BURLEY, Idaho—Soils around the world have been hammered for decades and are sick and dying, a soil ecologist says.

Farmers are spending a fortune on inputs while pests and disease persist and soils are getting sicker and sicker, according to Australian soil ecologist Christine Jones.

But there’s a way to restore soil health—it’s all about creating an environment favorable to microbes, she told farmers at the 6th Annual Soil Health Workshop, sponsored by the East Cassia and West Cassia soil and water conservation districts.

Creating that environment requires a diversity of plants that support microbial populations in the soil. Different plants have different functions when it comes to soil health, and plants and soil work in community, she said.

Plants are joined underground by a microbial network that delivers water and nutrients to plants and provides tolerance to stresses, such as drought, pests and disease, she said.

“Monoculture is death to soil,” she said.

You can’t take out functional plants and think soil is going to work with one type of plant. It’s like a village with different functioning businesses and entities—take out one, and things don’t work so well, she said.

In a healthy microbial network, plant roots are able to explore different areas of soil and access nutrients and the microbes they need, such as beneficial fungi that protect the plant from pathogens, she said.

Microbes are too small to see, but they coordinate activities to do extraordinary things. It’s to the advantage of the microbial network to keep host plants alive, she said.

“They are communicating all the time and using signals to get their act together,” she said.

Microbes function in exactly the same way a quorum is needed in an organization to make decisions or carry out business. When microbes reach a quorum or certain threshold, the microbial community begins to function as a coordinated organism and can perform tasks that individual microbes can’t, she said.

When there are enough of them, they can switch on genes that affect genetic expression in host plants—such as drought and disease tolerance, she said.

The communication and coordination between microbes is referred to as quorum sensing, which is triggered by chemical signals called auto-inducers. When the concentration of auto-inducers in the environment reaches a threshold, that’s when genes get switched on, she said.

“That’s where the power is,” she said.

If there aren’t enough microbes in the soil environment, nothing happens, she said.

Using inorganic chemicals is just treating the symptoms of unhealthy soil, it’s not fixing the core problem, she said.

The five principles for healthy soil are all designed to create better conditions for microbes. It’s not about adding microbes to soil; it’s about supporting the ones that are there, she said.

Those principles are minimizing soil disturbance, maximizing soil cover, biodiversity, the presence of living roots and integrating livestock.

It doesn’t matter what type of soil a person is working with, they need to look at microbes to understand the life in soil, she said.

“When you’re standing on soil, you’re actually standing on the rooftop of another world,” she said.