Jeff Hill – An Introduction to Soil Biology

Jeff Hill is a professional agronomist passionate about biology and nature.

Most of the living soil is invisible to a naked human eye. However, you can see relatively big living organisms such as earthworms and spiders. The soil ecosystem is extremely interconnected. This is why the living soil visible to the human eye can give you a great indication about the much greater number of living organisms that you can’t see without a microscope. This is why a simple count of the number of ants, spiders, worms and termites in a handful of soil can tell you how well your soil is doing.

It is better to have such counts when soil organisms are at the peak of their activities. This happens when the soil is in the perfect condition: not too dry, not too wet, not too cold, not too hot. Mid-spring and mid-fall are great times for such measurements and counts. Dig a shovel of soil. Drop it on a white material to make counting easy. A piece of poster board or a white sheet of paper would work great for this task. Break the soil apart and carefully inspect it. Count the number of different living creatures that you will encounter. Termites and spiders usually move very fast, so you need to count quickly.

You don’t need to know the names of all the species that you encounter. It suffices to count the number of different types. Generally speaking, a soil is healthy when you can see three or more representatives of three or more types of soil organisms within two to four minutes, says Jeff Hill.

Jeff Hill – The Importance of Soil Aggregation

Jeff Hill says that with enough experience you can tell a good soil by feeling it in your hands. It will be soft, spongy and crumbly like a cookie. They are also stable under pressure.

These crumbs of soil are called aggregates. The influence of a proper soil aggregation is crucial to the health of a soil. Enhancements of soil aggregation have a similar effect to the improvements of the organic matter of your soil.

Just like you would do with other soil health indicators, you can estimate the condition of the aggregates in your soil when the soil is a little bit wet. Take a few handfuls of soil from the top six to ten inches.

Gently break the soil with your fingers and see what kinds of pieces you get at the end. Good soil would break into brownie-like round crumbs. Take these same aggregates and apply some pressure to them with your fingers. Do they break easily? Wet them a little bit with water and try again.

A healthy soil would break not into large blocks, but into small round pieces. The best aggregates can hold pressure and retain their shape under it.

When a lot of pressure is applied, they would break apart easily. Learn how a well-aggregated soil looks and feels like and you’ll be able to quickly identify soil conditions any time you want to do so. If your soil is building in a healthy way, you would have more and more of this brownie-like crumb structure with every year, shares Jeff Hill.

Jeff Hill – Ecosystems and Their Needs

Jeff Hill is a professional agriculture consultant. He knows that the variety of organisms has a variety of needs. You would feed a human bodybuilder champion and your cat the same food. A shark and an owl do not live in the same habitat. The more complex a garden or a farm, the more likely you are to deal with a similar extensive variety of needs.

However, this complexity doesn’t mean that maintaining a healthy garden or a farm is complicated. In fact, complex ecosystems are often easier to manage because they take care of a lot of things on their own.

By meeting this variety of needs the organic soil matter becomes more diverse. This means that the functions of different elements of the soil ecosystem are repeated in a diverse number of ways by a diverse set of different organisms.

A big city of people is a great analogy. Every big city has a number of good auto repair mechanics. If you can’t get to one of them, you can visit someone else. If you have an exotic car, you can find several mechanics that specialize in your car brand. The same principles of variety and diversity apply to a healthy soil ecosystem.

Taking care of such an ecosystem means meeting the four key needs of any living creature. These needs are air, food, water and shelter. If you can provide those, then the ecosystem will take care of everything else.

This is the template that you can use to nurture the living component of the soil. While different soils do require slightly different ways in nurturing them, the basics do stay the same, says Jeff Hill.