what it does for plants (or perhaps vice versa). But… what about the actions we must take?

South Dakota farmer Rick Bieber has shared a solution for that conundrum: he says that he feels that soil health is just too much of an unknown term to have much merit in the regenerative agriculture (and gardening) community. He’s come up with the term “soil care” to reflect how we must take action to care of our soil. Or, be Soil Caretakers.

I think he’s on to something.

Soil care implies that we must work with nature in order to grow healthy plants. Like, truly healthy plants. And, in working with nature, we look to nature for guidelines, principles and inspiration on what to do in order to take care of our soil.

This is what it means to be a Soil Caretaker.

Admittedly, in the gardening world soil care isn’t nearly as inspiring as growing plants. But, we do need soil in order to grow plants, do we not? Many of us can’t afford (not just money, but time and energy as well) to do hydroponics which don’t require soil. So, we have soil to “use” to help us grow those beautiful hostas, geraniums, carrots, broccoli, sunflowers, pole beans, pumpkins, and more.

What does soil health mean to you? Do you think that we need to upgrade it to something akin to soil caretaker? Let me know!