Soil

Humus: A 20-Minute Primer with Graeme Sait

Graeme Sait is the co-counder of Nutri-Tech Solutions, author of Nutrition Rules!, and founder of the Radiance Festival. His work focuses on the connection between soil conditions and nutrition, following the ancient wisdom of the adage “you are what you eat.”

This short video is dedicated to the key component of our planet’s soil system: humus.

Graeme begins by explaining the impetus behind this particular presentation, which he said was when a group of climate change activists asked him, after a speech at a rally, about a word he’d used, which they apparently hadn’t been familiar with: humus. To him these questions indicated a shocking lack of familiarity with the very basics of agriculture, with the sources of our sustenance, not to mention a very key element to addressing climate change.

After introducing the term and explaining what humus is (short answer: the soil glue that keeps top soil in place despite the weather, and which stores the critical combination of carbon, water, minerals, and microorganisms), he summarizes the recent data on climate change and concludes with one simple message: that a great deal of the carbon that used to be in the soil, primarily in humus, is now in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. And that we need to get back into the soil.

He then lays out the basic ways we as individuals can help with this process, which I’ll mention briefly because I suggest you listen to Graeme’s fuller explanations. We should:

1) buy food from those who practice regenerative farming;
2) pay carbon credits to producers who increase humus as motivation to get them to farm the right way;
3) compost, compost, compost;
4) inoculate soil with humus-building organisms;
5) legislate to protect those organisms (i.e. against chemicals);
6) immediately and entirely stop burning of crop residue;
7) include a carbon source with every nitrogen based fertilizer;
8) extract humus from brown coal;
9) and redirect retirement funds to companies that support renewable energy and farming practices.

As you can see, some of these are practices we can start ourselves, while others are things governments need to do, but which we need to demand that they do.

Graeme then explains that the overall benefits of more and better humus are numerous: increasing farm profitability (and thus survivability), water conversation, increased nutritional value, and decreased dependency on chemical intervention. He concludes by saying that all of us can and should help, and repeats his urge for us to “compost, compost, compost.” He’s very convincing.

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