Soil Lives!

By: Raylene Nickel

That’s the central message Jon Stika hopes will grab the attention of everyone who reads his book, A Soil Owner’s Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health (available through Amazon).

Written in his retirement, the 80-page paperback is the culmination of Stika’s 30-year career as a soil conservationist and soil health educator for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service at Dickinson, North Dakota.

“I wrote the book out of both compassion and frustration,” he says. “I had compassion for people trying to make a living from the soil who didn’t know how to make it function. Yet, I was frustrated because so many farmers and ranchers are locked into agriculture’s status quo paradigm. They focus on the level of inputs they think they need to apply to broken – dysfunctional – soil in order to get the yields they want.”

What is really needed, says Stika, is an understanding of what soil is, of how it works, and what it needs in order to be restored to its vibrant, living self. In this state, he contends, soil needs few inputs, produces robust crops, and improves producers’ profitability.

That healthy soil is a living, breathing body of life not unlike the human body, is an understanding that comes to each person somewhat like an awakening. It doesn’t necessarily coexist with farmers’, ranchers’, and agronomists’ daily round of work with crops and livestock. Yet, with its arrival comes an intuitive sense that enriches farmers’ and ranchers’ work with the earth.