Living Soil

Picking up a fistful of soil and letting it run through the fingers idly, one would hardly suspect that there’s anything more to it than sand and some mineral or the other unless you happen to feel remnants of leaf or some organic matter.

At some dim and distant past, many soils of the Deccan plateau, where we are, must have started out as crumbled rocks of granite and gneiss with a generous peppering of iron oxides and lesser quantities of other minerals. We can see that in the russet tones.

In the normal course, life leaves its imprint on soils as various organisms inhabit the world beneath, where they live, die and decay adding to the organic content and so shape their character. More the organic matter, more numerous the living creatures and richer the soil. Hence a soil teeming with life is best able to support food crops. Unfortunately, it is only the top 2 to 8 inches that carry all this fertility and it takes nature thousands of years to build this top soil.

On dry rain fed lands, it becomes that much more important to see that the soil is indeed inhabited with healthy communities of fungi, microscopic creatures like bacteria and larger ones such as plants, insects and worms and that it is protected from excessive wind, rain and abuse. Farmers of yore have devised various measures to do just this. We at Anemane, following in their footsteps, take our job of feeding and nurturing the soil quite seriously.

Organic substances from animals and plants constitute the basic materials for making food for soil. In the wild, the floor is layered with leaves, branches, other biomass and droppings of animals, which over time, decompose to produce a dark, spongy layer, the fragrance of which defies description. Have you walked in a forest after the first summer showers?

This is what we try to emulate on the farm by composting leaves, twigs and animal dung, mainly of cattle and on occasions, of elephants raiding the farm. Here’s some really potent soil -food in the making!