Soil Health - Why it matters for our planet and our products!

Have you ever thought about what soil really is?

            It’s so easy to look at it as just some sort of strange dusty thing that everything grows out of and just as easy to forget how alive it really is. While our eyes can't pick up on the richness of life it holds, there are actually more organisms in a gram of soil than there are people on Earth.

“...all life depends upon the soil… there can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together.”

            Agriculture, water quality, air quality, pest control, disease prevention; these are a few kindaaa important issues when it comes to living in a thriving society with healthy friends and family, and soil is at the base of all of it!

Just with agriculture alone we can see incredible differences in nutritional quality of food or skincare when it’s grown in healthy soil vs not. More than that though, time and time again we see biodynamically farmed ingredients being perceived as having far better taste and texture (PMID: 28231216; PMCID: PMC5224538), or even having a totally different chemistry as is the case with natural grass-fed tallow vs grain fed tallow (see our tallow balms)!

This difference in farming method is called biodynamic farming and it's a standard of agriculture with practices that help maintain or improve soil health, reduce water usage, and strictly avoid pollution from synthetic chemicals.

              So you’re telling me more nutrition, better taste and better for the environment? Why isn’t everything farmed this way?

Wellllll, money, lack of knowledge, and then of course the huge demand for food and resources. For most farmers it’s how they were taught to farm (using pesticides etc), and conventional farming certainly works for producing a large number of crops or animals. To make it worse though, conventional farming is a sort of runaway snowball where once you go far down that route, it’s more difficult to stop, because your soil has now degraded and it can be very expensive and time-consuming to flip your operation upside down and begin farming biodynamically, especially when farming the correct way doesn’t produce as much product as you were used to yielding, and most farmers are struggling as is.

All of this is just to paint a picture to where we're now losing about 24 billion tons of fertile soil to erosion, a process worsened by unsustainable agricultural practices, deforestation, and urbanization. This rate of soil loss is roughly 10 to 40 times faster than soil can naturally regenerate, with some experts claiming we have only around 60 harvests left. Crazy.

So, as sad as it is we’ve got to this point, it’s not actually all doom and gloom. In fact, the remedy is quite beautiful!

            The remedy is with us, individually, and collectively, to improve our own health in line with improving the health of the planet. It’s up to us, the consumers, to go on a journey where we gift ourselves the right products and food, made the right way, to directly influence where our money flows and to what industries it supports. All this to improve our health, to improve the soil, to improve the environment, to improve the world. 

We are only as healthy as the world around us, and right now the world and our soil need a little love.