Hügelkultur
Hill-mound cultivation
Logs and woody material are layered beneath the soil, creating underground sponges that hold moisture and feed wood-decaying fungi for years.
Forged in America's agricultural capital
From young ranch hand to reading tree health from the ground up.
Jack Davis didn't learn soil science behind a desk. He learned it on the farms and ranches of California's San Joaquin Valley, where he started working as a young teen. Over several decades he did it all, from hands-on growing and harvesting to marketing and delivery.
Caring for crops and orchards led him to become an arborist certified by the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), and from there into soil science and how it applies to agriculture. Working directly on tree health, he kept noticing the same thing: wherever the ground beneath trees had been left undisturbed for many years, a rich, dark humus had formed on its own.
Why does an undisturbed forest floor keep building fertility by itself, while worked farm soils depend on constant inputs?
The answer was never up in the canopy. It was resting on the forest floor, in layers of slow, living, porous humus.
That observation started a search of more than 25 years into how nature produces humus soil, and how people can deliberately follow the same process while shortening the time it takes.
