We are all familiar with soil as a great provider of the food for both humans and non-humans. We connect and value soil to the ability to grow, especially the fertile soil which is commonly used for food production. Soil is the habitat for countless microorganisms that the humans may not see with bare eyes; but soil is a living community into a farmer’s eyes. Walking around Majvik, a biodynamic farm in Sipoo, a farmer Atte Hermansson guided me into the world where the relationships between soil, plants, animals, and humans strongly rely on each other:
As a farmer, taking care and maintaining the health of soil is the most important thing to sustain the farm. The cow house of the farm is what Atte calls “the heart of the farm”, it is where the cow produces the compost manure that contains organic material for increasing the organic matter in soil. With a shovel, we walked to a place nearby the greenhouse with tomatoes and cucumbers, Atte dig the ground and said: this is the most beautiful and healthy soil in the farm, if you look close to the soil you see many organic matters, this is the topsoil, soft with air pore, the soil smelled good and fresh. The topsoil is the most important thing for nurturing the crops, and it takes time to form. On the next layer of soil, you can find yellowish sand and silt. Atte mentioned that plants tell a lot about the soil’s health, he knows how to work with them by observing how the leaves grow and by the colour of their appearance. (Extract from working diary, 11 October 2019)
Talking and gathering soils with Hermansson has brought me to understand interspecies care in soil’s living world. This also ponders me to think whether human values soils’ wellbeing only because of our needs, and whether we only consider soil as a living world when it comes to the capacity of “growing”? But, what about the clay soils next to the road and under my feet, aren’t they consider as living? Soil and clay collected around the farm have raised strong ethical relation for questioning what it means to consider soil as a living community and to what degree the soil is considered less “alive”?