What is Soil Health?
Soil health is defined as the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans. Unlike the older term “soil quality,” which emphasized agricultural productivity, soil health extends beyond human health to broader sustainability goals that include planetary health. Soil health is holistic and multidimensional, eclipsing mere soil fertility.
A healthy soil must have good tilth and drainage, sufficient depth for crop growth, sufficient exchangeable nutrient supply, small population of weeds and pests, large population of beneficial organisms, no toxins, and resilience to adverse conditions. Soil is not an inert growing medium—it is a living and life-giving natural resource teaming with billions of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes that are the foundation of an elegant symbiotic ecosystem.
The concept encompasses three interconnected domains: physical (structure, water retention), chemical (nutrient cycling, pH), and biological (microbial diversity, earthworms, mycorrhizae). If any process is compromised, the others are also affected. A healthy soil is balanced in this respect and therefore provides for better growing conditions, crop resiliency and reduced inputs.
Origins & Lineage
The earliest references to soil health date to over 100 years ago. The first definitive mention of soil health was in 1910, but soil health was not a frequent topic in the literature prior to the 1990s. The original 1910 mention of soil health referred to a concept that was based largely in soil fertility, but by the 1930s aspects of soil biology had been added and links between soil health and human health had been recognized.
Pioneers of the organic agriculture movement such as Howard, Balfour, and Rodale were interested in soil health issues in the 1940s. During his 26 years learning from Indian farmers, Howard took note of the connections between healthy soil and healthy communities, livestock, and crops, writing the famous quote, “the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” He published An Agricultural Testament in 1943, a book that heralds the idea of soil as a living organism and stresses the importance of building organic matter through composting.
Lady Eve Balfour founded the Soil Association in 1946. In 1943, she published The Living Soil, a book explaining her experiment and detailing the links between healthy soil, organic farming, and human health. J.I. Rodale, inspired by Howard’s work, became a key figure in the American organic movement.
The 1990s saw considerable effort put into developing a definition of soil health and debate over whether or not soil health and soil quality were synonymous terms. Jay Fuhrer started saying “soil health” in the 1990s as a district conservationist with NRCS in Bismarck. The Soil Health Division of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service was formed in 2014. In 2015, NRCS began broad support of soil health, which incorporates less tillage and more cover crops.
How It’s Practiced
The soil health movement is a management philosophy centered around four simple principles: reduce or eliminate tillage, keep plant residues on the soil surface, keep living roots in the ground, and maximize diversity of plants and animals. The USDA NRCS has identified four principles for improving soil health: use plant diversity to increase diversity in the soil, manage soils more by disturbing them less, keep plants growing throughout the year to feed the soil, keep the soil covered as much as possible.
Practitioners employ specific techniques: no-till or reduced-till farming, cover cropping between cash crops, crop rotation, composting, reduced chemical inputs, and integrated livestock grazing. Gabe Brown’s five principles of soil health are: no-till or minimal tillage; keeping the ground covered; diversity of plant and animal species; keeping living roots in the soil as much as possible; and the importance of integrating animals.
Ray Archuleta, a conservation agronomist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, popularized soil health demonstrations that have reached more than 100,000 farmers and ranchers in the U.S. alone. These demonstrations use simple visual tools—rain simulators, slake tests, water infiltration comparisons—to show the dramatic difference between degraded and healthy soil.
Soil Health Today
Soil health has become a unifying framework across previously divided agricultural communities. One reason for its success is that it nestled right in the middle of two ideologies. To productivists, soil health means bigger and healthier plants and animals. But it also jibes with environmentalists’ goals of improving water quality, sequestering more carbon, using less pesticide, and providing greater habitat for biodiversity.
The Soil Health Institute, the Soil Health Partnership, and initiatives such as the Cornell Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health support the agenda of improving soil health across the country through research, implementation, and partnership. Farmers attend soil health conferences, join regional networks, and increasingly frame their land management decisions through this lens. The movement has spawned certification programs, carbon credit markets, and state-level policy initiatives.
Within conscious and spiritual communities, soil health appears in permaculture design courses, biodynamic agriculture workshops, and land stewardship trainings. Biodynamic narratives and rituals encourage attentiveness to more-than-human agency and energy, to depth (not only underground but also above-ground influences of the air and celestial bodies), and to reciprocity between soil biota and humans. More attention is being given to spiritual practices associated with biodynamics and site-specific practices, which pay attention to soil biota through both spirituality and scientific considerations.
Common Misconceptions
Soil health is not the same as soil fertility. Fertility refers narrowly to nutrient availability; health encompasses structure, biology, water dynamics, and resilience to stress.
Soil health is not a fixed state. It is dynamic, responsive to management, and exists on a continuum. Recovery from degradation takes years to decades.
It is not purely technical. While soil science provides measurable indicators, spiritual knowledge practices can reconfigure how soils are conceptualized and managed, with implications for relationships of care.
It is not prescriptive. Regenerative agriculture is not a prescription. There are no set rules or formulas. Instead, it depends on individual farmers and ranchers applying principles to their specific operations. Context—climate, geography, soil type, economic constraints—dictates appropriate practices.
Adding compost alone does not guarantee soil health. While organic matter is critical, healthy soil requires integration of physical management (reducing disturbance), biological diversity (plants, microbes, fungi), and appropriate water and nutrient cycling.
How to Begin
For farmers and land stewards: Contact your local USDA NRCS office for free technical assistance and soil testing. Attend a Soil Health Academy or regional soil health conference. Read Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery or The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour.
For gardeners and homesteaders: Start with a simple practice—mulch bare soil, plant a diverse cover crop mix in fall, minimize tilling. Observe what lives in your soil: earthworms, pill bugs, fungal threads. Learn to conduct a slake test or jar test to assess soil structure.
For spiritual seekers: Explore biodynamic gardening through the Josephine Porter Institute or local CSA farms. Study permaculture’s earth care ethic through courses offered by Quail Springs or Occidental Arts & Ecology Center. The concept of soil health offers a compelling analogy for spiritual well-being. Healthy soil is characterized by its biodiversity, its capacity to retain water and nutrients, and its resilience to stress. These qualities can be mirrored in our own spiritual lives. Just as soil needs tending to maintain its health, our inner selves require nurturing practices to flourish.
Begin by spending time directly observing soil—its smell, texture, inhabitants. Develop what biodynamic practitioners call “attentiveness”: noticing patterns, seasonal shifts, the relationship between what grows above and what thrives below.