Notes From My Knapsack 3-26-06
Jeff Gill

Cheaper Than Dirt?

Every year it surprises and bothers me.
There’s usually a need in the Gill lawn for some topsoil, and this spring very much so. I went out and without much bother, let alone comparison shopping, found a big pile o’ sacks labeled "top soil."
When it came to asking "how much," it felt as if I were doing them a favor by hauling it away, and the total cost was a pittance. If I’d wanted peat moss, it would have cost more. Cow manure, more. Sand, more. Brick dust, more. Fer Pete’s sake, a bag of nails: much more.
And so you think, "well duh, Gill! It’s dirt! You can find it anywhere, sack it everywhere, sell it anyplace. Cheaper than dirt, y’know."
Well, if only you could find it anywhere. There are many places on the face of the earth where topsoil would be a welcome gift at a wedding or birthday, let alone for spring planting.
That isn’t true in Ohio – yet – but it could be someday. Most of the state, and certainly Licking County, has had about 10,000 years since the glaciers went back to the Yukon garage and left sterile clay and silt behind.
It takes that many millennia of mosses, grasses, plants, shrubs, softwood tree leaves and hardwood debris, along with billions of worms steadily working the soil to make that (to a farmer or gardener) beautiful black, rich, organic stuff that ain’t dirt, but soil.
Soil is what you need to grow crops, whether an Edwardian herb garden or a row of corn. As they told us repeatedly at Purdue University on the edge of the Great American Prairie, dirt is what’s under your fingernails and needs a scrubbin’. Soil is a gift from God.
Is top soil plentiful around here? In most ways, yes. We’re mostly too level for erosion to have done major damage, and our local farmers got the conservation, contour-plowing, no-till gospel early on.
Houses not only lock up a fair amount of topsoil in certain areas, when subdivisions go in where farming once used the acreage, it helps to make it disappear entirely.
In many yards, considering that the topsoil is scraped clear by builders before the footers are set (organic soil is much less stable for your foundations than clay silts), the amount that was put back after the house was done depends on the efficiency and generosity of your contractor.
Some of that scraped off topsoil is recycled into new lawns, but much goes into random fill. Agriculture minimizes erosion, but can’t prevent it entirely; there’s a reason they call the midcontinent’s main drainage "The Big Muddy," and New Orleans keeps sinking and ending up farther from the Gulf of Mexico. Top soils in suspension head south, and grow the delta.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, we’ve figured out how to replace manual milking, momma hen, and shoveling poop onto the fields. But we have no artificial topsoil technology in the pipeline. The spreaders help mechanically to replace the bovine endproduct as a fertilizer back into the fields, but we’re not quite keeping up.
Do we have another 10,000 years to wait around to replenish this precious resource? I’d hate to eat canned food that long. Technology may actually come up with a process to generate new topsoil, but they ain’t close. I’m thinkin’ let’s treat topsoil like the vital, non-renewable resource it is.
It tells me something that big bags of this precious, all-too-potentially-rare stuff are the cheapest things going. It tells me that the ideas of cost and value don’t track very closely. How could the social costs of losing topsoil in the future, the crying need for this rich, black, usefulness in so many places around the world right now, be factored into the price?
Too many potential answers to that question go back to government regulation, and my confidence that any money they collect would be used for the initial purposes (see entry under "proceeds, state lottery") is pretty low.
One starting place is for all of us, at least, to know the difference between dirt and soil, and to value the latter, at least in our own imaginations. Think about it when you marvel at how cheap it is, today anyhow, to buy a sack of what we call dirt, but farmers around the world call "black gold."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; sling some mud at him through disciple@voyager.net.