Speaker at Hawk Creek gathering makes connection between healthy soil and human health

Mar. 4—- Kami Anez made the connection between soil health and human health as she worked alongside her late husband, Jared — she as a pharmacist, and he as an agronomist.

As she looked at charts to balance the levels of important elements like magnesium in her patients, he pored over charts of soil tests looking to make right the levels of some of the very same elements in farm fields.

A self-described “fierce advocate for agriculture,” Anez is every bit as passionate about the importance of soil health, she told an audience at the Hawk Creek Watershed Project’s annual meeting on Feb. 19 in Renville.

A co-founder of Anez Consulting in 1997 with her husband, Kami Anez now works with farmers as president of the Willmar-based company, helping growers with a wide range of needs.

Anez emphasized that there has been a realization how important soil health is for the nutritional quality of the foods the nation produces and, in turn, human health.

“Everything we eat and ingest, (the) nutrition, minerals are coming from the soil,” Anez said. “If we don’t have that healthy, balanced soil that is alive and vibrant and full of microbial fungi — that work in symbiosis with the plant roots that take up those chemicals — if we don’t have that, then the food we are eating doesn’t have that balanced nutrition, and what part is that taking in decreasing our microbiome (in our digestive system)?”

Healthy soils rely on millions of microorganisms to benefit the crops that grow in them. The human digestive system also relies on a rich microbial community, and it needs the elements and nutrients that food takes from the soil, she explained.

Today, the nutritional density in many foods is decreasing. It takes eight oranges today to provide the same levels of calcium, iron, and vitamins A and C that a single orange provided in 1980. It takes 26 apples today to provide the same amount of iron as did one apple in 1950, according to Anez’s presentation.

The decline in nutritional density is a complicated issue, and soil health is but one facet of it. Anez pointed out many other factors are at play, too. Increased yields made possible by modern genetics also end up diluting the available nutrients in any one ear of corn or single apple, as more are being produced per acre of soil.

The genetics of many foods have been purposely changed to improve their tastes, ability to be stored and transported, as well as other attributes. These improvements often come with trade-offs, such as reducing certain nutrients, she said.

The processes used to preserve or transport foods longer distances also reduces the nutritional value, white flour being one of the prime examples. Removing the bran and germ to prevent the wheat from going rancid in storage ends up also removing some of those nutrients.

Anez pointed out that many of the changes made to food plants, especially the increases in yields, are due to need — the need to feed a very large population.

Yet, how producers treat the land matters in many ways. Excessive tillage and the resulting erosion degrades the soil’s microbiome. Adding fertilizers and using irrigation make plants grow faster, but maybe too fast, as roots do not take up as many nutrients from the soil as they would when under a bit of stress, Anez explained.

Food nutrients are very important to the microbial communities in the human digestive system. And, Anez pointed out, there’s considerable research showing the benefits to health — even emotional health — that come from a diet that supports a healthy microbial population.

Anez said she believes ways to give back to the soil and not just take away from it, while also producing all needed foods, will be developed.

“We all want more common ground than we realize,” she said.