What is the Soil Food Web?

And why should we care?

The Soil Food Web explains how life underground works. Healthy soil contains life—some of which we can see with the naked eye, but much that we can’t, including microscopic organisms that plants purposefully attract through exudates they release through their roots.



Why would plants expend approximately 50% of their energy that goes into their roots into producing these exudates? They are attracting the microbes they need to grow and be healthy. These tiny heroes of the soil break down minerals with their enzymes, use their glues and strands to weave mineral and organic matter into microaggregates, and the microaggregates into macroaggregates, forming a structure that holds air and water and resulting in more stable earth that won’t blow away or wash away as we see in the greatly over-tilled Dust Bowl dirt image shown here. Aside from making soil less likely to erode, these microbes also protect against pests and disease, and—upon consuming one another (soil food!)—excrete waste nutrients that are super food for the plant itself. This is why land regeneration leaders, such as Didi Pershouse, have likened our life underground to “essential workers”—invisible without a microscope—yet without whom our whole ecological system on earth would collapse.

The Soil Food Web is a lynchpin of soil health

Studies by Dr. Elaine Ingham and other researchers, including Dr. David Johnson of Western New Mexico University, have shown that plant growth is more highly correlated with a healthy soil food web than with any nutrient indicator, or with organic matter itself. Additionally, Dr. Ingham and Dr. Johnson have invented compost methodologies that are the most efficient and effective for restoring a healthy soil food web in any soil.


Case Studies – before and after implementing the Soil Food Web approach

Images from Soil Food Web practitioners around the world, courtesy and copyright 2024 Soil Food Web School, All Rights Reserved.

Roadside erosion was so severe it blocked traffic during downpours

Adelaide, Australia

BioComplete™ compost added, seed from plant shown mixed in

1 week after compost and seed application – erosion halted

Both images: on left is field with Soil Food Web implementation grazed 5-7 times, on right the neighbors’ field is still not grazed.

Melbourne, Australia

Tree treated with compost tea

Timuru, New Zealand