Flip Your Soil: Farmers Wanting to Improve Soil Health Need to Make it More Alive Through Microbial Activity

Farmers getting started on a path to improving soil health can only accomplish that if they Flip their Soil to make it more alive.  Mitch Hora, Agronomist and CEO of Continuum Ag, says this involves changing the dead soils on your farm by reinvigorating the microbiological activity. 

He says one teaspoon of healthy soil contains more than 8 billion microbes and they need to be fed.   “They eat carbon, simple sugars and that carbon, those simple sugars come from plant roots aggregates that are pumped into the ground via photosynthesis when there's a living plant.  If we only have a living plant from mid may till early September that's not very much carbon being pumped into the ground, it’s not very much food to feed those microbes for the off season and a lot of them die out.  And we're not able to build those communities and get the benefit back to us.”   

So Hora says that's why he recommends cover crops because they help provide that living root that can keep the microbes fed and the soil nourished to aid in better performing crops.