Dale Strickler - The Complete Guide to Restoring Your Soil: Improve Water Retention and Infiltration; Support Microorganisms and Other Soil Life; Capture More ... Cover Crops, and Carbon-Based Soil Amendments

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Edited by Deborah Burns

Art direction and book design by Erin Dawson

Indexed by Samantha Miller

Cover photography by / stock.adobe.com , front, t.r.; Ant Rozetsky/Unsplash, front, 3rd fr. t.r.; Brendon Rockey, front, b.r.; Elizabeth Hesterberg, back; Jim Richardson, front, l.; photographyfirm/ stock.adobe.com front, 2nd fr. t.r.; Volodymyr/ stock.adobe.com , spine

Interior photography by Aleksa/stock.adobe.com, fig. 16.3

Illustrations by Steve Sanford, except Michael Gellatly, b.

Text 2021 by Dale Strickler

Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl

Ebook version 0.0

October 26, 2021

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To my children, Cole and Cassie, my two greatest creations

Once, in college, an acquaintance heard me talking about my Soils class. She looked at me, rather puzzled, and asked, You mean they have a whole class on dirt?

As it turns out, theres more to know about dirt than most people realize, including yours truly. When I set out to write this book, I thought I would create the final, authoritative, definitive reference to turning degraded, lifeless dirt into rich, productive soil. After all, I had a couple of degrees in agronomy and had worked with soils all my life, and I thought I knew a little something about the topic.

It wasnt long before that task appeared overwhelmingly large. In my research and reading, I found that there are entire books written about each chapter of this book; in fact, there are entire books written about each sentence in some of these chapters.

For example, in the chapter on carbon-based soil amendments, biochar gets just a brief discussion, but there are huge textbooks written about biochar alone, and there are scientists who specialize in that one topic and write scientific papers I can barely decipher. The same could be written about aerobic composting, or anaerobic composting, or manureall of which are merely parts of one chapter in this book. How in the world could I condense all the knowledge of all those scientific books into one volume?

I also began to feel a bit intellectually challenged. Each of those authors knew far more about their topic than I, obviously, and it would take years of research and investigation on every single element to become sufficiently qualified to write the book I had originally planned. If I were to write that book, it would not be a book; it would have to be volumes of books, and I would not finish them in a single lifetime.

So, midstream, I decided to change my goal from writing the last book on soil restoration to writing the first book on soil restoration that an ordinary person would actually want to read.

My goal now with this book is to offer a starting point from which people can branch out and dig deeper into whichever topics pique their interest the most, and to provide the background and resources to do so. Much of this book will sound like a broken record (for those old enough to remember broken records). The same themes will recur throughout this book. It is not repetition, it is reinforcement.

Dale Strickler