A Love Affair with Soil
In these hands I hold a billion lives. Amidst a hot summer sun, I stood amused at my city boy hands that just planted a bed of carrots. I was five weeks into my tour of visiting small organic farms across Japan, and I was helping out at a farm in the mountains of Ehime prefecture. It was a busy day of harvesting, planting, and taking breaks to make a dent in an endless supply of in-season persimmons. It was the first time I was intensely conscious of the dirt in my hands, of our relationship and dependence on the earth and the beauty of it all. I wanted to remember the moment, and kept this photo as a reminder to continuously build that relationship.
“One teaspoon of soil contains more living organisms than there are people in the world”. As wonderful as this seems to me, I’m often faced with puzzled looks whenever I mention this fact. I can imagine my fellow city dwellers thinking “so what?”. It might be a bit too complicated to explain how soil is a complex living ecosystem where minerals, nutrients, water, and air are fixed and cycled to support life on earth, but beyond the science in all this, what might be more pertinent is the understanding that life begets life. We may only live if the tiniest microbes can live and die to feed plants that eventually feed us (this is an embarrassing simplification of the food web). It is a shame that in our current world we’ve somehow tried so hard to develop a mode of living that encourages us to forget this. And we’ve called this progress.
Masanobu Fukuoka famously said that “the ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings”. I’ve resonated with this so deeply since I started my journey in this vocation. As a civilisation born from agriculture, I believe that farming is closely tied to morality. With good agriculture comes a moral culture. Farming gives us perspective: we appreciate how a mayfly lives and dies in the same day, but also know that we plant trees to feed and shelter our grandchildren. We take good care of our soils, because damaging, killing or extracting from it sabotages our children’s ability to live well. A good agriculture teaches us how to interact with our environment, and that we are part of it, not above and beyond.
Agriculture is humanity’s connection to their land, and soil is the necessary medium for that. I’ve always loved Japanese cuisine, and in my visits, realised something that made it special (at least compared to what we have in Singapore). Food is very much tied to their land: soil, terrain, seasons together give rise to late summer persimmons, Akita rice, umami of seaweeds, and the depth of koji fermentation. We’ve got it wrong here. Good, healthy food isn’t necessarily the air-flown fishes, strawberries grown in climate-controlled containers, or even the plant-based, lab-grown meat patties. If we can learn to value what grows best in our soils, and develop a tradition of food around that, we might also find it easier to see that our environment sustains us, and learn to cherish it more.
With these hands we try to sustain lives. Day by day in Singapore, we see the slow death of soil. Forests are converted to developments, and traditional agriculture spaces are concretised for lifeless towers to be built on. Soil is way more than empty space; it is a gift for us to enact our humanity. We can either live with it, or die with it; and we need to choose wisely before there is no more left. Let us all put our hands into soil.
