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“We know more about the stars and the sky than we do about the soil.”
–Dan Barber, Chef and Organic Food Advocate
For the almost 10,000 years that humans have lived in agricultural societies, soil has been responsible for 95% of the food we eat. Take, for example, a simple homemade pasta. Flour starts as wheat. The eggs were laid by chickens who graze on grass. If you top with olive oil, you can guess where the olives came from—and so on.
Sometime in the 20th century we started to associate tomatoes mostly with the grocery store, and we regarded the ground as the place we put our feet. We now have an opportunity to discover the world of soil anew.
Soil is a habitat, bound by the laws of nature and chemistry. Plants take what they need from the soil and give back the nutrients that they create. When we spend years spreading artificial fertilizers, excessively tilling the land, and introducing heavy machinery, we permanently change that balance.
Due to these practices, soil is now eroding, meaning it is losing its optimal structure and nutrient density ten times faster than it can be replenished. If we continue like this, we’ll eventually see crop yields dwindle to dangerously low numbers.
At Jacobs Farm del Cabo we farm with the belief that soil-grown agriculture is a key solution to replenishing our world’s soil, protecting the long-term sustainability of our planet, and fighting the climate crisis.
There are about 2,500 gigatonnes of carbon stored in the soil, which is more than three times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere! And the benefits reach beyond carbon. The soil holds about 30% of all living organisms, making it a biodiversity hotspot so enormous that we can hardly begin to truly understand it.
Soil is a key part of understanding sustainability, and farmers are a key part of understanding the soil. They spend generations stewarding the land that grows the wonderful organic food we eat, and provides them and their communities with sustainable income and wellbeing. Embracing this model, that has worked in countless societies for generations, creates full-circle benefits for everyone, especially the planet.
As one of our farmers in Ensenada, Baja California said, “When you buy from us, you are buying from people who truly farm—you can know your food. We sell organic products grown in soil with as little plastic as possible, and we recycle as much as possible. We want our roots in the soil, we want local materials, and we want small footprints.”