What Todd measures in a farm's soil, why the soil — not the plant — is the unit of management, and where the method's limits are.

Soil management is moving from estimation to measurement. For most of modern agriculture, a farm's decisions have rested on intuition, convention, and a soil test taken once or twice a year. That was the best available. It no longer has to be.

We treat the soil as the unit of management. A plant's resilience follows from the mineral balance and biological life of the ground it grows in, so we start there — measuring what harms the soil and what improves it, and correcting on the evidence.

What we measure

Soil health is a balance, not a number. We track the levels and ratios of calcium, potassium, magnesium, and sodium, per management zone, across a season. Those ratios tell us whether a soil is stressed, depleted, or recovering. Bringing a depleted soil back into balance takes about three years, sometimes five, and it works only when you can see at each step exactly where the soil stands.

Soil is a living system

Minerals are half the picture. The soil's biology does much of the work of making them available to a plant, and a program that ignores it fails. We remineralize and rebuild that biology together, and the plant grows stronger for it. This is old soil science — the mineral-balance work of William Albrecht and the researchers who followed him — applied with data it never had.