Selman Waksman Quotes

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

There are more living organisms in a tablespoon of highly organic soil than there are people on the planet.

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.

If you build up the soil with organic material, the plants will do just fine.

Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.

Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.

That dark laboratory we call the soil.

[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].

From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

The microscopic world became my obsession.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility

If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe.

It helps to think of soil as a living organism covered with skin like a human. We can live with a certain percentage of our skin damaged, but if too high a percentage is damaged, we die. So, too, does soil and thus most life

Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Weeds play an important part in building soil fertility and in balancing the biological community . . .

We don't even know what species are out there, for the most part, particularly when you get down to the microbes and very small invertebrates. They make up the mass of the organisms around us, including the soil we depend on, the soil of cornfields as well as hardwood forests. We haven't taken ecology to the point where we can even make a crude prediction of what's going to happen when we've reduced the living world down to a certain level.

Worms are the intestines of the earth.

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?

I used to like getting cups and putting tiny bits of food and liquids in them. I'd grow mould plumes in the dark wardrobe of my little back bedroom. Not to eat them, mind - just to admire the growing power.

At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.