In order to understand the soil functioning, I write in this article the first two steps of the soil functioning.
Creation of humus
All begin in winter when leaves fall on the ground. Those leaves are eaten by a specific category of insects called aboveground fauna and the secretes excrement are transformed in humus by the mushrooms leaving above the soil. According to what I’ve just mentioned we should all agree that soil ploughing is a non-sense, in fact leaves must stay above the soil to let the aboveground fauna and the mushroom do their job. Unfortunately, soil ploughing is a widespread technique in the agricultural world.
Humus and mushroom are also essential for the soil permeability. A healthy soil has a permeability of
150mm/hour of water, while an unhealthy soil has a permeability of 1mm/hour of water.
This is the main cause of inundation.
Permeability is also crucial for the good growing process of plants. In fact, if the soil doesn’t allow water to penetrate, roots cannot absorb water and plants cannot grow properly as water is the main element for plants weigh. If the plant doesn’t receive enough water from nature, we need than to water which represent an extremely wasteful process.
This is one of the reasons for which we should convert our agricultural system in an organic and natural system.
Humus absorption
Plants have 2 different roots’ systems: one vertical and one horizontal.
The horizontal one is located just under the humus while the vertical one goes deep under the earth and gets to the source rock.
The humus is transformed by the aboveground fauna and contains many mineral elements which are absorbed by the horizontal roots. The main problem is that roots can only absorb liquid minerals and not the solid ones. For this reason, the work of bacteria is essential as they are the only fauna in soil able to transform solid mineral into liquid mineral. This process is called mineralization.
Bacteria mineralization only transforms anion mineral but not the cation family which is located in the source rock.
Microbes use two main techniques to transform mineral elements.
The first one is oxidation which transforms solid mineral into liquid one by adding 3 or 4 molecules of oxygen. Therefore, the soil needs to be well airy (worms helps to air the soil).
In case of absence of oxygen in the soil, the microbes cannot do their work properly and as a consequence plants are not feeded as minerals remain solid.
The second process is named chelation and oxygen is required also in this case.
Those are the two first steps for the soil creation. In the next article, I will finish this topic and reveal the next one.
I hope you will enjoy and feel free to let me know your opinion
All the best
Dlyan
