Webinar - Case Studies of the Soil Food Web with Dr. Elaine Ingham
Hosted by Didi Pershouse on November 7, 2019
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Webinar - Soil Food Web Case Studies with Dr. Elaine Ingham, hosted by Didi Pershouse
This webinar was filmed on November 7th, 2019 and is now available on-demand. You will access the webinar via this course's curriculum.
In this second live webinar with world-renowned Soil Biologist Dr. Elaine Ingham and Land and Leadership Founder, Didi Pershouse, we discussed case studies that demonstrate what can happen when soils regain biological diversity and health. Dr. Ingham discussed how changes in the soil food web can profoundly improve crop health and productivity, as well as resilience to drought, flooding, erosion, and wildfires.
Dr. Ingham teaches and consults with farms all over the world and has decades of hands-on experience. This is a great chance to learn from her in an affordable way, from the comfort of your own home.
(This webinar builds upon our previous one, in which she outlined the soil food web and explored the many functions that soil organisms perform in a landscape. Access that 3.5 hour webinar here.)
As we explored in our first webinar with Dr. Ingham, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms, and arthropods are all essential workers. We rely on their intelligence and work to produce healthy crops that are resistant to disease; healthy lawns, farms, and ranches that are resilient in extreme weather events; and healthy humans.
Dr. Elaine Ingham teaches that all soils, no matter how degraded, can become healthy and functional again. This can only happen by creating conditions in which soil organisms are allowed to do their work: to rebuild the underground structures that allow land to soak up water; and convert the inert sand, silt and clay particles into dynamic nutrients that plants can actually use.
In this second webinar, Dr. Ingham presents successful case studies to show that land managers do not need inorganic fertilizers, pesticides or tillage to have productive landscapes, and to grow healthy food. They just need to learn how to collaborate with these underground workers.
This webinar is offered on a sliding scale.
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 her 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, while 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
- 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
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 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 Founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative, Board Chair 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.