Letting plants grow
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By Kim Deans
Is there a missing link in your soil health strategy? It’s common to start a soil health strategy with biological inputs and more natural fertilisers but this can often leave us wondering why it’s not working. If this sounds familiar, then it’s possible we are missing the foundational step in improving soil health that can only be achieved when we work with nature and let plants grow. We can’t buy soil health in a bag.
Soil health is defined as ‘the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.’[1] To be healthy is to be alive, and soil is a living ecosystem. Soil health relies on life. Living plants capture sunlight via photosynthesis and produce root exudates that feed soil microbes, which in turn provide nutrients to nourish the plants. Nature provides the perfect system where healthy soils occur through harnessing free resources - sunlight and rainfall to grow plants.
“Imagine there was a process that could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, replace it with life giving oxygen, support a robust soil microbiome, regenerate topsoil, enhance the nutrient density of food, restore water balance to the landscape and increase the profitability of agriculture? Fortunately, there is. It’s called photosynthesis.” – Dr Christine Jones[2]
I have seen farmers shift to biological inputs and more natural fertilisers and not see improvements in soil health when they continue with herbicide fallows or overgrazing. Changing inputs can seem like a simple place to start, yet we are only addressing part of the equation. No amount of biological or mineral inputs can fix soil health without an accompanying management practice that harnesses the ability of plants to capture sunlight, convert it into sugars to share with the microbial community in the soil and provide carbon to help restore soil health. No input can replace the essential role of a photosynthesising plant!
“Land deprived of photosynthesis is not resting, it is starving!”- Dale Strickler[3]
When we start improving our ability to capture sunlight via photosynthesis this is when strategically using inputs can assist us to support plant growth and soil microbes to improve soil health. If we don’t harness photosynthesis first through growing plants, inputs are nothing more than a life support system, and we stay on the input treadmill with inputs required in ever increasing amounts. When we stop nature doing its job, we need to do it instead.
“There is no system of production or soil amendment that will fix what is wrong with your soil. You must become a student of what makes soil healthy. It’s that simple and there are no short cuts.”- Jon Stika[4]
There are a range of farming practices that we can use to keep living plants growing to capture sunlight and feed the soil. The practices that are best for you will depend on your unique individual situation and many of these require the willingness to experiment to see how they can best work on your farm. Some of these include:
Adaptive grazing management that incorporates plant recovery periods between grazing
Cover cropping
Relay cropping
Ley pastures (incorporating a pasture phase in a crop rotation)
Avoiding bare ground, and minimising the length of time soil is bare when this occurs
Growing a diversity of plants
Reducing herbicides
Incorporating livestock in cropping systems
Integrating more trees into the landscape
Some food for thought:
Soil carbon that is derived from plant root exudates is five times more efficiently stabilised and converted to stable soil carbon than carbon derived from above ground plant material.[5]
Forbs (broadleaf plants that are not grasses or legumes) such as dandelion, chicory, plantain, and thistles can be more effective than other plants for producing root exudates to build long term soil organic matter. Forbs allocate 15% of plant sugars to root biomass, compared to 45% for grasses, and 35% is devoted to root exudates, compared to 5% for grasses.[6]
“Soil is the source of all life, but soil without herbage is inert and incapable of giving life: hence the key to the life of the soil is the herbage which covers and permeates the top soil and converts the subsoil rock and mineral into vital nutrient for man and beast.’ – Newman Turner[7]
Letting plants grow is an essential step in restoring soil health and builds the foundation for soil health on which other management practices can build. Soil health requires a shift away from practices focused on killing things to grow things, towards practices that let plants grow so life can create life.
[1]https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/conservation-basics/soil/soil-health
[2] Christine Jones. ‘Light Farming: Restoring carbon, organic nitrogen and biodiversity to agricultural soils.’ https://amazingcarbon.com/JONES-LightFarmingFINAL(2018).pdf
[3] Dale Strickler, 2021. ‘The Complete Guide to Restoring Your Soil’.
[4] Jon Stika. 2016. ‘A Soil Owner’s Manual’.
[5] Christine Jones. ‘Light Farming: Restoring carbon, organic nitrogen and biodiversity to agricultural soils.’ https://amazingcarbon.com/JONES-LightFarmingFINAL(2018).pdf
[6] John Kempf. 2025. ‘The take half, leave half fallacy’. https://members.acresusa.com/the-take-half-leave-half-fallacy/
[7] Newman Turner. 1955. ‘Fertility Pastures’.