There’s a slightly odd theme developing on The Third Half.
A few conversations ago, Rebecca Ghim at The Ferm got me thinking about fermentation and what happens to food we might otherwise throw away. Then Matt Knight at Freely Fruity got me thinking about growing food in our communities, getting people involved, and why we don’t simply plant more fruit trees. And now Alex Montgomery has got me thinking about what happens at the other end of all this. The soil.
I’ll admit, before this conversation I hadn’t given soil a great deal of thought. I garden (a little). I grow things (hmmm. Not many). I do buy compost. I complain like others - especially this year! - when the lawn goes brown. But at one point in this conversation I realised I didn’t actually know what soil was. Alex does, quite a lot as it happens.
He’s a researcher in UK food systems and the founder of Bristol-based Generation Soil, which collects food waste from homes and businesses, ferments it using bokashi and turns it into living compost that can go back into the ground. How cool is that.
But this conversation ended up being about much more than compost. Alex talks about the sheer amount of life beneath our feet, what happens to unhealthy soil during drought and heavy rain, the industrialisation of our food system, and a thought I keep coming back to: reciprocity. As he puts it, our current relationship with soil is largely one-way. We take from it. We grow food in it. We eat that food. Very little finds its way back. In fact it’s worse than that.
There’s also the discovery that Alex’s journey towards soil may have started with Minecraft; he’s a founder actively telling people not to pay for his service if they can compost themselves; and a quickfire answer about electric cars I wasn’t expecting.
Oh, and this - there can be around 10 billion microorganisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil. More microbes in your hand than there are people on the planet. Which is quite a thought when you’ve spent most of your life regarding the stuff as something you wipe off your shoes.
This is a conversation about soil. But really it’s about food, community, nature, and whether we might benefit from reconnecting a few things we’ve allowed to become disconnected. And appropriately enough for The Third Half, Alex never really planned any of it.
Listen and Watch the full conversation.
https://player.captivate.fm/episode/58aa1e26-4149-43a8-a79f-ad7c4be058de/