Complete Guide to Restoring Your Soil: Improve Water Retention and Infiltration; Support Microorganisms and Other Soil Life; Capture More Sunlight; And Build Better Soil with No-Till, Cover Crops, and Carbon-Based Soil Amendments

by Dale Strickler

Healthy soil is key to sustaining life on Earth. While more and more people are starting to see the need for soil restoration, there is very little understanding of just how it can be accomplished. There is a rapidly emerging demand for a "how to" manual for soil restoration. Dale Strickler is an expert on building healthy soil and restoring degraded soil, and in The Complete Guide to Restoring Your Soil, he presents the science of soil, along with proven methods of restoring depleted soil and agricultural practices from around the world that continue to build soil, rather than cause it to deteriorate. Strickler provides a solid foundation in the science of healthy soil, explaining how soil has become so degraded over time and the dire consequences for the human species, not just in terms of food scarcity but also the social, health, and environmental consequences of growing food in poor soil. He addresses the chemical, physical, and biological principles behind soil function, and presents actual farming practices that can be used to regenerate soil, techniques and strategies for remediating contaminated soil, and agriculture systems both past and present that functioned to build soil, such as the ancient chinampas systems of Mexico and the permaculture systems of today. AUTHOR: Dale Strickler is the author of Managing Pasture and The Drought-Resilient Farm. He is a leader in the soil health movement and an agronomist for Green Cover Seed, the nation's top cover crop-specific seed company. Strickler holds degrees in agronomy from Kansas State University and has taught at the college level for 15 years. He farms and ranches cattle in Kansas.

• ISBN10: 1635862248
• ISBN13: 9781635862249
• Publish Date: 6 December 2021
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Storey Publishing LLC
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Complete Guide to Restoring Your Soil is a well written and layman accessible guide to soil building and restoration by Dale Strickler. Due out 26th Oct. 2021 from Storey, it's a comprehensive 352 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

The author is an agronomist with a lot of experience in the field. He explains in the intro that he intended to write the definitive volume on soil-building and discovered along the way that there was already vast amounts of academic research on each facet of the information he originally intended to include. A great deal of the research on soil and the biome was so technical it was difficult to access and understand. The original scope of this book became impossibly huge and he decided to simplify and streamline the concepts into layman accessible and understandable language. In this goal, he has succeeded. This is a book which doesn't go into unnecessary depth on any one facet of soil building, but does manage to give the highlights over a wide spectrum of practical information.

The information is grouped thematically into sections: why build up soil, what ideal soil structure is made of, practice and practical methods for soil-building, and comparisons of previous and possible future improvements in systems and protocols. Graphically appealing and easy to understand, it's full of graphs and tables, simple illustrations, and clear color photographs.

The broad focus here means that not all the information included will be relevant for all (or even most) readers. There are significant takeaways for the home gardener here, but there are also many relevant practices aimed at large scale farmers (and even mega-agribusiness models). The relatively callous treatment of our soil over decades and non-sustainable agricultural methods of post WW2 mean that most people are looking at a real crisis of depleted and infertile land, destroyed microorganism populations, and loss to erosion. This book covers some of the ways to rebuild and turn around the destruction we've wrought before it's entirely too late.

This would be a good choice for public or school library acquisition, gardening groups, maker's and outdoor activity groups, agriculture trade schools, smallholders, and gardeners. There's a lot of good information here.

Four and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.