When Anne Biklé started rehabilitating her Seattle backyard to plant a garden, she didn’t anticipate the return of carbon to the soil. She invited a soil scientist from UW to compare samples from the original dirt with samples from the Eco-Lawn, perennial beds, and vegetable bed. The Eco-Lawn had 5% more carbon than the baseline, the perennial beds had 8% more, and the vegetable bed had 12% more carbon. What if farmers applied these ideas at scale?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble. We are in the Nori office, Nori HQ in Ballard, Seattle. It is quite rainy today and maybe we’ll learn about how that’s affecting the soil in our guest’s famous backyard garden. We’ve heard stories about it, so we’ll probably get into that. Christophe, why don’t you take it from there?
Christophe Jospe: Happy to. Happy Friday, everyone. Even though this isn’t going to air on a Friday. It doesn’t matter at all to the listeners. It is Friday. Very happy to have our guest on. This is the first time we’ve had a husband and wife. We won’t say whose wife this is. Maybe we’ll let the listeners guess, or it’ll just come out naturally. I also want to make a correction. For the first podcast, you were talking about the accent aigu that I have, and I said, non, je n’ai pas un accent aigu, but that’s not true.
Je n’utilise pas un accent aigu, because I do have that.
Ross Kenyon: I almost asked this, too, when we learned the pronunciation of your name. Bickley has like the accent.
Christophe Jospe: It is the accent. Right. Well, so sitting across from us is Dr. Anne Bickley. She is a biologist and co-author of The Hidden Half of Nature. And as we might have told you before, we like to start with people’s stories and really what got them to where they are today, where they’re sitting on a podcast talking about Reversing Climate Change.
Anne Biklé: Yeah, that is an interesting question. I guess you sort of realize who you are only later in life and things sometimes make sense or sometimes not when you think back to the kinds of things you did as a kid and what – Sort of your natural tendencies were and things like that. And for me, I grew up in Colorado, south of Denver in a sort of a suburban environment. And this was a time, of course, way before devices and way before screens.
Christophe Jospe: You were left to your own devices.
Anne Biklé: Yes. Yes, that is a really good way to put it. We were left to our own devices, and the devices in my case were wandering around in our backyard, which to a little kid was a huge, huge world. And that’s where, no matter the season, summer or winter, spring or fall, there was always something to see out in the backyard. And I think that’s probably where I developed what seems to have grown over the years into a very bad case of plant lust. I am.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen this on your website. That’s a great turn of phrase there.
Anne Biklé: Yeah. And it doesn’t help living in a place like Seattle. But what really started the case of plant lust was where I went to college, which was in California and Santa Cruz. And never before in my life, because I had grown up in Colorado, did I really even quite realize that plants could be green in the wintertime. And not only green, but lots and lots of different kinds of plants. And arriving to college and looking around at these enormous redwood trees that were on campus really opened my eyes up to the botanical world.
So that’s kind of where the bad case of plant lust started. And once you have a bad case of plant lust, inevitably you end up with a garden. Because you want to grow these things and you want to see what do they look like when they’re small and what do they look like when they’re big. And, you know, growing plants is not for the faint of heart at all because you will lose plants, plants that you love, plants that... Anyone out there who’s grown a plant and you’ve done all of these things, all these right things, you put it outside, you’ve pulled it inside, you’ve done this, you’ve done that, and then it dies and it will just break your heart.
So... That’s just a little bit, I guess, about me. And speaking of gardens, so here we are in Seattle and... I had long, long wanted a garden, but moving around every few years, you could never really have a garden, could never really put the roots in. And then when we bought our house, and this was a long time ago in Seattle, part of what drew us to this house was not so much the house, but the lot. The house had been built on one side of the lot, almost like on the very edge of the lot, and it left this very large side yard.
So I saw that and I thought, Oh my God, we’re going to rip everything out that’s here, which actually there wasn’t much at the time. And I’m going to turn this place into a garden. So that’s sort of how the journey into the soil began.
Ross Kenyon: How was the soil quality there? I think Dave told us a little bit about this. The soil was quite bad. It was dirt, right? And we’ve told listeners the difference between dirt and soil. Maybe that’s a good thing to repeat for them. But I know you transformed it, right?
Anne Biklé: Yeah, that’s interesting, the dirt versus the soil. That has a whole – you guys should get a soil scientist in here, a broad-minded soil scientist, because probably, strictly speaking, a soil scientist would not be here on your podcast even uttering the word dirt because it is soil. But nonetheless, that would be a really interesting thing here. Soil is what – it’s really pretty amazing. If you think about our planet and you think about us humans, you know, running around on the surface of the planet – And that we need to eat and that we are using all of these resources to make things.
There’s a pretty thin layer between life and death and that is the soil. I think it was Franklin, actually I don’t remember if it was Theodore Franklin Roosevelt. One of them has this quote, something about six inches of topsoil is the difference between life and death. And that is a really sort of profound thing to think about because we’re losing our topsoil. Many of us are completely unaware of that. Some say we’re going to be out of soil in the next 50 or 60 years if we keep running through it at the Soil is the physical, it’s the dead parts of soil along with the living parts.
So you take the biology, so all of these different kinds of organisms from earthworms down to bacteria. And you take the dead part, which is a bunch of rock fragments, for lack of a better way of putting it. Maybe Dave would say something else. But, you know, you also think about the diversity of rocks on our planet, you know, all kinds of things. And so these rocks weather out and all of these fragments have minerals in them. And so you mix all of these rock minerals as they weather out of the solid rock with the biology and you get soil.
And then you put a plant into that kind of an environment with a part of its body, its root system, that is interacting with these life forms and with these minerals in the soil. And what you have in a really healthy functioning soil is what is thought to be one of the most biodiverse places on our planet. It’s not the Amazon jungle. It could be the ground beneath our feet, depending on how it is we’re treating our soils.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a nice way to put it. And I always like being reminded of the magic of everyday life. And do you ever read Mary Oliver? Do you know her?
Anne Biklé: She has been coming up, I don’t know why, for the last several weeks. And I was actually at the library yesterday. It was just the little Wallingford library, which if you’ve ever been there, it’s about as big as this room. And I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s right. I was going to look for a poetry book by Mary Oliver. And I’m like, I don’t even see a poetry section here. Damn. So I still don’t have one.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, they’re so good. And yeah, if you ever need a reminder that the world is a magical, beautiful place, that’s one of the most reliable sources of wonder that I have. The way that you describe soil very much strikes me that way.
Unknown speaker: Do you have like a title recommendation? We’ll put it in show notes.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, man. I’ve read a few of them. My wife’s a huge fan. Her family is too. She has a new one that just came out called Devotion or Devotions. That’s a collection, but I haven’t read that one yet. I can’t I can’t remember. Maybe I’ll look one up and tell you which one I like the best. I think DreamWork is one of the ones that I really liked. But anyways.
Unknown speaker: Did you have a question, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: No, I just wanted to talk about poetry and that whole scene.
Unknown speaker: No, that’s great. And so the soil beneath our feet, if it’s healthy, can be one of the most biodiverse places on earth. That is quite a tidbit. I’m going to steal that and start throwing that into conversation.
Anne Biklé: I think you should. And what’s really wild about it is that... Most of these life forms we can’t even see.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like nematodes and bacteria.
Anne Biklé: Nematodes, bacteria, viruses, archaea, many different kinds of worm, amoebas. I mean, it’s, you know, our sight is wonderful. We can see each other here in this room. We can, I guess, look out at the shades of gray in our sky today. But it’s also really limiting because that’s what we think the world is, are the things that we can see. But there’s so much that We can’t see from the tiny invisible creatures that live in the soil to I was just looking at these images the other day of how. Insects, flying insects, bees and wasps and things like that, see the botanical world and flowers in particular.
It was some images in National Geo, which you always know you’re going to get nice photographs there. But I was stunned because it wasn’t just... We’ve seen these photos before where the yellow flower is not just yellow. Whoever had taken these photos had put some 3D stuff behind it. And I just stood there looking at this. I just couldn’t believe it. And it might be because we just sort of have come out of summer here and now we’re into the rainy season. And I think I was thinking the other day about, oh yeah, just a month ago out on the patio.
One of my favorite things to do is to sit on the patio and watch the insects. And I think it beats birding. Actually, I mean, there’s all these people are wild. I like birds, too. But the really cool thing about insects is that if you have a garden with a lot of different plants in it and a lot of flowering plants, they come to you. Typically, when you go birding, you got to leave home, you know, get in the vehicle, drive out to the hinterlands, which can be fun. But I’m like, I think I really like growing things in the garden and having the insects come here And watching them.
And I actually, I can highly recommend this. It might sound silly, but just wait, just wait, get the binoculars out and do some bee and some insect watching. Because you start looking at their body parts and their head and their mouth parts and like, what are they really doing out there? And it’s really, it’s almost like you have a magnifying glass on these insects. And because you’re at a distance, you’re also not Really interrupting their behavior. So it’s really cool. So next summer, get the binos out, go sit yourself down by some flowers and take a look at what’s going on.
Ross Kenyon: I can see the tagline. It’s gardening, the lazy person’s birdwatching. Perfect. That sounds great. So then you turn this backyard from a relatively sterile place into a place where you’re out there with binoculars, checking out insects. You’ve created a little oasis of life in your backyard.
Anne Biklé: Yeah. And what’s interesting, I don’t know if Dave talked about this, but we... So, okay, back to the side yard. We... Kind of different than what’s going on in Seattle today, we left the house standing, but we demolished the side yard. And what I mean when I say demolish is we, you know, rolled up that old, old growth lawn that was not a very interesting kind of a lawn. There were some trees and... A couple were dead, some were in really bad places and we just, we demoed everything and so we could start with a blank slate.
And that was fun as a gardener because you get to choose where does everything go and how are these things going to look together and what are they going to do. But what we realized about a year in and then even more in say the following three to five years is that life is Life was returning to the yard in much the same way that life evolved on Earth, which is to say that it was the smallest things, it was the microorganisms and the insects that sort of were the first arrivals.
And then a few years would pass and we began to see more and more birds in the yard, for example. If we had had a water feature... I’m sure we would have attracted some amphibians. I’m just sure of it, but we didn’t. But after the birds came, I guess we had a mammal. We had a drunk once.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure that counts as gardening.
Anne Biklé: Was walking past a house from the local bar and sort of teetered into some trees and was sleeping there for a few hours. But anyway, the point is that, yeah, it was really neat to watch sort of the emergence of life In the garden, the same way it had evolved on earth. And one of the most amazing things was one summer, you know, in Seattle, we don’t get a lot of sunsets, but if we are, it’s going to be summertime when you’re going to see that. So one, one July evening, I was out just, it’s my favorite time of day, because I’m not a morning person.
And so I’m just looking around. I’m like, hey, what’s that big shape there up in the sky, you know, against this sort of like peachy tangerine sherbet I don’t know, kind of a big bird. I’m like, yeah, that is. And then I’m like, that’s a really big bird and it’s coming right toward us, toward me. And it got bigger and bigger. And it was this bald eagle that swooped sort of just right over my head up to the neighbor’s fairly large Douglas fir tree where there was a crow’s nest, where there were babies in that nest.
And... So the eagle arrived to take some baby crows out of that nest. And, you know, shortly before, shortly, you know, earlier in the summer, we had had parent crows. I don’t know if it was these exact parents of that nest, but could have been that were digging around kind of like chickens in the mulch and in all of the organic matter that I had put on the beds. And so Here it was, you know, soil life started, sort of kicked things off. Organic matter fed more soil life. More soil life brought things to eat the soil life, the crows, and then the crows attracted the bald eagles.
So that was sort of a, that was a really stunning thing to see and to experience and to sort of put it together with Oh, this is all kind of connected here, the life of the soil and what there is to eat in the soil and the kinds of things that it draws.
Ross Kenyon: Is the rehabilitation of soil in that way something that required much input from you or did this just occur naturally?
Anne Biklé: Yeah, that’s an interesting choice of words. Did it require much input from me? Yes, tonnes of input from me. So Dave will tell you he has a brown thumb, and I can vouch for that.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds like his turn of phrase. I could see that, yeah.
Anne Biklé: This is not necessarily a bad thing because if he were a big time gardener, if you ever get involved with a gardener, we’re very opinionated about which plants where, if the plant is ailing, what should be done about the plant. If the plant is doing wonderfully, what do we do to keep that going? So Dave was not a gardener. So I was doing all of this, making the decisions about the garden really sort of by myself solo. And I could enlist him for some heavy lifting and some hauling. It’s like, okay, I’ve got another load of...
Chicken manure. I got another load of wood chips. I got another load of coffee grounds. I need you to help me get it out of the car. So I calculated at one time. So let me back up. When we demoed the lot and we got down to what the soil was, this is when I would call it dirt because it was about the color of, say, a All these rocks in it, which is not that atypical for Seattle, but I mean just an awful lot of rocks and hardly any organic matter.
So I had done enough gardening in my life to know this is not going to work and we got stuck putting the garden in at a really bad time. It was August, which if you’ve been around Seattle for the last several Augusts, it can be brutally hot. And So I thought, what am I going to do? The watering bill is going to be through the roof. How am I going to keep these plants alive? And I thought, mulch and organic matter, that is what you need immediately. Lay your hands on as much cheap or free as you can.
And so there ensued many, many trips to coffee shops nearby to load up on coffee grounds, making friends with the arborists in the neighborhood who were doing work and saying, I need your wood chips, I need your wood chips. The neighbor, this neighbor down the street has these gorgeous oak trees that in the fall dump huge amounts of leaves. And an oak leaf... And oak leaf works particularly well in Seattle. I don’t know exactly why, but they don’t tend... To mat together and form clumps the way say many of our maples do.
So these oak leaves would somehow stay, I don’t want to say dry or even semi dry, but they were wonderful for mixing up with the mulch and the coffee grounds. And so I would make these sort of stew like concoctions and then layer them on the beds. No digging in. I had no time to dig anything in and I So that was how we started. That’s how I started off sort of feeding the life of the soil. And the most peculiar thing was that this was a work. I was constantly, constantly mixing things up in the wheelbarrow, getting them over to the beds, layering the stuff on.
And then I’d think, okay, yeah, we’re done. We’re done for now. And then three months later, I’d go out and where I had put, you It was down to like one or two inches. And I thought, what is going on? Where is this stuff going? You know, the whole idea here was to keep the stuff on the surface to conserve water and to keep feeding the soil life. And this was, in a way, answering that question, where is all this stuff going, all this organic matter? That was sort of the genesis in part for the hidden half of nature is to figure out Where’s all, who’s processing this organic matter?
What are they doing with it? And what does that mean for the health of the soil? What does that mean for the health of the garden? And basically organic matter is like this giant smorgasbord buffet spread for the life of the soil. And if you put it there, they will come. And Of course, a little bacterium can’t take a fist-sized piece of organic matter and gnaw it down and chew it down for that. There’s bigger forms of soil life, stuff like the earthworms and beetles and the things that we can see.
But every life form in the soil is sort of scaled to a particular size and a particular type of organic matter. And eventually, it gets down to a small enough scale that’s where the microorganisms get a hold of it. And it was just really interesting to think about the flow of nutrients from all this organic matter I was collecting into the bodies of these trillions of different species of soil life. And they’re getting nourishment and energy out of it. And then they’re excreting stuff that some other form of soil life is eating.
So it’s this... It’s both a cascade and a cycle at the same time of carbon-based things. And when you really think about that, especially for what you guys do in the context of what are we going to do about this big problem of climate change, I like to think about carbon as sort of a flowing thing, like a liquid thing, not like this hunk of coal or this gaseous phase that’s coming out of vehicles and things like that. But I think about it as carbon is sort of, plant is getting a hold of carbon from the atmosphere and combining that with sunlight and creating this flow of carbon in its green body and then From there, this liquid carbon is flowing out into the soil and that’s another thing.
It’s another big dietary source, if you could call it that, for the life of the soil. They’re eating this liquid carbon in the soil at the same time as they’re feeding on many solid forms of carbon that are bound up in organic matter. Once you start looking at and thinking about soil, you could just do that Soil is very new.
Ross Kenyon: In fact, much of what you’ve said I’m not sure was well understood until a few decades ago, maybe more recently.
Anne Biklé: Yeah, that’s true. So there’s all these great cycles that make our planet function, at least for us, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle. And because of these enormous scales on which these very basic elements are cycling through life and up into the atmosphere and through the water and all those kinds of things, it’s hard to get your mind around that. And that, I think, is in part why it’s been so hard to understand, for people to understand why it is that there’s such a huge potential reservoir for putting carbon into the soil.
Because we think, a lot of us who maybe think superficially about climate change think, oh, the big problem is we’re just burning up fossil fuels just way too fast, and all of that stuff is going up into the atmosphere now. But in fact, much of the carbon in the atmosphere can be traced to having been released from the soil.
Ross Kenyon: Isn’t it like a quarter?
Anne Biklé: Yeah. Estimates vary, but between a quarter and a half since the Industrial Revolution came from the soil.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Land use change is what I’ve heard people say, right? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: And I think it’s compounded by the crisis when we’re destroying topsoil and you read reports that say something like there are only 60 years left to grow food globally because we’re depleting the soil of all these nutrients and every time we plow it releases all the carbon that’s creating a lot of problems.
Ross Kenyon: Do you know that line people say farming is mining for carbon or carbon mining? You’re like you’re taking the life out of the soil.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And I think it goes back to what you were saying, too, and which is carbon isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s the carbon is the wrong place. Right. I’m kind of curious, here we are. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Biklé: I think a good place to start, so long before we had farmers and when we were hunter-gatherers, the places that we got our food, of course, was nature. And when I think about, people will say, oh, but you did that in Seattle and the climate there is so mild, you know, I can’t do that here in the Dakotas or somewhere that, you know, you get these, you know, long winters. And I think one of the things to do wherever a person lives is to go to a place where they can see what some of the native habitats and native forests and native vegetation communities look like because those vegetation communities evolved in that place and figured between the type of plants that grow there and the processes that are breaking down that organic matter can get an idea of, oh, There’s soil everywhere, but it gets made of different forms of organic matter.
So I think it would be really interesting to go, let’s say you go to a prairie, and we know the dominant vegetation communities in prairies, prairie states, for example, is grass and many different kinds of grasses. So if I had a garden and In one of these places, I would go out to a natural grassland and I would take a look around and say, you know, what’s growing here and what thickness of organic matter is built up here? And I would think about trying to mimic as much as possible the kinds of processes and the kinds of materials that you find in native plant communities.
Ross Kenyon: Try to reverse engineer it on your own plot.
Anne Biklé: Yeah. Yeah, kind of like that. And we had, we of course... We didn’t anticipate that we were going to be returning carbon to the soil in the garden. What ended up happening is several years ago, there was a soil scientist at UW, and Dave and I thought we should have Sally over and get her to get some soil samples because we were curious how much carbon – How much carbon have we put back in the soil? So we had some soil behind the garage that has never been, there’s nothing that grows back there.
So that’s sort of our baseline. So we took a sample from there and then we took samples from, we put in what’s So there’s grasses and forbs and some other plants that make up what is our lawn. And then we have beds where there’s perennials and trees, and then we have vegetable beds. So we took samples from all those different places, and what we ended up learning was sort of astonishing. The lawn area had increased in carbon by, I think it was somewhere around 5% or 6% in the perennial beds.
Which is where I’d really been focusing on layering in organic matter. That was somewhere around 8% or 9% more carbon than in the baseline sample. And not surprisingly in the vegetable bed, which I had heavily amended because I’m growing vegetables there and we don’t have the longest growing season around here. So it’s like I really want to juice up whatever is growing there. So I would be adding... Vermicompost or worm compost, which is some of the finest, finest organic matter, in my opinion, that any gardener can lay their hands on.
Ross Kenyon: That’s just their casings, right?
Anne Biklé: That’s just their casings, yeah. And people think, oh, well, aren’t the earthworms doing that? That processes food fragments and scraps than the earthworms that are in the soil that are eating the organic matter that’s naturally present. And so there’s vermicompost in the veg beds. I did a treatment with biochar. I added some of my coffee ground rich mulches and the veg beds were around 12 or 13% carbon. So An analysis I’d really like to do is, there’s a lot of gardens across our country. And what if in every garden, we were able to increase carbon somewhere in the ballpark of what we did?
What kind of an impact would that have? And then if you translate that, what if that happened in other countries? And what if farmers do this on a much larger scale? And of course, they’re not going to be Farmers have different methods of working with and managing organic matter on a farm. But still, I think there’s huge potential there.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like the concept of victory gardens all over again.
Anne Biklé: Yeah. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: So as a local food producer, do you find yourself not needing to go to the grocery store as much at all? Sort of how do you think about the garden in terms of what you consume? Yeah.
Anne Biklé: Yeah. I would say if we did not live in a town that had as many farmer’s markets as we do, I would probably be growing more food at our place. But because we have farmer’s markets and I like to support farmers, in the summertime, I’d say we pretty much exclusively eat between the garden and the farmer’s market. That’s where all the veg really is coming from. Wintertime, we still can do year-round farmers markets. It’s a little more limited variety. But yeah, that’s kind of where that’s at. It’s interesting. The other thing, if you ever find yourself involved with gardening or a gardener, is this is one of the hardest things to sort of grapple with.
And that is that there’s nothing that is more dynamic than a garden. Because these plants, especially the long-lived plants, shrubs and trees, they are growing naturally. And they are changing the environment around them in the garden. And what has happened over the years in our garden is that what I really love about it is we have this wonderful screen that makes the garden really, really private. The flip side of that is we’re getting more shade. And so that’s changing growing conditions for other plants, including the vegetable bed. So sometimes I think, I should take those trees out.
And I’m like, you’re not touching that tree. You are not touching that tree because the other thing that’s happening is earlier we talked about inputs, the tonnes and tonnes of inputs and organic matter that I brought in. It’s now to the point where the garden is generating so much of its own organic matter. It breaks my heart a little bit. I just filled up the green yard waste bin last night, as a matter of fact, with a bunch of cuttings from my living fence, this dogwood, this really cool dogwood fence that I have.
I’m like, oh, I really do not like exporting this stuff.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so surprised to hear this, actually. You sure Dave’s not going to be mad at you for revealing this on the air? You’re going to get in trouble when you go home?
Anne Biklé: No, most of the time. No, he’s on board with that. He’s on board with that. And the reason I don’t like to let go of my own organic matter is that I know there’s no chemicals in it. And one of the – you know, I’m all for the various commercial operations around town that are processing and selling organic matter. But I also am concerned about what sometimes ends up in yard waste bins because – People are using various products in their gardens and then they’re cutting stuff. It’s going into the yard waste bin and it’s finding its way into a compost stream perhaps.
But that said, yeah, the leaves that are coming off of our trees now, I just am completely in love with them as a form of organic matter. In fact, it was kind of funny. I We were speaking at this biodynamic wine conference, which that is another really interesting world that I was not that aware of until speaking at this conference and hanging out with some biodynamic grape growers for a couple of days. But one of them was down in the Applegate Valley, and we were talking about Plants, compost and soil and things like that.
And one aspect of the biodynamic philosophy that’s really cool is that they like to source the organic matter that they use in these various preparations from their own farms. And so this particular person told me, she goes, yeah, it’s kind of gotten to the point now where, she goes, I don’t want to let it get out of hand, but I’m kind of just growing this stuff so I can get the organic matter so I can make my preps and so I can spread this organic matter back out on the soil.
And I knew exactly what she meant because this time of year it’s fall.
Ross Kenyon: We haven’t talked about the biodynamic school of thought, but that’s, is that Rudolf Steiner? Is that him? He’s the creator of Waldorf Schools. One of my most proud moments is, and this totally fell on deaf ears. It’s like one of my best slash worst jokes. Thank you. A guy I barely knew is like, oh, yeah, I send my kids to a Waldorf school. I said, that’s a normal school. They just put walnuts and grapes in it, right? The Waldorf salad. He didn’t know I was making a salad joke and it was a disaster.
Anne Biklé: Oh, no.
Ross Kenyon: But anyways, tangent aside, we haven’t talked about what does it mean to be biodynamic? Is it what you just said where you’re trying to keep it’s like related to permaculture almost where you’re trying to keep the inputs and the outputs in a continuous flow kind of thing?
Anne Biklé: Yeah, Steiner was a really, really interesting person. He had, you know, that term, Renaissance Man, you know, back when that, I think that term came about, it’s when You could do all kinds of different things. And I think Rudolf Steiner was sort of a Renaissance guy from like the 20s, the 1920s or thereabouts, I think a little earlier even. And he had a philosophy about the way society should be. He had a philosophy about farming, about education, which is where the Waldorf school stuff comes in. And what I’m most drawn to, I have not delved deeply into Steiner, but this whole idea of sort of respect for cycles, understanding cycles, seeing that the earth is, and soil in particular, kind of has this metabolism, is, I don’t know, for lack of a better word, that a farmer, if you’re going to be a biodynamic farmer or gardener, you’re working with this metabolism.
And so you’re thinking about your inputs, you’re thinking about your outputs, and that the soil is sort of the It’s this grand engine that is giving and taking and giving and taking. And it’s a way of working with the earth that I think is really quite profound. It’s sort of beyond organic and maybe some of the permaculture people get into it too. But it’s really interesting. For listeners, there’s a National Biodynamic Conference in Portland this coming November so.
Unknown speaker: When is it?
Anne Biklé: November, I think 16th, 17th, 18th. And I’m going to be speaking at that. And I’m really excited because this isn’t just going to be like the biodynamic wine people. This is everybody, right? Tomatoes, chickens, cucumbers, the whole thing. So I’m interested to sort of hang out with those folks for a few more days and learn more about them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should go down there too. That sounds, uh, and then I can use my joke again. Get some more mileage out of that beauty. Uh, well, if you’re interested in the things that, and you’re talking about is a good place to start and to learn more your, your book, uh, the hidden half of nature, or there, is there some other place you might recommend?
Anne Biklé: Yeah. Of course, you know, you ask an author, what about your book? The author’s, yeah, that book. Yeah, that’s a really good one. That’s the definitive resource on this. There’s a lot of information out there about the soil world and organic matter. But in The Hidden Half of Nature, The Microbial Roots of Life and Health, that’s the book that Dave and I wrote. And part of what that book is trying to do is give people a fuller picture the microbial world and how foundational it actually is. And it was, if you’d practically need to have been living under a rock for the last, say, three to five years to have not heard the term microbiome and not know that our bodies inside and out are actually sort of these...
We are terrain for a very large number of microorganisms that associate in symbiotic communities with themselves and with ourselves. And so this is sort of stunning to realize here it’s almost 2020 and we’re just sort of really learning, oh... These things, our microbiome is hugely important to our health and to the health of our plants. And this was not anything I learned when I was in college about microbiomes. And one of the really cool things that we learned in writing and researching that book was that when you look at the root system of a plant and you look at the human gut, they’re these very analogous kinds of organs.
And it’s not just about Getting food and nutrients, you know, in the case of a plant, sucking stuff into the roots, up through the roots and distributing it through the plant, or likewise, our These are really interesting places because it’s where the lion’s share of the microbiome lives. So most of it is in, not like our stomach, I get really irritated when I see these articles on the microbiome and what invariably is shown is this outline of the stomach. That is not a hospitable place at all for our microbiome. Where most of our microbiome is, is in the very lower part of our digestive tract in the colon and Which is what I consider to be sort of tranquil grazing pastures.
Because you don’t have a lot of hydraulics in that area. And it’s actually much more like, this is a sauerkraut town. We’ll see what people think about this joke. So you got an onboard sauerkraut croc, people. This is what your colon is. It is a fermentation chamber. And what is really... What’s cool about it is that there’s a lot of chemistry going on, a lot of biochemistry. And so these bacterial communities in the colon are breaking down the organic matter, mulch. All the stuff we eat becomes mulch, essentially. And bacteria are eating this because they need to live too.
They need their three meals a day. And what they’re excreting after they eat what we ate is not waste products, but it’s actually products with medicinal effects, right? Some of these compounds are known to affect our mood, they’re known to affect all kinds of things about our metabolism and our bodies. So this is like, ooh, never knew that. It’s not really what we eat, it’s what our microbiome eats that Probably influences our health almost, you know, more than anything. So the soil has a diet. The soil needs to have organic matter too because...
Our gut compared to the soil is just a drop in the bucket. I like to think about soil sometimes as sort of the digestive tract of earth. It’s sort of all the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine, all of that. That’s what the soil is. It’s digesting all of these things. So anyway, we go into sort of these parallels about guts and digestive systems and microbiomes in the hidden half of nature too. And what we really hope is that After somebody gets done reading that book, you know, they’re never going to look at their body or their garden in the same way again.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m sold. I really liked the other two books in this trilogy that you and Dave have worked on. It was A Growing Revolution and Dirt, The Erosion of Civilizations. And then the one that you’re specifically listed as a co-author is The Hidden Half of Nature. What was the subtitle?
Anne Biklé: Yeah, The Hidden Half of Nature, The Microbial Roots of Life and Health.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m definitely just going to go buy that. You also make me regret living in an apartment right now. I would really like to... I’ve been reading so much about... So I’m doing Kiss the Grounds soil advocate training right now. So I’ve been... Been all up in this material and it’s fascinating.
Unknown speaker: Getting your hands dirty.
Ross Kenyon: Getting my hands. I never knew that I would become so interested in all of these agricultural topics, but it’s truly fascinating. It scratches a number of itches. So I will get this book and I’ll send you an email sometime.
Anne Biklé: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: But thanks for being with us. That was a very fun podcast. Yeah. Learned a lot of stuff there. Thank you.
Anne Biklé: Yeah, sure. And if anybody wants to know more, we tend to be, I’m sort of the social media maven for the team here. I haven’t dropped out of Facebook yet, but which is to say, if you want to catch up with us, probably Twitter is where we’re more active and that handle is at dig to grow and it’s D-I-G, the number two and then grow. Yeah. So a lot of dirt talk, soil talk, gut talk there.
Ross Kenyon: If you got a lust for plants, that’s where you go.
Anne Biklé: Exactly. Yeah. Hey, thanks a lot for having me on. Really, really appreciate it and had a lot of fun here today with you guys.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thank you.
