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Oh Yes, How Soil Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck your friends, and we
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Speaker 1: out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
0:53
Speaker 1: a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
1:02
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
1:05
Speaker 1: Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and this is Stuff
1:09
Speaker 1: you Should know, the Dirty Dirt edition the best I
1:17
Speaker 1: could come up with. And I even had days to
1:18
Speaker 1: think of that, and that was it. Chuck, I'm sorry. Yeah,
1:22
Speaker 1: this is a cool one. You know, we're into gardening,
1:24
Speaker 1: so it's always nice to talk earth biology. Yes, agreed, Agreed,
1:30
Speaker 1: And like I had a pretty I guess I thought
1:32
Speaker 1: a dcent idea about this, but wait, did this article
1:36
Speaker 1: open my eyes? Yeah? And this, you know, we covered sand,
1:41
Speaker 1: and we covered compost, permaculture, perma culture, like we sort
1:46
Speaker 1: of danced around soil. We danced in soil. Yea, our
1:50
Speaker 1: toes are all dirty. But yeah, this is good to
1:53
Speaker 1: finally check this one off the old list. Agreed. So
1:57
Speaker 1: people are probably like, I don't know about this one.
2:00
Speaker 1: I would hope that it's been, you know, long enough.
2:02
Speaker 1: We've been at it long enough to just trust us
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Speaker 1: that if it sounds boring, we're gonna find something interesting
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Speaker 1: in it. And I dare say that that is going
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Speaker 1: to be the case with this one too, Chuck, I hope.
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Speaker 1: So to understand soil, we have to understand what soil is,
2:18
Speaker 1: where it comes from, and soil is basically just worn
2:23
Speaker 1: down rock, just like sand is. Right, I think we
2:26
Speaker 1: talked about and like, are are we running out of sand?
2:28
Speaker 1: Episode that like, rocks get weathered and kind of taken
2:33
Speaker 1: down stream all the way to the sea and they
2:35
Speaker 1: get gently um broken down over time into this very
2:39
Speaker 1: nice little beach sand and washed up on shore, and
2:41
Speaker 1: that's where sand comes from. Well, basically that is also
2:46
Speaker 1: part of the same process for producing dirt as well.
2:48
Speaker 1: It's just weathered rock that's broken down into different um
2:54
Speaker 1: sizes that that are that that basically make up different
2:58
Speaker 1: types of so oil. That's one the main structure of
3:02
Speaker 1: it is basically just weathered rock of various sizes. Yeah,
3:06
Speaker 1: so you can you know, wind can do that over time.
3:09
Speaker 1: Water and obviously the combination of all these is where
3:12
Speaker 1: you really get your money money's worth. You've got your win,
3:16
Speaker 1: you've got your your water um. When you get weather
3:20
Speaker 1: going on in your seasons, you get the freeze law cycle,
3:23
Speaker 1: which is a really kind of speedier way. Once that
3:26
Speaker 1: water gets in those little tiny fractures in the rock
3:29
Speaker 1: and freezes and unfreezes and cracks, that will really speed
3:33
Speaker 1: things up. And then you get a little help from
3:36
Speaker 1: our our little tiny critters under under our feet. Yeah,
3:43
Speaker 1: tiny critters of all shapes and sizes from like microbes
3:47
Speaker 1: like bacteria and fun guy all the way up to
3:51
Speaker 1: like prairie dogs and gophers. They're basically taking all this
3:54
Speaker 1: stuff and mixing it together. But the stuff that they're
3:57
Speaker 1: mixing together is so you've got the structure of the
4:01
Speaker 1: soil from broken down rocks. But that's just one big component.
4:03
Speaker 1: You have to have life living among it or else
4:07
Speaker 1: it's not gonna do anything. It's just it's just dead.
4:11
Speaker 1: There's nothing to it. So um part of the process
4:15
Speaker 1: of forming soil is taking those little gritty pieces of
4:18
Speaker 1: weathered rock and adding decomposing organic matter to them. And
4:22
Speaker 1: that's where we finally start to get to what we
4:25
Speaker 1: understand is soil. Yeah, because once you have that, it
4:30
Speaker 1: can hold a little bit of moisture, and then that
4:32
Speaker 1: means little plants can grow. Those little plants grow, they
4:36
Speaker 1: eventually die. It's very sad for the plant and the
4:38
Speaker 1: plant's family, but it happens to all of us. And
4:42
Speaker 1: then those little plants that die, they decompose and they're
4:46
Speaker 1: holding all that carbon dioxide and their little skinny stems
4:49
Speaker 1: and leaves and body, and that carbon dioxide stays behind
4:55
Speaker 1: and it's dissolved by water, and then that forms carbonic acid,
4:59
Speaker 1: which isn't you know, if you want to throw a
5:01
Speaker 1: body in a barrel, you don't want to use carbonic acid.
5:05
Speaker 1: Now you're gonna get caught. Still, you're gonna get caught.
5:08
Speaker 1: So it's not super strong, but it is strong enough
5:11
Speaker 1: to help break down all those little rocks and everything
5:15
Speaker 1: even more, and before you know it, you've got soil. Baby, Yeah,
5:20
Speaker 1: you've got so So those decomposing all that decomposing organic
5:23
Speaker 1: matter is full of like nutrients that kept the thing
5:26
Speaker 1: alive while it was living. And then all those little
5:29
Speaker 1: tiny animals and microbes that eat that stuff break it
5:33
Speaker 1: down even further, which unlocks all of the nutrients and within,
5:39
Speaker 1: and that means that plants can start to take them
5:41
Speaker 1: up in its roots and use those nutrients to grow.
5:44
Speaker 1: And so that's a big part of what soil is.
5:46
Speaker 1: It's like a nice little substrate of medium for holding nutrients,
5:53
Speaker 1: and then the whole thing is actually held together itself
5:55
Speaker 1: even further by the roots that the plants that grow
5:58
Speaker 1: in the soil spread out in stabilized too. So I
6:02
Speaker 1: think one of the things we've just hit upon. One
6:04
Speaker 1: of the reasons I love soil so much. It's harmonious
6:09
Speaker 1: and um symbiotic, Like everything living in the soil almost
6:15
Speaker 1: is involved in keeping everything else going and alive. It's
6:19
Speaker 1: like part of a really beautiful, complete system. Yeah, and
6:23
Speaker 1: that's why, you know, we always make a big deal
6:25
Speaker 1: and science makes a big deal out of the disruption
6:29
Speaker 1: of this and not just this process, but all earth processes.
6:34
Speaker 1: One little tiny thing will lead to another little tiny thing,
6:36
Speaker 1: and before you know it, you got you got issues
6:38
Speaker 1: on your hands. Yeah, you do, for sure. You can't
6:41
Speaker 1: let it get out of whack. Luckily, from what I found,
6:44
Speaker 1: I started to get into um into like long care
6:48
Speaker 1: and stuff like that happen at some point and it's
6:52
Speaker 1: fun to me years ago and I was like, you
6:54
Speaker 1: just wait, Yeah, it's true. It's true. And I've learned
6:57
Speaker 1: not to flood my lawn with a quarter inch of
6:59
Speaker 1: um of water. But um, the best fertilizer and aeration
7:05
Speaker 1: that I found is just basically feeding microbes to your lawn.
7:10
Speaker 1: Like you don't need to like go dig holes and
7:13
Speaker 1: core plugs in your lawn, just if you add the
7:16
Speaker 1: right kind of microbes to your lawn and all of
7:18
Speaker 1: that will just kind of turn it into this healthy
7:21
Speaker 1: soil beneath it on its own, which I just love
7:25
Speaker 1: because it's just springing microbes onto the ground. What's more
7:28
Speaker 1: beautiful than that. Well, we've got the opposite. We have
7:31
Speaker 1: zero grass now. Basically, oh, I know, I know, you
7:34
Speaker 1: just love to my face and that. But still no,
7:36
Speaker 1: it just kept going more and more and it got
7:38
Speaker 1: smaller and smaller, to the point where I was like,
7:41
Speaker 1: why am I holding onto this tiny little patch of grass?
7:43
Speaker 1: Why do I even have a weed whacker? At this point,
7:47
Speaker 1: I know I've used a weed whaker in two years.
7:49
Speaker 1: It's great, that's awesome. I got a big old honking
7:52
Speaker 1: gas powered lawnmower even too. So I'm basically going the
7:56
Speaker 1: exact toposite direction, is you do you have a writer now? No? No, No,
8:00
Speaker 1: it's not that big. It's not that big. Yeah, it
8:05
Speaker 1: runs on like the tier of baby deer. That's what
8:10
Speaker 1: John Dear means. So, um, if you're talking soil, you
8:14
Speaker 1: need to talk soil horizons, and you know, we'll get
8:18
Speaker 1: to sort of the list of the different horizons here
8:21
Speaker 1: in a few minutes. But soil horizons are these horizontal levels,
8:25
Speaker 1: these striations that you know, if you look at like
8:29
Speaker 1: if you go to any science center, they'll probably have
8:31
Speaker 1: some kind of cool um piece of glass with a frame,
8:37
Speaker 1: and you have soil in there, and they have little
8:39
Speaker 1: lines drawn to mark these different soil horizons, because soil
8:43
Speaker 1: is not all the same. From the the very top
8:46
Speaker 1: of the top soil down three feet, it gets very different.
8:50
Speaker 1: And you want space in there, you want air in there. Uh,
8:54
Speaker 1: you want to have water to be able to travel
8:56
Speaker 1: through there. I think they say if you want, like
8:58
Speaker 1: really good soil should be about fifty just fifty percent
9:03
Speaker 1: soil and then fifty just space for air and water. Yeah, exactly,
9:08
Speaker 1: And then you want about half of those spaces to
9:10
Speaker 1: be filled with water. So you've got about soil air pockets,
9:17
Speaker 1: water filled pores. That's ideal for sure. And that's yeah.
9:22
Speaker 1: And that the reason the way that you get those
9:24
Speaker 1: those pores in those pockets and everything is because there's
9:27
Speaker 1: different types of soil. There's different shapes of soil um,
9:31
Speaker 1: and there's different sizes of soil. Like we said, you know,
9:34
Speaker 1: there's sand, but there's also silt, and there's also and
9:36
Speaker 1: get ready for your socks to be not clean off
9:39
Speaker 1: your feet. There's also clay, which clay Whenever I think
9:42
Speaker 1: of clay, it's like a big hunk of something that
9:45
Speaker 1: I'm like having to dig through to plant a plant,
9:48
Speaker 1: and it's enormous. But it turns out that clay is
9:51
Speaker 1: actually the finest, uh smallest type of soil, and it's
9:56
Speaker 1: so fine that it compacts together into these large aggregate
10:00
Speaker 1: pieces of clay that we think of when we think
10:01
Speaker 1: of clay, But that's actually huge, enormous chunks of extraordinarily
10:08
Speaker 1: tiny pieces of dirt of soil that are so small
10:12
Speaker 1: you can only see them with an electron microscope if
10:14
Speaker 1: you want to look at them individually. Yeah, and clay
10:17
Speaker 1: is important. It's all part of the mix that we'll
10:19
Speaker 1: talk about here in a minute. But you know, if
10:23
Speaker 1: you start off with just a barren rock landscape. There's
10:29
Speaker 1: a very smart lady who who did this one? Was this?
10:32
Speaker 1: I think that Grabster helps us out with this. This
10:34
Speaker 1: is the Grabster um. He must have been interviewed doctor
10:37
Speaker 1: Caitlin Hicks Priests, who's an assistant professor of biological sciences
10:43
Speaker 1: at Dartmouth, and she said, you know, if you start
10:46
Speaker 1: off We've seen it happen if you start off with
10:48
Speaker 1: just bedrock in about a hundred years, you could probably
10:52
Speaker 1: grow a tree there in the soil that you would
10:54
Speaker 1: get seen it happen a million times hundred years. That's
10:58
Speaker 1: all you need, right, And well, reason why it can
11:00
Speaker 1: happen so fast is because some plants are early colonizers
11:05
Speaker 1: and they can grow and just a little bit of
11:08
Speaker 1: you know, soil, just a little bit of fine rock um,
11:12
Speaker 1: and as long as there's like nutrients and water coming
11:15
Speaker 1: to it, it's it's fine. It doesn't need a big
11:17
Speaker 1: thing of like top soil or potting soil. It can
11:19
Speaker 1: make do like that. And then once those plants start
11:21
Speaker 1: to die, they start to decompose, and then it really
11:23
Speaker 1: kicks off. So yeah, you can have like soil, a
11:26
Speaker 1: couple of horizons of soil in a hundred years if
11:28
Speaker 1: you're really boogian. Al Right, should we boogie on down
11:32
Speaker 1: and take a break. Yeah, let's let's get her hands
11:35
Speaker 1: dirty and we'll come back and we'll talk about these
11:36
Speaker 1: horizons right after this, okay, chuck. Horizons. And speaking of horizons,
12:10
Speaker 1: I think there was a Disney World ride or at
12:12
Speaker 1: Epcot Center ride called Horizons or something like that, and
12:16
Speaker 1: there was this group of people who infiltrated it they
12:19
Speaker 1: figured out how to get basically behind the scenes and
12:22
Speaker 1: would hang out there for like entire weekends and like
12:25
Speaker 1: high during the regular hours and then just hang out
12:28
Speaker 1: like they were part of the set um after hours.
12:32
Speaker 1: After no it was about future life, like what life
12:37
Speaker 1: was going to be like in the future. It's really cool.
12:38
Speaker 1: But the upshot of all this is that they documented
12:41
Speaker 1: the whole thing with pictures and it's somewhere on the internet.
12:43
Speaker 1: I can't remember where, but I'm pretty sure it was
12:46
Speaker 1: called Horizons. But it's a closed down Epcot ride where
12:49
Speaker 1: a bunch of people documented it in the early nineties,
12:52
Speaker 1: just with cool pictures of it. So check it out,
12:54
Speaker 1: and that's probably why they closed it down. I don't
12:57
Speaker 1: remember why they closed it down and what it became,
12:59
Speaker 1: but think it's not nearly as cool. I never got
13:01
Speaker 1: to write it, but seeing those pictures, maybe I wish
13:04
Speaker 1: I'd been able to go. So here are a bunch
13:07
Speaker 1: of the horizons. When if you're talking about pedology, which
13:10
Speaker 1: is a study of soil, it's a bit of an
13:13
Speaker 1: unfortunate name. Um, but we're gonna talk about horizons, not
13:18
Speaker 1: the event horizon, not the Gateway to Hell itself, No
13:21
Speaker 1: chaos and disorder of unparalleled horrible nous. Did you see that?
13:26
Speaker 1: I loved it? Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty good. Huh. Yeah,
13:29
Speaker 1: when's the last time you saw it? But when it
13:31
Speaker 1: came out, I don't think I ever repeated that one.
13:33
Speaker 1: I saw in the last couple of years, and it
13:34
Speaker 1: holds up. I've been several times since it came out,
13:37
Speaker 1: and it's it's a really genuinely good horror movie. Yeah.
13:40
Speaker 1: I agree. I also saw Solaris too recently, and that's
13:43
Speaker 1: a really great movie too. The Russian version of these,
13:47
Speaker 1: I've still never seen the Russian version. I've seen the
13:49
Speaker 1: Soderberg version. Yeah, it was good. I would recommend the Tarkovsky.
13:54
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a grind, but worth it. Sure,
13:59
Speaker 1: his movies are all worth it, but they're just you know,
14:01
Speaker 1: they're tough. You don't if you're sleepy, don't try it. Okay, Okay,
14:05
Speaker 1: it's like The Irishman, but Russian and in space and
14:09
Speaker 1: good okay. Um. So the o horizon, these are some
14:14
Speaker 1: of the different horizons. The horizon is that's like not
14:18
Speaker 1: even top soil yet. It's the leaves that blow off
14:21
Speaker 1: of trees and are sitting sort of on top that
14:24
Speaker 1: counts as the horizon. They're basically the things that are
14:27
Speaker 1: in the initial state of decomposition right on top of
14:30
Speaker 1: the dirt. Yeah. Exactly underneath that then is the A horizon.
14:34
Speaker 1: So this makes zero sense already because we went from
14:36
Speaker 1: oh to A. None of this makes sense. The A
14:39
Speaker 1: horizon um is what we would consider like top soil um.
14:44
Speaker 1: It has most of the organic matter that's really begun
14:47
Speaker 1: to decompose and break down into smaller and smaller bits,
14:50
Speaker 1: and it's usually kind of dark in color. This is
14:53
Speaker 1: where the highest concentration of minerals are and this is
14:56
Speaker 1: also where you're going to find them the roots of
14:59
Speaker 1: plants to because they really like those those minerals and nutrients. Yeah.
15:03
Speaker 1: And by the way, when I said this makes no sense,
15:05
Speaker 1: I'm sure and our scientists is gonna say, guys, it
15:08
Speaker 1: makes perfect sense. And and here's why. Uh, you have
15:13
Speaker 1: the E horizon next, which stands for alluviated horizon, and
15:17
Speaker 1: that's where you've got this water draining down and those
15:21
Speaker 1: minerals that you were talking about in the A horizon,
15:24
Speaker 1: it's leaching those minerals and all that stuff out, and
15:28
Speaker 1: you've got sort of this light colored soil in its wake. Right, Um,
15:32
Speaker 1: that is not a common or I shouldn't say common,
15:36
Speaker 1: it's you're not going to find that in every UM
15:39
Speaker 1: soil sample that you take. Right. It's usually a product
15:42
Speaker 1: of say, like um, a patch on like a hilltop
15:47
Speaker 1: where it's it's like the dirt's in place, but all
15:49
Speaker 1: the nutrients have been leached out over time. So anytime
15:52
Speaker 1: you just dig with the shovel into some dirt, you're
15:54
Speaker 1: not necessarily going to find an E horizon. Yeah, and
15:57
Speaker 1: we should say that for all this stuff, it's all
16:00
Speaker 1: going to vary according to where you are and what
16:02
Speaker 1: kind of rain and flooding and uh and drainage that
16:06
Speaker 1: you have and stuff like that. What's next, You got
16:10
Speaker 1: the B horizon that's the subsoil, and this is where
16:13
Speaker 1: you finally get down to some of the finer uh particles,
16:17
Speaker 1: and you've got like a lot of silt, a lot
16:19
Speaker 1: of clay. Uh. It's it's you're starting to get down
16:23
Speaker 1: to the good stuff at this point. And all this
16:25
Speaker 1: makes sense too if you think about it, like, um,
16:28
Speaker 1: when the water, when rain water trickles down through the
16:31
Speaker 1: soil and percolates, it's far easier for it to bring
16:36
Speaker 1: with it smaller and smaller particles. So the further it travels,
16:40
Speaker 1: the further or the smaller the particles you're gonna find
16:43
Speaker 1: going down with it. So you've got your bigger particles,
16:47
Speaker 1: your looser, coarse or bigger top soil. Then you've got
16:50
Speaker 1: the subsoil, which is a little tighter together, and then
16:53
Speaker 1: in that um in the b horizon, in the subsoil,
16:56
Speaker 1: you've got compacted. That's where you're gonna hit like your
17:00
Speaker 1: lay layer, because again, clay's made up of those tiniest
17:03
Speaker 1: little particles that have been brought all the way down
17:05
Speaker 1: as far as it can go with the water that's percolated.
17:09
Speaker 1: That's right, And it's much more stable than top soil
17:11
Speaker 1: as well. For sure, sometimes it's too stable and like
17:15
Speaker 1: water and roots can't really penetrate it. Yes, or shovels
17:19
Speaker 1: it can be. It can be a problem child as
17:22
Speaker 1: far as soiled soil horizons. You know my story when
17:26
Speaker 1: I was trying to dig my fence post holes for
17:29
Speaker 1: my privacy fence years ago, was I rented a two
17:33
Speaker 1: man auger, a two person auger, and it just spun,
17:38
Speaker 1: it just it compacted the clay even more. It did
17:41
Speaker 1: not break it up at all. It's spun it like
17:43
Speaker 1: a potter's wheel. Nice, did you go give me some clay?
17:46
Speaker 1: Oh wait, that was bad? Did you get it? That
17:50
Speaker 1: was a pottery joke, but it tied into your problem.
17:54
Speaker 1: That was maybe the smartest joke I've ever made in
17:56
Speaker 1: my life. Well, no, wonder I didn't get it. Uh
18:00
Speaker 1: And and I think I mentioned this on the show before.
18:02
Speaker 1: If you if you do have that kind of problem,
18:04
Speaker 1: if you're going to plant and you have really tough
18:07
Speaker 1: clay that you're trying to get through, or rock for
18:09
Speaker 1: that matter, get a San Angelo tool, which is that
18:14
Speaker 1: big heavy spike um that you see at the hardware
18:18
Speaker 1: store that's, oh yeah, six ft long, has a pointy
18:22
Speaker 1: end on one side and a flathead on the other
18:24
Speaker 1: in ways like you know, twenty pounds or something. Yeah,
18:27
Speaker 1: I never knew what they were called. They look like
18:29
Speaker 1: sharp pointing lightning rods basically, right. Yeah, I mean you
18:32
Speaker 1: just it's backbreaking. But if you voice that thing into
18:36
Speaker 1: the ground as hard as you can and just wiggle
18:37
Speaker 1: it back and forth a million times, and then you're
18:39
Speaker 1: gonna be able to well, you're gonna be able to
18:41
Speaker 1: break up anything. Basically, and then you hit it with
18:44
Speaker 1: the auger or post hole diggers. Uh no, I mean
18:47
Speaker 1: the augur was useless at that point. You just loosen
18:49
Speaker 1: and use a shovel. Did you get your money back
18:52
Speaker 1: and say this augur is worth nothing? No, because they
18:55
Speaker 1: would say welcome to Georgia. Thing. That's the slogan, and
19:02
Speaker 1: not all over Georgia, but particularly where we are, like
19:04
Speaker 1: up in the mountains and stuff it can get it can.
19:06
Speaker 1: The soil is very rich and very uh a pliable. Yeah, yeah,
19:10
Speaker 1: for good stuff as long as you don't hit the
19:12
Speaker 1: granite underneath, which can happen. Yeah, as a matter of fact,
19:17
Speaker 1: because those those pieces of granite that you hit as
19:21
Speaker 1: you get closer and closer to the Appalachians further north
19:23
Speaker 1: and Georgia, that's bedrock that's like the outermost rock of
19:28
Speaker 1: the Earth's crust, right, so you're actually touching the earth.
19:31
Speaker 1: It's almost like the soil that builds up on top
19:34
Speaker 1: of the bedrock is I don't know, dander maybe, And
19:38
Speaker 1: the bedrock is really the Earth's outer skin. So you're
19:42
Speaker 1: touching the Earth's skin when you're touching bedrock, which can
19:46
Speaker 1: which can poke through the ground every once in a
19:48
Speaker 1: while is what we call rock outcroppings. Yeah, and so
19:51
Speaker 1: as far as the horizon levels go just above the bedrock,
19:54
Speaker 1: I don't think we mentioned the sea horizon that is
19:57
Speaker 1: also rock. But that's rock that um his weather down
20:01
Speaker 1: some but didn't quite make it to soil level, right,
20:05
Speaker 1: because remember, some plants can come in and colonize that
20:08
Speaker 1: rock and pretty quickly start building up soil. And if
20:11
Speaker 1: that's that rock beneath isn't exposed to that weathering process
20:15
Speaker 1: from wind and freeze, thaw and all that stuff, it's
20:17
Speaker 1: never gonna get broken down, right, It's just gonna be
20:21
Speaker 1: hard on the old auger uh, and then the bedrock.
20:26
Speaker 1: And then you've got what's called hard pan and these
20:28
Speaker 1: are mineral deposits that I mean, this stuff, I don't know.
20:33
Speaker 1: I guess it's harder than bedrock. It just sounds like
20:36
Speaker 1: nothing will will grow and there's no chance for anything
20:39
Speaker 1: to permeate it. Yeah, and hard pan the is not
20:42
Speaker 1: under bedrock bedrocks as low as it gets before you
20:45
Speaker 1: like that's the Earth's crust. Hard pan is just kind
20:47
Speaker 1: of I think he's just kind of tossed that on
20:49
Speaker 1: where it's like this is this is another. It's like
20:51
Speaker 1: an e horizon, like an alluviated horizon. You're not gonna
20:54
Speaker 1: find it everywhere. When you do, you'll know it because
20:57
Speaker 1: it's very hard to dig through and there can be
21:00
Speaker 1: streaks of it within another you know, soil system um
21:04
Speaker 1: of different horizon layers, uh, and you just don't want
21:08
Speaker 1: anything to do with that. Neither do plants either. It's
21:10
Speaker 1: basically impermeable as far as water and roots and shovels
21:14
Speaker 1: go no good. Another term that I think is really
21:18
Speaker 1: just cute is parent material, And that doesn't mean whether
21:23
Speaker 1: or not you would be a good papa or a
21:25
Speaker 1: good mama to a human child. Parent material is the
21:30
Speaker 1: type of rock that you started out with, the type
21:32
Speaker 1: of mineral that you started out with millions of years
21:35
Speaker 1: ago that was weathered down there to create what kind
21:39
Speaker 1: of soil you've got, And depending on where you live
21:43
Speaker 1: and what was there hundreds of thousands or millions of
21:46
Speaker 1: years before you, you're gonna have much different kind of
21:49
Speaker 1: soil than uh, maybe another place in the world. Yeah,
21:51
Speaker 1: Like if it started out as igneous rock from a
21:54
Speaker 1: lava flow, that's going to be different kind of it's
21:56
Speaker 1: going to produce a different soil from you know, sedimentary
22:00
Speaker 1: that was weathered down from a granite outcropping by a river.
22:03
Speaker 1: It's just different soil. But it can also come about
22:06
Speaker 1: in different ways, like like that rock outcropping that was
22:10
Speaker 1: worn down by a river and just kind of sunk
22:12
Speaker 1: further and further into the ground and was built up
22:14
Speaker 1: a top of it. Soil layers were that would be
22:17
Speaker 1: called residual, where it's developed in place. There's also transported
22:21
Speaker 1: where it could be moved by like ice, like a
22:24
Speaker 1: glacier pushing soil from one place to another. Um and
22:27
Speaker 1: then there's also cumulose, which is basically like peat, where
22:31
Speaker 1: organic materials basically suspended in in suspended animation by water.
22:37
Speaker 1: It's it's prevented from full decomposition. That's right. Those are
22:41
Speaker 1: the kinds of parents that soil can have. So let's
22:45
Speaker 1: talk about the soil texture triangle. Okay, this is where
22:50
Speaker 1: it gets pretty cool because if you're talking soil and
22:55
Speaker 1: and I think people should start using the word soil
22:57
Speaker 1: more than dirt because I just think it's more evocative
23:00
Speaker 1: of what you're really talking about. I think it's kind
23:04
Speaker 1: of reductive. I saw a dude who is like a
23:07
Speaker 1: soil sciences professor explain that to him, at least dirt
23:12
Speaker 1: is like dead soil. Soil is like living, breathing, you know,
23:17
Speaker 1: it's almost like a It's a symbiotic organism formed by
23:20
Speaker 1: the by all these different other bits of life working together,
23:25
Speaker 1: whereas dirts is like dead stuff that maybe will become
23:28
Speaker 1: soil one day if it behaves itself right, if it
23:32
Speaker 1: if it plays his cards right. So this texture triangle,
23:36
Speaker 1: if you're talking soil is a mixture, and this is
23:38
Speaker 1: all soil of uh, sand, silt and clay sand. Well,
23:43
Speaker 1: it's a really good podcast episode on it. I think
23:45
Speaker 1: we did um that is the most course, which is
23:48
Speaker 1: funny to think about because sand seems super super fine,
23:52
Speaker 1: but when compared to silt, I think sand is two
23:57
Speaker 1: to point zero five millimeters in diameter compared to silt,
24:01
Speaker 1: which is point o five to point o two. And then,
24:05
Speaker 1: like you mentioned earlier, it's hard to wrap your head around,
24:07
Speaker 1: but clay is a really really fine kind of soil
24:11
Speaker 1: point o o two millimeters in diameter. And you've got
24:14
Speaker 1: to get that microscope out if you want to take
24:16
Speaker 1: a look at it. Yeah, and because the different sizes
24:20
Speaker 1: when they're put up against one another. If you've got
24:22
Speaker 1: a bunch of sand, the pores in between the grains
24:25
Speaker 1: of sand are going to be really big, which is
24:27
Speaker 1: why beaches don't have a lot of plant life growing
24:30
Speaker 1: on because water just drains right through them and it's
24:33
Speaker 1: very difficult to keep organic matter suspended within it. Right silt,
24:38
Speaker 1: it gets a little easier, a lot easier because the
24:41
Speaker 1: from what I saw, the pores in between silts are
24:44
Speaker 1: basically ideal. They're just big enough that they drain really well,
24:48
Speaker 1: but they also can hold some water. And then clay
24:50
Speaker 1: because the pieces are so close together, the pores between
24:54
Speaker 1: them are so small that they hold a lot of
24:57
Speaker 1: water and they they basically sealed off the waters escape.
25:01
Speaker 1: So clay can either prevent water from coming in or
25:04
Speaker 1: it can hold it in and and drown things. Either way,
25:07
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily very good for roots. Super compacted clay. Yeah,
25:12
Speaker 1: you want a nice mix, and it doesn't all have
25:14
Speaker 1: to you know, it depends on what you want to
25:15
Speaker 1: do and what you're working with, But it doesn't have
25:18
Speaker 1: to be the exact same mix either. Um. I'm sure
25:22
Speaker 1: there are ideal versions, but uh, depending on where you are,
25:25
Speaker 1: you can only do so much with your soil, Like,
25:27
Speaker 1: you can't make an entire farm uh something that it's not.
25:30
Speaker 1: You can augment it and help it out, but you're
25:33
Speaker 1: kind of working with what you got to a certain degree. Um.
25:37
Speaker 1: I think one of the cool things from this research
25:39
Speaker 1: was that you know, if you see a farmer in
25:42
Speaker 1: a movie bend down, and that the scene that's in
25:45
Speaker 1: every movie about a farmer when they grab that soil
25:48
Speaker 1: in their hand and they look at it and twist
25:51
Speaker 1: it between their fingers and then let it fall gently
25:53
Speaker 1: out of their hand onto the ground. Not only does
25:56
Speaker 1: that make for a nice movie moment, but that's real
25:59
Speaker 1: deal stuff. If you're a pro farmer or a soil scientist,
26:04
Speaker 1: you can tell exactly what's going on with that soil
26:06
Speaker 1: by how it clumps in your hand, how it moves
26:09
Speaker 1: in your hand, how it holds together, what shape it is. Uh.
26:13
Speaker 1: So it's not just a sort of a BS thing
26:15
Speaker 1: you see in movies. No, you can also run a
26:17
Speaker 1: lab test to figure out what the ratios are. Right. Yeah, hey,
26:21
Speaker 1: college boy, you need to get yourself a farmer um
26:26
Speaker 1: with hands either way? Right, But if you if you, um,
26:30
Speaker 1: you there is an ideal combination between it depending on
26:34
Speaker 1: what you're trying to do. For sure, Um, you don't
26:37
Speaker 1: want it to clay, you don't want it too sandy,
26:39
Speaker 1: you don't want it although I don't know, I think
26:41
Speaker 1: you do kind of want everything to be kind of silty.
26:43
Speaker 1: But um, where they interact is going to going to
26:47
Speaker 1: describe what kind of dirt you're dealing with. And there
26:50
Speaker 1: are things you can do too. There's a reason for
26:52
Speaker 1: understanding that because you can say, oh, if I add this,
26:55
Speaker 1: if I if I bury a bunch of grass clippings,
26:58
Speaker 1: is going to turn this clay into more silt um
27:01
Speaker 1: and everything's going to just jump for joy from that
27:04
Speaker 1: point on. Yeah, And if you're a home gardener, uh,
27:08
Speaker 1: you can certainly manipulate your yard or any potted soil
27:13
Speaker 1: that you have. You can amend all that stuff until
27:16
Speaker 1: you get exactly what you need. Um. And then once
27:18
Speaker 1: you have it in a good place, there's upkeep. But
27:21
Speaker 1: it's it's not like you just have to do it once,
27:23
Speaker 1: but you have to do it once really really well
27:26
Speaker 1: and then just sort of keep that good mix going. Yeah,
27:29
Speaker 1: and then you can just go get one of these
27:31
Speaker 1: things that you you hook onto the end of your
27:34
Speaker 1: hose and spray it once in a while with some
27:36
Speaker 1: microbes and sit back and watch everything that's exactly right
27:43
Speaker 1: made out of deer hide. O. God, it doesn't It
27:47
Speaker 1: doesn't burn very well and it's kind of noxious smelling,
27:50
Speaker 1: but it really makes a point, you know. I know
27:53
Speaker 1: we mentioned regularly and I want to say terraforming and
27:59
Speaker 1: other episodes mm, but this Sometimes people say this as
28:03
Speaker 1: a word for soil, but it's really much more than that.
28:07
Speaker 1: It's kind of like anything on top of the bedrock
28:11
Speaker 1: basically can be called regular, and that's not And we
28:14
Speaker 1: mentioned terraforming because if you talk about the Moon or Mars,
28:19
Speaker 1: you talk about regular as well, and whether or not
28:21
Speaker 1: we could grow stuff there, which apparently we could, right. Um, yeah,
28:27
Speaker 1: if we added the right nutrients and water, it would
28:30
Speaker 1: it would hold, which is essentially all it is. At
28:33
Speaker 1: that point, It's like what that that soil science? This
28:35
Speaker 1: guy was saying that it's um, it's a it's it's dirt,
28:39
Speaker 1: not soil. It's dirt because it doesn't have anything living.
28:41
Speaker 1: But you can add that stuff to it as needed, right,
28:44
Speaker 1: make Mars great again? Oh God? So you want to
28:52
Speaker 1: talk about the carbon cycle? Yeah, what is I mean?
28:56
Speaker 1: Does carbon have anything to do with the Earth. No,
29:00
Speaker 1: has nothing at all to do with it. Um. But
29:04
Speaker 1: actually it has quite a bit to do with it, right,
29:06
Speaker 1: So so um carbon is essentially the building block for life,
29:10
Speaker 1: and there's a big cycle of carbon moving through the environment.
29:14
Speaker 1: There's a lot of it in the atmosphere in the
29:16
Speaker 1: form of c O two, and the atmosphere itself forms
29:20
Speaker 1: what's known as a carbon sink, which, if you haven't
29:23
Speaker 1: been paying attention in the last few decades, one of
29:25
Speaker 1: the reasons that climate change is happening is because we've
29:28
Speaker 1: been um overwhelming that carbon sink in the atmosphere by
29:33
Speaker 1: burning fossil fuels and releasing a lot of carbon dioxide
29:36
Speaker 1: that have been sequestered in the ground, which leads us
29:39
Speaker 1: to this point that plants and soil help lock carbon in,
29:44
Speaker 1: so that in addition to the atmosphere being a carbon sink,
29:47
Speaker 1: soil is also a really major carbon sink too. Yeah,
29:52
Speaker 1: and you're thinking about agreeing with that or not. No, no, no,
29:56
Speaker 1: I totally agree with it. But I mean it's kind
29:58
Speaker 1: of like when you know, Amazon rainforest caught on fire. Uh,
30:04
Speaker 1: that's it's almost like you're getting a double whammy there,
30:09
Speaker 1: Like even just cutting the Amazon down to to grow
30:12
Speaker 1: crops there too. Like you're you're, you're creating quite a
30:16
Speaker 1: bit of harm even without burning it down, because all
30:19
Speaker 1: those trees are really good at sequestering carbon dioxide from
30:23
Speaker 1: the air and creating a carbon sink in the ground.
30:26
Speaker 1: But then also it will find out later when you
30:29
Speaker 1: till the ground, a lot of that carbon that's been
30:31
Speaker 1: trapped under there, and we'll stay that way for a
30:35
Speaker 1: thousand or so years, is suddenly released just by tilling it.
30:39
Speaker 1: So there's basically the main point I would like everybody
30:42
Speaker 1: to take away from this entire episode, maybe our entire podcast, Chuck,
30:48
Speaker 1: is leave the rainforests alone. Just stop messing with the rainforest,
30:52
Speaker 1: because it's really screwing things up in ways that we
30:55
Speaker 1: are yet to fully realize. Yeah, agreed, that was my soapbox.
31:01
Speaker 1: That's you and Don Henley Man arm in arm Yes,
31:05
Speaker 1: he's a big rainforest guy. You know. Well we're always
31:08
Speaker 1: chatting it up about the rainforest. I got a lot
31:11
Speaker 1: of my ideas from him, you know, thanks to stuff
31:14
Speaker 1: you should know. Listener Clayton Jaynes, who was a guitar Well,
31:19
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say exactly what he does, but he
31:21
Speaker 1: he worked on this last tour for the Eagles and
31:24
Speaker 1: invited Emily and I down before the show. I got
31:28
Speaker 1: to like touch Don Henley's drum kit and Joe Walsh's guitars.
31:33
Speaker 1: I remember you saying that, and Joe amazing because he
31:35
Speaker 1: happened to be standing next to his guitars at the
31:37
Speaker 1: same time. It's pretty cool man. And you're like, I'm sorry,
31:41
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. He's like, it's okay. Life's been good to
31:43
Speaker 1: me so far. Uh, something's wrong with me today, man,
31:47
Speaker 1: something's bad wrong, all right. So let's talk about carbon dioxide,
31:52
Speaker 1: um for a second here, because plants draw that in
31:55
Speaker 1: from the atmosphere and then eventually they're going to break
31:59
Speaker 1: that down because as uh think, you know, photosynthesis happens
32:03
Speaker 1: and they use that carbon to build up that plant.
32:06
Speaker 1: We're talking about the roots, the leaves, the stems. Carbon
32:09
Speaker 1: plays a big part in that. But eventually, like I
32:11
Speaker 1: said earlier, that plant is gonna die or leaves just
32:14
Speaker 1: fall from a tree or whatever, and that carbon is
32:17
Speaker 1: locked inside that leaf or that dead plant on the
32:20
Speaker 1: ground that you stepped on right exactly. So, Um, what's
32:23
Speaker 1: great about this is that plant used that carbon and
32:26
Speaker 1: when it died, it died with that carbon and it
32:29
Speaker 1: was locked in like you said, but it's able to
32:33
Speaker 1: be used by other plants that come along, which is
32:36
Speaker 1: part of that whole like beautiful system that just works
32:40
Speaker 1: so intricately well because to unlock that carbon you have,
32:45
Speaker 1: that's where all that life that lives in the soil
32:47
Speaker 1: comes along and uh becomes extra extremely important because they
32:52
Speaker 1: break that stuff down and decompose it. Depending on whether
32:55
Speaker 1: you're talking about bugs that chew up leaf litter um
32:59
Speaker 1: into smaller, smaller pieces, which makes it easier for microbes
33:02
Speaker 1: to break down more quickly. Um, the microbes themselves get eaten,
33:07
Speaker 1: and that carbon that was locked in the plant is
33:10
Speaker 1: suddenly unlocked and available in the soil for other plants
33:13
Speaker 1: to take up through their roots and build their own
33:16
Speaker 1: structures and use for photosynthesis too. It's it's the circle
33:20
Speaker 1: of life, right, or it doesn't use at all, and
33:23
Speaker 1: some of that carbon is then released back into the atmosphere. Uh,
33:27
Speaker 1: then we get to the humus. And I think we
33:31
Speaker 1: might have talked about this. Surely we did in composting, Yes,
33:34
Speaker 1: we definitely, maybe we did. One of earthworms, right, yea,
33:39
Speaker 1: they talked about in earthworms. We talked about um in permaculture.
33:44
Speaker 1: I believe we may have also talked about it in
33:47
Speaker 1: desertification and droughts. Right, that was a good one. That
33:55
Speaker 1: was good. So humist is that? Um, it's basically, if
34:01
Speaker 1: you'd compost something years later, you're gonna finally get down
34:05
Speaker 1: to humus. It's what's left over after all that snacking
34:09
Speaker 1: is done. Uh. And it's you know, if you have
34:12
Speaker 1: a home composter, I don't think that you have humus
34:15
Speaker 1: after a couple of months of doing a really good
34:18
Speaker 1: job composting, because it takes like many years to become humans. Yeah. Um,
34:23
Speaker 1: And like it's just a very small percentage of the
34:26
Speaker 1: stuff you compost will break down into humus because apparently
34:29
Speaker 1: the precursor of humans is proteins, and most compost is
34:32
Speaker 1: made up of carbohydrates, plant materials, or carbs, right, Um, yeah,
34:38
Speaker 1: that's right. Um. So when it breaks down, this humus
34:42
Speaker 1: is it's almost like a Some soil scienists apparently consider
34:46
Speaker 1: humus a third state of life where it's not just dead,
34:50
Speaker 1: it's very dead. Decomposition is not really happening anymore. But
34:54
Speaker 1: there's a lot of minerals kind of locked in their
34:57
Speaker 1: inorganic materials. UM. But the thing is you want humus.
35:01
Speaker 1: The more humis you have, the more lively in life,
35:04
Speaker 1: affirming your soil is UM. It's like eat, prey and
35:08
Speaker 1: love down there, you know, because humis forms an ideal
35:13
Speaker 1: house for all that other life to live in. It's like,
35:17
Speaker 1: exactly what is needed for the other organisms that make
35:21
Speaker 1: soil alive in this um symbiotic network. That's what they want,
35:27
Speaker 1: is humist and and it's it's extraordinarily important stuff. But
35:31
Speaker 1: we don't fully understand why it doesn't necessarily keep breaking
35:35
Speaker 1: down after a point. Yeah, it's it's very dark, it's
35:39
Speaker 1: like black. Basically, it's very spongy. UM. It has great
35:43
Speaker 1: water retention. It can hold nine of its weight and water. Uh.
35:47
Speaker 1: And it's sort of like the bond. It's like the
35:49
Speaker 1: cement that helps. You know, when you clump that soil
35:52
Speaker 1: together in your hand and it stays together, you can
35:56
Speaker 1: thank humus for that. Yeah, as a matter of fact,
35:59
Speaker 1: you should thank humans out loud when you can. When
36:01
Speaker 1: you squeeze soil in your hand, you totally should thank
36:04
Speaker 1: you humus. So it's like you said, like humust holds
36:09
Speaker 1: the stuff together, but it also creates those air pockets
36:13
Speaker 1: or those gaps that are so important in um in
36:16
Speaker 1: healthy soil, right, it keeps things from getting sticking too
36:20
Speaker 1: close together. Yet it also keeps it in aggregations or aggregates, right,
36:24
Speaker 1: So it's really weird if you really stop and think
36:26
Speaker 1: about it. It holds things together, but not too much together.
36:29
Speaker 1: It kind of holds them together at just the right
36:31
Speaker 1: distance so that you have that ideal mixture of soil
36:37
Speaker 1: um gaps. And then those gaps are you know, can
36:42
Speaker 1: hold water moisture. Yeah, and you've got to have that
36:45
Speaker 1: that right mix, because too much sand is not able
36:50
Speaker 1: to hold any water. Like you mentioned, if you go
36:52
Speaker 1: to the beach, you can just see this in action. Um,
36:55
Speaker 1: you've got to have some of that clay though, because
36:57
Speaker 1: that's the smallest one and it's uh those little micropores.
37:02
Speaker 1: They're gonna as what's called capillary action. That's uh adhesion
37:06
Speaker 1: and surface tension mixed together in a bag basically, and
37:10
Speaker 1: that's super super strong. And if you have clay in
37:13
Speaker 1: your soil, it's gonna hold that water and it'll even
37:16
Speaker 1: draw water up from the water table and say here
37:18
Speaker 1: you go go out and feed. Yeah, I saw yet
37:22
Speaker 1: another soil sciences professor talk about capillary action, and he
37:26
Speaker 1: surprised me because he showed that um sand has the
37:29
Speaker 1: least amount of capillary action. There's some you know how
37:32
Speaker 1: like when you're digging into the sand, right before you
37:35
Speaker 1: get to the to the water beneath it, it's wet.
37:38
Speaker 1: That's because the sand has still been wicking some water
37:41
Speaker 1: up through those gaps. Um And But rather than clay
37:46
Speaker 1: being the the strongest with capillary action or the best
37:50
Speaker 1: for soil, I should say, um, it's actually silt. He
37:53
Speaker 1: had like three tubes silt, sand and clay, all next
37:56
Speaker 1: to each other, and the silt one just rocked the
37:59
Speaker 1: other two for how far it had wicked water up
38:02
Speaker 1: this tube. So apparently that's the ideal. Silt is just
38:05
Speaker 1: as good as it gets. Is from what I can tell,
38:08
Speaker 1: it's your own team silt. I am super team silt
38:11
Speaker 1: from now and forever. All right, I think we should
38:15
Speaker 1: take another break perhaps, and we'll talk about what all's
38:20
Speaker 1: living down there in that soil and what this all
38:22
Speaker 1: has to do with climate change right after this, all right,
38:51
Speaker 1: So we talked about early on things living in the soil. UM.
38:56
Speaker 1: I know it's It's easy to think about um, little
38:59
Speaker 1: mike robes and bacteria and things in soil because we
39:02
Speaker 1: know it's just rife with that stuff. But you can't
39:05
Speaker 1: ignore the big things too. There are little moles that
39:08
Speaker 1: live in the soil, their prairie dogs, their lizards, there
39:11
Speaker 1: are snakes, um, all this stuff. Every like kind of
39:15
Speaker 1: larger animal disrupts the soil. But that's a good word
39:19
Speaker 1: in this case. You want that soil disrupted because it's
39:22
Speaker 1: redistributing nutrients. It's you know, you want them peeing and
39:26
Speaker 1: pooping in that stuff and mixing all that stuff in.
39:29
Speaker 1: And you've got this sort of larger, small to larger
39:32
Speaker 1: animal system acting as a little composters along the way. Yeah,
39:37
Speaker 1: and and they're actually also mechanically mixing the soil. Like,
39:40
Speaker 1: you don't want your soil just be big, medium small.
39:44
Speaker 1: You want it to be fairly mixed together, because big
39:47
Speaker 1: is just to the the the gaps between are too
39:51
Speaker 1: big and small the gaps between or two small, you
39:53
Speaker 1: want them mixed well. And so like an earthworm burrowing
39:56
Speaker 1: actually is mixing the the earth together. Gophers apparent mixed
40:00
Speaker 1: together something like eighteen hundred cubic meters per square kilometer
40:05
Speaker 1: every year. That's a tremendous amount of soil mixing in there.
40:10
Speaker 1: It's they're doing it for free, basically. Yeah, and that's
40:13
Speaker 1: when they're getting along. Like you want to really mix
40:15
Speaker 1: up some soil, you get a gopher rumble, Sure happening.
40:20
Speaker 1: You can get ugly, but your soil is gonna be
40:22
Speaker 1: super mixed afterwards. Oh man, it's gonna be fantastic. Plus
40:26
Speaker 1: you can roll cigars out of their hides, the hide
40:28
Speaker 1: of the loser. Oh boy, you've also got spiders. You've
40:32
Speaker 1: got a little scorpions. Um, you've got centipedes, you got millipedes,
40:37
Speaker 1: you got termites, you have uh roaches. Unfortunately, I think
40:43
Speaker 1: right here it says in a sample of one square
40:46
Speaker 1: foot of two inch soil in the forest, two hundred
40:50
Speaker 1: species of mites alone. Yeah, that pretty impressive. I've got
40:56
Speaker 1: one even better than that. Right, let's go down in
40:58
Speaker 1: order a magnitude or so. Oh, I know where you're headed. So,
41:01
Speaker 1: the microbes in the soil are so abundant and so prevalent.
41:04
Speaker 1: Apparently a teaspoon of soil has more microobs in it.
41:09
Speaker 1: Microbes is another pronunciation, um than there are than there
41:13
Speaker 1: are people on Earth and one teaspoon of soil, right,
41:18
Speaker 1: and all these little microbes, their bacteria, there's viruses, there's um,
41:23
Speaker 1: there's fungi. All these my all this microbial life are
41:27
Speaker 1: like the last the last layer of decomposition. But they
41:31
Speaker 1: do even a lot more than just decompose dying things. Um.
41:37
Speaker 1: There's there's a function of fungus that we're just now
41:42
Speaker 1: starting to wrap our heads around called um micro riz a,
41:46
Speaker 1: which is a symbiotic relationship. So so soil itself is
41:50
Speaker 1: a symbiotic relationship. This is a symbiotic relationship within the
41:54
Speaker 1: symbiotic relationship where fungus basically says, hey, roots, I like
41:58
Speaker 1: what you're doing there above me. Um, I'm gonna hang
42:01
Speaker 1: out around you and maybe grow my own system of
42:04
Speaker 1: roots out of fungus me that connects to your roots
42:08
Speaker 1: but also goes through the ground and connects to other
42:10
Speaker 1: roots too. And I'm going to take up, you know,
42:14
Speaker 1: nutrients from the soil and help you accept them into
42:17
Speaker 1: your roots, maybe bring you some water here there, and
42:19
Speaker 1: I'm gonna let you communicate with other plants through your roots,
42:24
Speaker 1: through me to the roots of the other plant too.
42:27
Speaker 1: So it's like if you look at um. A micro
42:30
Speaker 1: is a if you pull up like a plant, it
42:33
Speaker 1: has like this thin, almost long like film around it.
42:37
Speaker 1: That's the fungus. That's it's like a root system around
42:40
Speaker 1: the roots system made up of fungus. And we're just
42:42
Speaker 1: starting to understand this and it's just beautiful to know
42:46
Speaker 1: that it exists like that. It's the fungus amongus. It is,
42:50
Speaker 1: And there's actually humongous fungus amongus, isn't there. Yeah, so, um,
42:55
Speaker 1: what you were talking about is a mutualist. They're kind
42:57
Speaker 1: of three kinds of fungus. And I love that they
43:00
Speaker 1: call it a mutualist. It's a great name for that. Uh,
43:03
Speaker 1: the symbiotic relationship. There's the name for like a neo folk. Sure, yeah,
43:09
Speaker 1: why not get it? Get a tweed vest and a
43:12
Speaker 1: jaw harp and have have a good time. I just
43:16
Speaker 1: got a jaw harp in the mail. By the way,
43:18
Speaker 1: is that the one that has the shoulder mountains? No,
43:20
Speaker 1: the jaw harp is the twangy thing you put in
43:22
Speaker 1: your mouth. It's like to have it here. If you
43:25
Speaker 1: want me to go get it, I would love you
43:27
Speaker 1: to go get it. I think we'll wait. The fungus
43:30
Speaker 1: that eats decaying matter is called a sacrifice. Then you've
43:35
Speaker 1: got your mutualist, and then you've got an actual parasitic fungus.
43:38
Speaker 1: Those are the jerks of the of the forest world.
43:41
Speaker 1: But you were talking about humongus fungus. I know, I
43:45
Speaker 1: feel like we've talked about this at some point. Pando.
43:48
Speaker 1: Was it in Pando? Okay? I thought it might be
43:51
Speaker 1: um in mal Here National Forest. Um there is something
43:55
Speaker 1: called Janet D and a big network of fung i
44:00
Speaker 1: is a genet and Janet D is the humongous fungus
44:04
Speaker 1: is considered the largest living individual on Earth two thousand
44:09
Speaker 1: acres worth. Apparently it's all connected. Yeah, and it was not.
44:13
Speaker 1: It's the biggest by area. I think in Panda is
44:16
Speaker 1: the biggest by mass. Like if you wade Pando, it
44:19
Speaker 1: would weigh more like this one was still covers a
44:22
Speaker 1: lot bigger area, but it's just one big, single organism
44:26
Speaker 1: and it is it's underground and it sucks onto um
44:30
Speaker 1: onto roots. And actually they found it because there was
44:32
Speaker 1: a bunch of dead trees and they're like, what's going
44:34
Speaker 1: on here? And they discovered that it was this one
44:37
Speaker 1: a m A stoy a fungus that um was killing
44:42
Speaker 1: off trees because it can be one of those jerk kinds.
44:45
Speaker 1: The parasitic fungus, what are they called, just parasitic fungus.
44:50
Speaker 1: There's not a great name for them. Uh, No, parasitic fungus.
44:54
Speaker 1: But the ones that so they live in the soil.
44:56
Speaker 1: No one likes them. They're they're they're considered jerks, like
45:00
Speaker 1: you said, um, the ones that everybody likes. So the
45:02
Speaker 1: mutualists are the sacrifices which eat decaying matter and then
45:06
Speaker 1: sometimes they eat one another and all this stuff just
45:09
Speaker 1: the I don't want to say the point of it,
45:11
Speaker 1: because who knows if there even is a point. But
45:13
Speaker 1: if there is a point, it is that UM that
45:18
Speaker 1: nutrients that get used by living things and locked into
45:23
Speaker 1: the living things when they die get unlocked so that
45:25
Speaker 1: other things can use them. All right, So do you
45:28
Speaker 1: want to talk about the nitrogen cycle? Yeah, because I
45:31
Speaker 1: mean that's another thing they can get locked and unlocked
45:34
Speaker 1: thanks to these organisms in their symbiosis. UM nitrogen is
45:38
Speaker 1: extremely important to plants. They used to make chlorophyll, They
45:41
Speaker 1: use it to make some of their UM proteins and structures. UM.
45:46
Speaker 1: But it's and there's it's super abundant in the atmosphere,
45:49
Speaker 1: in the air. But now plants are really good at
45:52
Speaker 1: unlocking it um actually, which is right, which is why
45:56
Speaker 1: you need some plants called nitrogen fixers to come along.
46:01
Speaker 1: And I think legums are a really good example of
46:03
Speaker 1: this in like alf alpha peanuts, you know those things
46:08
Speaker 1: um and they can take it out of the air
46:10
Speaker 1: and turn it into a usable form. And they actually
46:13
Speaker 1: do that, I saw, not on their own accord. They
46:16
Speaker 1: have to become infected by a bacteria called rhizobium, And
46:20
Speaker 1: it's actually the infection from ryriezobium that alters the plant
46:23
Speaker 1: to make it so that it can take nitrogen out
46:26
Speaker 1: of the air and deposited in its roots for storage. Yeah,
46:30
Speaker 1: most plants can't do that. They have to draw it
46:33
Speaker 1: from the soil around them. And you know, we we
46:37
Speaker 1: mentioned the balance and nature that we always are seeking
46:40
Speaker 1: that homeostasis, which you would like is a balance between
46:43
Speaker 1: these nitrogen fixers and dead plants adding nitrogen into the
46:47
Speaker 1: soil and then also those plants that are drawing that
46:50
Speaker 1: soil out, like you want that all to sort of
46:52
Speaker 1: balance out together, right exactly, And again it's because there's
46:56
Speaker 1: help from bacteria helping fix nitrogen and nodules on the
47:00
Speaker 1: on the roots that other plants can come along and use,
47:03
Speaker 1: and to fix what's called a fixed form, so it's
47:05
Speaker 1: fixed nitrogen. Like you can have, UM, say a glass
47:09
Speaker 1: of sea water, and you're really thirsty, but you can't
47:12
Speaker 1: drink it because it's not in a usable form, even
47:14
Speaker 1: though it's still water. But if you run it through
47:16
Speaker 1: a reverse osmosis filter and desalinate it, now it's usable water.
47:20
Speaker 1: So you can think of nitrogen fixing is like the
47:24
Speaker 1: Earth's version of reverse osmosis for nitrogen converting into a
47:28
Speaker 1: usable form for plants. The thing is that we kind
47:32
Speaker 1: of talked about it before UM and you just hit
47:35
Speaker 1: upon it. There's like a natural cycle and natural process
47:39
Speaker 1: to all this, which things like agriculture, especially UM has
47:44
Speaker 1: really kind of disrupted. And even after the research that's
47:48
Speaker 1: been produced over time, we're still we're either being like
47:53
Speaker 1: willfully ignorant or still figuring it out, or people are
47:57
Speaker 1: still trying to get the word out. I don't know
47:58
Speaker 1: what the issue is UM. If it's just too expensive
48:01
Speaker 1: to do it right, I don't know. I'll have to
48:03
Speaker 1: go back and listen to our permaculture episode again. But
48:06
Speaker 1: one of the ways, like you said, that we we
48:08
Speaker 1: disrupt this natural cycle, or the nitrogen cycle in particular,
48:12
Speaker 1: is by not um planting things like cover plants that
48:15
Speaker 1: are nitrogen fixers to replenish the soil. Instead, we use
48:20
Speaker 1: factory made fertilizer, which is just fixed nitrogen itself UM
48:24
Speaker 1: to replenish the soil, which is much harsher and can
48:27
Speaker 1: have um all sorts of uh cascading negative effects on
48:32
Speaker 1: the surrounding environment as well. Yeah, because if you're doing
48:36
Speaker 1: a major agriculture job and you're pulling that nitrogen out,
48:41
Speaker 1: you've got to artificially put it back in. And that's
48:43
Speaker 1: all fertilizer is, because you're feeding that manure or whatever
48:48
Speaker 1: fertilizer you're using. Manure has a lot of nitrogen, so
48:52
Speaker 1: that's why it's used as a fertilizer, but you're just
48:54
Speaker 1: pumping it back into the soil. Uh. There's a great
48:57
Speaker 1: documentary that's called I Think Big Little Farm maybe not
49:04
Speaker 1: about this couple who you know, dropped out and started
49:08
Speaker 1: their own farm, but started a farm that they wanted
49:11
Speaker 1: to do right and to be and balance like naturally
49:16
Speaker 1: with itself. It's really good and daunting and inspiring all
49:21
Speaker 1: at once. It's it's cool. It sounds a bit like um,
49:24
Speaker 1: the movie All of Me, where Lily Tomlin takes over
49:27
Speaker 1: Steve Martin's body and they have to learn to coexist
49:31
Speaker 1: together kind of harmoniously. And I think they do at
49:34
Speaker 1: the end if I remember correctly. It's not big little farm,
49:37
Speaker 1: Biggest The biggest little farm is what it is in Texas.
49:41
Speaker 1: Uh No, that's a Burt Reynolds movie, right, Okay, And
49:44
Speaker 1: you said this is a documentary Biggest Little Farm. It's
49:47
Speaker 1: really good. You should check it out. Okay, Um, well,
49:50
Speaker 1: people should check out All of Me too, if you
49:52
Speaker 1: ask me. Um. The thing is, Chuck is when you're
49:54
Speaker 1: talking about nitrogen fixing and say like, okay, well, farmers
49:58
Speaker 1: should just grow alfalfa and then whatever, say, if you
50:01
Speaker 1: harvest corn or something like that, you till it into
50:05
Speaker 1: the grass. Whatever is left over after you've harvested the corn,
50:08
Speaker 1: you till it into the ground. I mean, and that
50:10
Speaker 1: buried stuff actually provides a lot of food for all
50:13
Speaker 1: of those microbial life and um, earthworms and all that stuff.
50:17
Speaker 1: So they actually leave the roots of your plants alone.
50:20
Speaker 1: That's great, but even doing that requires more care than
50:23
Speaker 1: you would think, because if we go back to humus, remember,
50:27
Speaker 1: humus is a really great way to lock in carbon
50:30
Speaker 1: for hundreds or thousands of years. But we're finding that
50:34
Speaker 1: it can be fairly easily disturbed by agricultural practices like tilling,
50:39
Speaker 1: and that once you disturb it, all of a sudden,
50:41
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, yeah, well I'm done, I'm out. If
50:43
Speaker 1: you're not gonna appreciate me, I'm not gonna hold onto
50:45
Speaker 1: your carbon anymore, and it starts to release it. So
50:48
Speaker 1: we're finding that agricultural practices like um tilling are actually
50:52
Speaker 1: having a contribution and impact to climate change as well. Yeah,
50:57
Speaker 1: and it's not uh and I think this came from
51:00
Speaker 1: the same interview with the professor assistant professor Um. She's saying,
51:05
Speaker 1: it's not like it's the same as the burning of
51:07
Speaker 1: fossil fuels. UM. There was an estimate is that soils
51:11
Speaker 1: have lost a hundred and twenty uh pg. What does
51:15
Speaker 1: that stand for pedigrams of carbon since we've been since
51:21
Speaker 1: the dawn of agriculture basically, and that since seventeen fifty one,
51:27
Speaker 1: uh fossil fuel burning has had a cumulative total over
51:31
Speaker 1: four hundred pedigram so it's not on par but it is,
51:37
Speaker 1: you know, something to think about, and especially when you're
51:40
Speaker 1: talking about perma frost, and you know that's why we
51:43
Speaker 1: talk about when UH climate change is sort of like
51:47
Speaker 1: this vicious cycle where things are heating up and then
51:51
Speaker 1: UH ice caps are melting, and when that stuff melts,
51:53
Speaker 1: that's releasing this perma frost. Soil that has been stored
51:58
Speaker 1: you know, stored carbon for thousands and thousands of years,
52:01
Speaker 1: all of a sudden released back up into the atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah,
52:05
Speaker 1: because humus is most stable as a carbon sink when
52:09
Speaker 1: it's cold. So if it's so cold that it's been
52:12
Speaker 1: frozen for years, um, it's very stable. But yeah, as
52:16
Speaker 1: climate change warms it up, that starts to get released,
52:19
Speaker 1: and that is a problem. I mean, yes, a hundred
52:21
Speaker 1: and twenty pedigrams over the last years. It doesn't seem
52:27
Speaker 1: like much, but we're getting to the point now where
52:29
Speaker 1: every little bit counts, and I think as part of
52:31
Speaker 1: the Paris Climate Agreement, you can um count your carbon sinks,
52:37
Speaker 1: like the kind of soil you have against your output
52:41
Speaker 1: to to show whatever reduction you're working on. So it
52:44
Speaker 1: does count, it is taken into account. It's just nothing
52:47
Speaker 1: like fossil fuels, but it is an important component, it
52:49
Speaker 1: seems like. Yeah, So basically, you know, that's what they
52:53
Speaker 1: did in the biggest Little farm is get back to
52:55
Speaker 1: basics of the dawn of agriculture when they practice really
52:59
Speaker 1: sound soil management. Um for the most part, tilling you know,
53:05
Speaker 1: only what needs to be tilled. Don't go super deeper,
53:08
Speaker 1: super wide if you don't need to that ground cover
53:11
Speaker 1: that you were talking about, shades that soil, and don't burn.
53:15
Speaker 1: And this is one of the big problems with Big
53:17
Speaker 1: agg is burning plant waste. Yeah, you don't want to
53:20
Speaker 1: do that. You want to bury that stuff and put
53:22
Speaker 1: it back into the earth. Put it back into the earth, everybody,
53:25
Speaker 1: because the life down there wants It's right. That's the
53:29
Speaker 1: slogan for this one. Okay, agreed. So get out there
53:33
Speaker 1: and get your hands dirty and go feel the soil
53:35
Speaker 1: and remember to say thank you Humus as you let
53:38
Speaker 1: it move through your fingers. Okay, okay, everybody. And in
53:42
Speaker 1: the meantime, I think, chuck, it's a listener mail. Yeah,
53:48
Speaker 1: this is uh from a teacher. I think is this
53:52
Speaker 1: a teacher? Yes, biology teacher. Appropriately, Hey, guys, just listen
53:58
Speaker 1: to the episode of arcolepsy. Thought it would clear up
54:00
Speaker 1: a confusion about the difference between a disease and a disorder.
54:04
Speaker 1: As a high school biology teacher, I had to explain
54:06
Speaker 1: the difference every year. The difference is subtle, but there
54:10
Speaker 1: is a simple way to remember. A disease is caused
54:13
Speaker 1: by a path pathogen like a virus or bacteria. A
54:17
Speaker 1: disorder is a malfuncttion malfunction due to genetics, trauma, chemical toxicity,
54:22
Speaker 1: or other non living factor. The lines can become blurred
54:26
Speaker 1: a bit because the disorder can be triggered by a disease.
54:28
Speaker 1: Some cancers are triggered by viruses. May be a clearer example,
54:32
Speaker 1: as HIV AIDS. A person can be HIV positive and
54:35
Speaker 1: if the viral disease is discovered in time and treated,
54:39
Speaker 1: they may never succumb to the disorder that is AIDS,
54:41
Speaker 1: which sets in when the infected person's immune system has
54:45
Speaker 1: been effectively eliminated. Hope this helps the issue. Thanks again,
54:48
Speaker 1: keep up the good work. And that is from Rich
54:51
Speaker 1: Brusk from Manhattan, Kansas. That's a man of hat A, Kansas.
54:57
Speaker 1: That's right. That is a world class biolo g teacher.
55:00
Speaker 1: Chuck totally what was his last name, Brusque with a B. Sure,
55:08
Speaker 1: Thanks Mr Brusk from Manahatta, Kansas, UM. We appreciate that,
55:12
Speaker 1: and we appreciate you being a biology teacher in a
55:14
Speaker 1: world class one at that. If you want to show
55:17
Speaker 1: off what a world class person you are, you can
55:19
Speaker 1: get in touch with this too, like Mr Bruss did. Uh,
55:22
Speaker 1: you can send us an email send it off to
55:25
Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
55:31
Speaker 1: Know is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
55:34
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55:36
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
55:39
Speaker 1: favorite shows,