Rabbi Jeffery Newman reflects on the harmony of life, as is manifest in science, in religion, and is visible in a clod of earth
Civilisation rests on six inches of soil. The film of that name — Six Inches of Soil (Colin Ramsay, 2024) has made this truth newly visible to a wide audience, but farmers have always known it. They know, too, that the work of Real Farming happens not on the surface but in the hidden networks beneath our feet: in the fungal webs that bind soil together, in the electrical currents that pass from root to root, in the centuries of stored memory that make soil a living record of human and non-human cooperation.
I should say at the outset that I am not a farmer. Personally, I know the daily craft of seeding, tending, harvesting, or caring for animals only through books — though as I write this I do recall standing on a haystack in Devon at about ten years old, thrilled to imagine I was helping, feeling the strange growing heat beneath my feet.
When Colin Tudge and I unexpectedly discovered we had known one another at school, I felt a new point of connection with the world of farming. I write as a rabbi shaped by years of study of the Torah — the Five Books of Moses — and of the Psalms, those profound writings in which the land, its seasons, its creatures, and its labours are woven into the fabric of prayer and moral life. So this is not a practitioner’s manual but a meditation offered in solidarity — an attempt to honour the knowledge of those who work within the six inches of living soil on which we all depend.
We live in an age where the commercial and measurable aspects of farming dominate the conversation: yields, markets, machinery, new technologies promising efficiency or scale. The less visible life — the life that actually sustains us — is easily pushed aside. My purpose in this essay is to explore those invisible realms and to draw them into conversation with another set of invisible networks: the symbolic and spiritual dimensions through which human beings have always understood soil. This is not a technological essay, nor a mystical one. It is a meditation on soil, on meaning, and on the forms of dialogue that sustain both.
I. The Visible and the Invisible
Soil is not the brown anonymity we often imagine. It is a community. It is a conversation.
Much of the life in soil is fungal. Mycorrhizal networks form intricate systems in which plants share water, nutrients, and warnings. Whatever language one prefers — communication, signalling, responsiveness — the fact is clear: soil is alive with exchange.
Electrical activity is part of this. Voltage changes ripple through fungal threads and plant roots in response to heat, light, water, and pressure. These are forms of responsiveness — signs of an environment attentive to itself, adjusting, learning, changing.
Further, emerging research suggests a possible new danger posed by climate change: that global heating may alter soil’s electrical balance. Early studies — including soil-carbon field work underway in parts of Kenya — indicate a potential shift in some soils from predominantly negative toward more positive charge as they warm or dry. The findings are preliminary and must be treated with appropriate caution. But the direction of inquiry is significant: alterations in electrical charge can influence how nutrients bind, how roots signal, and how fungal networks coordinate. Climate change may be disturbing not only soil’s chemistry but its capacity to sense and respond.
Farmers do not need scientific confirmation to tell them soil is alive. They smell it, feel it, learn from it. Good farmers understand this in their bones: soil is not a substrate but a relationship — a covenant between life-forms, constantly renewed.
II. Soil as Symbol and Story
If the biological networks of soil show us what is happening materially, the symbolic networks of human imagination tell another part of the story. Human cultures have long used imagery of soil, worms, dust, and regeneration in their dreams and myths. In Hebrew, adamah (earth) and adam (human) are intertwined: we are formed from dust and return to it.
Dreams often present worms or burrowing creatures as figures of renewal — they break down what is dead so new life can emerge. The psyche, like the soil, creates life through decomposition, transformation, and slow, humble labour.
The symbolic and biological realms are not separate. They speak to one another. Soil is an outer ecology that mirrors the inner one. Our stories help us recognise that the inner and outer worlds belong to each other.
III. Dialogue: A Method of Understanding
Martin Buber (1878–1965), the Jewish philosopher whose work has shaped my thinking, wrote that “all real living is meeting”. He contrasted the “I–It” relationship, where the other is used, exploited, or classified, with the “I–Thou” relationship, where the other is encountered as presence. Soil, I want to suggest, can belong to the I–Thou realm when we are attentive. The soil calls us. It listens. It responds with its own slow speech.
IV. Three Parallel Webs: Soil, Spirit, Machine
There are, then, three networks (at the very least) that shape our present moment:
- The Mycorrhizal Web
- The Human Symbolic Web
- The Technological Web
These three networks — biological, symbolic, and technological — orient us in different ways. They gain their moral direction only when placed within a larger frame: the frame of covenant.
V. Covenant: Soil as Moral Relationship
A covenant is not a contract but a relationship grounded in fidelity, responsibility, and mutual restraint. In the Torah, covenant extends not only between human beings and God but also — strikingly — between humans and the land. The earth itself is a partner in the moral life of the community.
The sabbatical year (letting the land lie fallow) expresses this vividly. Its purpose is not merely agronomic; it is theological and ethical. The land is granted its own rest, its own right to renewal — a reminder that we are tenants, not owners. The Psalms echo this sensibility: the land rejoices, the hills sing, creation is addressed as a living presence.
Crucially, this intuition is not confined to Jewish or Christian traditions. Many Indigenous cultures — from West African shifting cultivation to Native American fallowing cycles — recognise that land must periodically rest, not as technique alone but as reciprocity and reverence.
In contemporary Restorative Justice, this insight reappears in striking forms: some administrations now appoint advocates to speak on behalf of land, rivers, or whole ecosystems — recognising that the more-than-human world has legitimate interests that require a voice. This is covenantal imagination at work.
Real Farming is, perhaps, at heart, covenantal agriculture. It recognises soil as a living community that demands respect. Enlightened Agriculture, as Colin Tudge has described it, places this recognition at its centre: the aim of agriculture is to feed people while enhancing, regenerating, rather than degrading the life of the land.
VI. What Real Farmers Already Know
The paradox is that those who most understand soil have the least time to read essays about it. Farmers already know — not from theory but from years of attention and care — the signs that matter most:
— how healthy soil smells
— how worms “tell the truth”
— that fungal networks heal when tillage is reduced
— that mixed farming strengthens resilience
— that kindness to animals enriches the land
— how the soil’s weight changes after rain
— how a recovering field “feels” underfoot
— how birds and insects return as soil health strengthens
What makes soil flourish is not cleverness but humility: listening, restraint, patience.
The farmers in Six Inches of Soil embody this. They are not heroes or visionaries but craftspeople. They return, season after season, to the land, learning its character, its voice, its seasons, its sufferings. They embody covenant through action, not theory.
VII. Seeing Again: The Invitation
We stand at a moment when farming faces extraordinary pressures: ecological, economic, climatic, and cultural. Technology is accelerating. Weather is destabilising. Many younger farmers feel unsupported; many older farmers feel unheard.
In this context, the question is not whether we will adopt new tools, but how we will use them — and what kind of relationship with soil we wish to cultivate.
If we attend only to yields and markets, we will exhaust the land.
If we attend only to symbol and story, we will lose our practical footing.
If we attend only to technology, we will forget that life thrives through tenderness, not control.
But if we attend to all three — soil, spirit, and the thoughtful use of tools — we may yet restore those six inches of soil on which everything depends.
The invitation, then, is to see the land again: to let science deepen our reverence, to let story deepen our responsibility, and to let technology serve the quiet work of restoration.
For in the end, soil is not an object. It is a partner. It is a presence. It is the ground of our existence — and it speaks, if we learn to listen.
The author wishes to acknowledge the help of AI in writing this essay.
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