Webinar - The Soil Food Web with Dr. Elaine Ingham

Hosted by Didi Pershouse on September 25, 2019

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Webinar - The Soil Food Web with Dr. Elaine Ingham, hosted by Didi Pershouse

This 3.5-hour webinar was filmed on Wednesday, September 25, 2019 and is now available on-demand.

In this webinar with world-renowned Soil Biologist Dr. Elaine Ingham and Land and Leadership Founder, Didi Pershouse, we discussed the soil food web and explored all the roles and functions that soil organisms perform in a landscape.
Why do most people portray microbes as deadly disease-causers, when in fact most microbes don't cause disease? From assessing microbes in the digestive systems of oysters to understanding the interplay of microbes in the soil, Dr. Ingham has shown that the soil food web increases plant production and nutrition, reduces water use, builds soil structure, and increases nutrient cycling--creating better food for all of life.

Dr. Ingham teaches that there is no soil that lacks nutrients to grow plants--rather, many soils lack the proper sets of microorganisms to convert nutrients in soil into a form that plants can use (not unlike our own microbiomes in our guts.)

Dr. Ingham has shown that much of modern agriculture has been extremely destructive of soil, and as a consequence, we are consuming sick, unhealthy plants. It is critical to understand the role and function of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms, and arthropods in ensuring that food resources contain the nutrients we need, without destroying natural systems.

She will use successful case studies to show that we do not need inorganic fertilizers, pesticides or tillage to grow healthy plants, and healthy, productive ecosystems.


Born in Minnesota, daughter of a veterinarian, an avid gardener/hiker/canoe-er/and skier, Dr. Ingham has always enjoyed the out-of-doors. In the final semester as an undergraduate student, she took a microbiology course and discovered her passion. Dr. Ingham's revolutionary approach has been used to restore the ecological functions of living-soils all over the world, ensuring healthy, strong plants and super-nutritious food, whilst eliminating soil erosion and the need for chemical inputs. She is the Founder and Director of Research for Soil Foodweb Inc. and President of Soil Food Web School. Her goal is to empower people to bring the soils in their communities back to life using the science of the Soil Food Web.

About the pricing options:

At the Land and Leadership Initiative, we try to make our courses and webinars available to people from around the world, with widely varying incomes and life circumstances. This provides a richness in our discussions that you won't find in most other places. We expect people to pay up and down the scale, so that we can continue to provide high quality learning to everyone.

Please consider what makes sense for you to pay. Your choice could be based on a combination of factors:

  • What you can afford to pay
  • What you'd like to offer as a gift, to make it possible for others to participate
  • What seems fair as a market value
  • The value you and/or your community expect to get from this course
  • An investment in the development of new courses
  • A gesture of commitment towards the ongoing work of the teachers, and/or our overall Land and Leadership Initiative project.


Authors

Dr. Elaine InghamDr. Elaine Ingham, Ph.D has pioneered research in the field of Soil Biology over the last 4 decades and is widely recognized as the world's foremost soil biologist.

Behind Dr. Ingham’s user-friendly approach to soil biology lies a wealth of knowledge and research on the different groups of microorganisms that make up the Soil Food Web.

Her goal is to empower people to bring the soils in their communities back to life using the science of the Soil Food Web. Dr. Ingham's revolutionary approach has been used to restore the ecological functions of living-soils all over the world, ensuring healthy, strong plants and super-nutritious food, whilst eliminating soil erosion and the need for chemical inputs.



Didi Pershouse

Didi Pershouse is the author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function. She is a lead author for the upcoming United Nations FAO Technical Manual on Soil Organic Carbon Management, and a contributing author to the upcoming volume Health in the Anthropocene.

As the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine, she developed a practice and theoretical framework for systems-based ecological medicine—restoring the health of people as well as the environmental and social systems around them. After 22 years of clinical work, Pershouse now travels widely in North America and Europe as a speaker and teacher. Her participatory workshops engage farmers and ranchers, policy makers, investors, and environmentalists in deep listening, systems thinking, and emergent strategies.

Both online and in-person, Pershouse is a skilled facilitator, who can bring together conservatives and liberals into effective working groups with common goals: improving soil health, public health, water security, and climate resilience through simple changes in land management.

She is the president of the non-profit Soil Carbon Coalition, Strategic Director of Regenerate Earth, and a co-founder of the "Can We Rehydrate California?" Initiative. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017. You can learn more about her work at www.didipershouse.com.

Course Curriculum


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Frequently Asked Questions


When does the course start and finish?
The course will be a live interactive webinar, along with links to previous lectures. But you can still watch it after it is done.
How long do I have access to the course?
After enrolling, you have access to this course for at least one year.

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