Welcome to the Cannabis

Welcome to the Cannabis Cultivation and Science Podcast.

I'm your host, Tad Hussey of Kiss Organics.

This is the podcast where we discuss the cutting edge of growing from a science-based perspective and drawn top experts from around the industry to share their wisdom and knowledge.

Before we get into today's topic, I want to take a moment to acknowledge some very sad news in our

community. Dr. Elaine Ingham passed away this past week. It's hard to overstate the impact she

had on agriculture and horticulture. She was the one who really brought the term the soil

food web into the mainstream. She challenged the old school view of soil as just a physical medium for

holding up plants and showed us that it's a living, breathing ecosystem. Without her work,

we wouldn't be having the conversations that we're having today about living soil, microbial

diversity, or organic cultivation. She was a giant in this field and her legacy lives on in every gardener who

has ever put down the synthetic salts to make compost. Now, in the spirit of the scientific curiosity,

that Dr. Ingham encouraged, today we are revisiting the soil food web. I originally recorded this

as a supplementary podcast for our Patreon,

but because this topic continues to come up so often, I wanted to revisit it, update it with

the latest research, and release the full conversation here as part of our foundation series.

The Soul Food Web is a useful conceptual model, but it's often presented in ways that are

overly simplistic or disconnected from how we actually grow in controlled environments. Today, I want

to bridge the gap between the ideology and the hard science, looking at what we've learned since

those early days and how we can apply those ideas in a way that's actually practical for

the modern grower. In my opinion, the soil food web may be one of the more misunderstood aspects

of organic cultivation today. Now, before we get into the weeds, I have to talk about why this

...