The health of the soil in which ourbr food is grown is intimately connected to our health, not to mention the environment as a whole.

Ray Archuleta, aka “the Soil Guy,” is a soil scientist and conservation agronomist at the United States Department of Agriculture – Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS) at the East National Technology Support Center (ENTSC) in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“I’ve been working for the government for about 30 years. It was during the last 10 years that I started discovering that we weren’t fixing our resource issues.

Our water quality wasn’t getting better, and the farmers were going broke. The worst thing about it is I couldn’t help them.

Even though I went to eight years of university studies, I realized that I didn’t understand how the soil and the ecosystem function. That led to the fact that I couldn’t help the producers save their farms,” he says.

Once Ray got a job at the East National Technology Service Center, he was finally exposed to the right people with the right paradigm and began learning how a farm connects to and is part of the natural ecosystem.

“I think the majority of our farmers think that the farms are separate from the woods or the prairie. But I started realizing that the soils still want to be treated like those prairies and like those woods.

Simply stated, soil health is the soil’s ability to function, to sustain animals, plants, humans, and our climate. The healthier the soil is, the more it functions properly.

If I would use one word to explain soil health, I would say biomimicry: mimicking nature, the biology and the ecology, to make it function.

Keeping the soil covered, having living root, bringing diversity, and integrating animals — those are principles we teach to make soil healthy and functioning.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2lFUqBZDwY