Preface
Introduction: From the Ground Up
Chapter 1: What You Eat is Made out of Thin Air (and a Tiny Bit of Dirt)
Chapter 2: Soil, the Earth's Miracle Skin
Chapter 3: The Earth's Kidneys: When Good Soil Turns Bad
Chapter 4: Plants Don't Eat Dirt: The Underground Economy
Chapter 5: Here, There and Everywhere: The 'Old Friends' Hypothesis
Chapter 6: Look After the Soil, and the Plants Look After Us
Chapter 7: Nutritional Dark Matter
Chapter 8: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Chapter 9: Big Ones, Small Ones, Skinny Ones, Fat Ones: Worms
Chapter 10: Bombs, Germs and Plants: 100 Years of Fast Fixes Creating Big Problems
Chapter 11: How The Green Revolution is Turning the World Brown
Chapter 12: You'll Never Plough a Field by Turning it Over in Your Mind
Chapter 13: Burying Charcoal and Building Soil
Chapter 14: Weeds: What We Can See Tells Us About What We Can't
Chapter 15: Home Gardeners Rock
Chapter 16: Compost, Compost and Compost
Chapter 17: If it Quacks, Is It a Duck?
Chapter 18: We Are All, For a Certain While, Not Soil
Chapter 19: Keep Them Dawgies Movin'
Chapter 20: A Grain of Truth: Regenerative Agriculture
Chapter 21: What's the Beef with Methane?
Chapter 22: Money in the Bank
Chapter 23: They Germinated a Seed on the Moon
Chapter 24: Loaves and Fishes: Feeding a Hungry World
Soil FAQs
Resources
Acknowledgements
Index
Products specifications
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Author
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Matthew Evans |
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Pub Date
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14/10/2021 |
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Binding
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Paperback / softback |
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Pages
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288 |
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Country
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United Kingdom |
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Dewey
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631.4 |
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GBPPrice
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14.99 |
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Availability
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Available |
'A love letter to Mother Earth and entertaining must-read that goes to the heart of our survival' Charles Massy, author of Call of the Reed Warbler. Perfect for fans of Wilding by Isabella Tree.
What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves.
Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed.
For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing. But if we want our food to nourish us, and to ensure our planet's long-term health, we need to understand how soil works - how it's made, how it's lost, and how it can be repaired.
In this ode to the thin veneer of Earth that gifts us life, commentator and farmer Matthew Evans shows us that what we do in our backyards, on our farms, and what we put on our dinner tables really matters, and can be a source of hope.
Isn't it time we stopped treating the ground beneath our feet like dirt?
