"Soil Has a Microbiome, Too"

"The unique mix of microbes in soil has a profound effect on which plants thrive and which ones die".

"The Netherlands, home to windmills and clogs, legalized prostitution and marijuana, is also home to intensively farmed cropland. Holland’s small size and large population have meant that the country his historically needed savvy agriculturalists to feed its people. But as it grows less and less of its own food, the government has  to buy out farmers to return cropland to a wilder state.

When this program started several decades ago, according to Martijn Bezemer, a biologist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, conservationists would simply stop planting and let the land be, or they would strip off the top layer of soil and leave the sandy subsoil exposed to the elements. Neither approach met with much success. It seemed that no matter how long they waited for a healthy grassland to take hold, the soil, degraded after decades of high-intensity farming, wasn't recovering.

The government recruited Bezemer to try and speed up the restoration process. His group began experimenting with the process of inoculating degraded soils with dirt from healthy ecosystems. Just as physicians could treat many intestinal problems by transplanting gut microbes from a healthy person into a sick one, Bezemer’s group wanted to use healthy microbes to treat a sick ecosystem."

Carrie Arnold reports for Smithsonian magazine August 11, 2016.