A healthy soil is home to an incredible number of creatures. The collection of soil critters from the tiniest microbe all the way up through beneficial mites to the mighty earthworm is called the “Soil Food Web”. "Soil Food Web" is a term that has recently been created to describe those thousands of species of critters that inhabit a healthy soil ecology.

When these underground citizens are in sufficient numbers in the soil, they prevent compaction, improve soil drainage, control plant disease, and most important they make nutrients and water readily available to plants. We can’t have healthy plants unless we have healthy soil, and that is not possible without sufficient members of the soil food web in residence.

What is critical to understand about this community of creatures is that they are all related to each other. When part of the food web is destroyed by a pesticide for example, the system for maintaining a healthy soil comes to a stop.

It turns out that the earthworm is the main caterer for the soil food web. It pulls much of the organic matter needed by the members of the web down from the surface into the soil. The whole soil system depends on the availability of that organic matter on the soil’s surface, so the earthworm has something to pull down for everyone’s lunch.

For ten million years, Mother Nature with her forests and the prairies offered the soil food web an annual dose of organic matter in the form of autumn leaves and dead grass. Unfortunately, that ready source is not available to our lawns and gardens. We need to find a way to make organic material available to the earthworms over our entire home landscape; under the trees and shrubs, on the lawns, and in the gardens.
If you want to have a healthy soil under your turf, you need a healthy soil food web. You can feed it or you can kill it. Most people are killing it, guaranteeing their growing grass in dead soil.

Our recommendation is to feed the soil food web and do everything you can to avoid harming it.