Thousands of years of poor farming and ranching practices—and, especially, modern industrial agriculture—have led to the loss of up to 80 percent of carbon from the world's soils. That carbon is now floating in the atmosphere, and even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, it would continue warming the planet. 

It is important to recognize that soils distributed across the land are unlike the atmosphere or the ocean (which may be mixed readily and a continuum approach is suited to model its fluid dynamics). Real-world soils exhibit clear architectural organizations that control the pathways and patterns of mass and energy flow and transport at different scales. Thus, a combination of deterministic and stochastic approaches would be a more appropriate way to couple structural and random components of the soil system. Another conceptual advance needed is to improve the holistic understanding of soils as a complex system through coupled processes and interactions rather than isolated individual factors.

Nature is complex, elegant, and infinite in its wisdom. Farmers who are truly successful learn nature's many facets and her intricate dance; they crack the code of how to honor and feed this boundless natural system while coaxing the production needed for the survival of a modern farm. Natural product formulator and farm consultant Jerry Brunetti wraps together a lifetime of learning and his uncanny observations in this fascinating volume on the interconnected dynamics in place on a farm -- the farm's geology, biology, and diversity of life forms.