http://www.permaculturevoices....
This is a great podcast but a little heavy on the chemistry, just to warn you. I never knew that putting anaerobic compost into the soil could harm plants.

Correction: "building the soil"

Well, same difference...

Hi Anderwood. Sorry the link doesn't work for me.

gloria

Here is the direct link:

http://www.permaculturevoices....

Thanks, Dave. That's a good link.

This is revolutionary. Be sure to check it out!!

Thanks, Anderwood. That's a worthy site. I'm tempted to buy Dr. Ingham's book. (I learn better from printed text than audio and video -- think I'm in a minority these days. ) I'll have to wait til the next cash infusion, though.

Has anyone listened to this yet?

Not me. One day. I just don't do enough activities that would give me a good opportunity to listen.

Thanks for posting this Anderwood. I did have some trouble listening--my speakers have decided to make every audio presentation sound like bugs bunny. And I was thinking with respect to Dr. Ingham's video and discussion of soil vs dirt; just as my speakers are obscuring information and spitting out "noise" so do we have agricultural practices that obscure the natural structure of soil and turn it into dirt. This has had a profound effect on the structure and variety of plants that can be grown on the surface of the earth.

As professional archaeologists, this is what we do: turn soil into dirt. With pride we claim to be "dirt" archaeologists. But ethically we are constrained to document the information in the structure of the soil that we have obscured. [Every excavation has a "float column" reserved to recover the pollen present at every stratigraphic level. From that pollen, we can generate the plants characteristic of that particular context]. I remember well a 30 ft deep soil profile on the banks of the Tombigbee River here in west Alabama. The time line of that profile spanned from the present (the site was then in a pasture grazed by holsteins) to a paleo occupation some 10,000 years ago. We wound up excavating the activities of a palisaded chiefdom village @ about 1,000 A.D. Soil has structure that can be read by archaeologists. And that structure can also be read by plants--if it is not destroyed. And the practice of modern agriculture has been very destructive. Routinely in archaeology we discard the upper 20 to 30 cm of a site--the plowzone. The information has been destroyed by cultivation and it is of no value archaeologically. And it is not of much use for growing plants either after the soil structure has been destroyed. Years ago I wrote an article which considers how much of the earth's surface has been affected by cultivation. [The same Dave who founded All Things Plants.]

Dr. Ingham's discussion takes me back to the content of that article and leads me to review Fukuoka's work which was instrumental in founding the concept of permaculture. Soil is information--it is in the structure. And to grow plants that structure has to somehow be rebuilt.

i've listened to this particular episode of PV at least three times. it is really dense and without the visual element there are a couple of moments where i lose her...but it's a great listen.

also, hazelnut - you just blew my mind...10000 year old culture in bama? amazing.

@hazelnut thanks for the insightful response.

@wayne I too have listened almost three times. I agree about the visuals. She really piqued my interest about soil. Also, I never made the connection about anaerobic compost, or the misconception of cover crops.

Fascinating stuff!

@Anderwood my favorite part is when she describes root damage associated with anaerobic soil conditions. also, I really love the fact that she wants people to buy a microscope and get to work. pretty awesome.

on an unrelated note - my wife saw your picture while I was typing this and got all excited because she is a baby wearing fanatic

http://www.nps.gov/SEAC/hnc/ou...

Wayne. This is a map of paleoindian archaeological sites in the Southeast. As you can see there are a lot of them. And more are discovered every year or so.

So, yes, 10,000 years ago there was a lot of activity in this area, and some of that activity is written in the soil. To me what was so amazing about that 30 ft profile on the Tombigbee River bank at Aliceville, Alabama was not only that occupations from present to the paleoindian period were documented in one place, but also once you shave off a 30 foot high profile, there is a danger it will cave in on you! So there is both awe at the information there, and fear that it may not stay intact long enough to record it. Riverine soil profiles are usually sandy alluvium, so they are very unstable once exposed.

From the soil, you can read not only the pre-history of human cultures, but also the weather, animal and plant distributions over time, and soil building events like wind, erosion, flooding, fire, etc.

@hazelnut thanks, that is fascinating!

Factory farms and soil degradation. Only two generations of top soil left, according to this article.

http://articles.mercola.com/si...