The ground beneath us: Exploring soil, health and climate resilience

In this episode, Professor Jack Gilbert - renowned microbial ecologist and Professor at UC San Diego - takes us beneath the surface to explore the hidden life of soil and why it matters more than we think. From the microscopic ecosystems that drive climate resilience to the profound connections between soil, culture, identity, and our sense of place, this conversation reveals why soil is far more than just a foundation - it’s a living system central to our future.

We explore the links between soil health and public health, the importance of land stewardship, and the value of indigenous and local knowledge in restoring balance to our landscapes. The episode also spotlights Dr Gilbert's involvement with The Soil Stars - a group of world-class scientists and experts developing and deploying soil microbial strategies to combat climate change, and looks ahead to Oath Biome, where science is being translated into action to build a more resilient future from the ground up.

Thank you for listening to this episode. 

For any comments, questions or insights please contact phil.emonson@jbaconsulting.com.

Visit our website jbaconsulting.com
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SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Climate Resilience Podcast brought to you by JBA Consulting. I'm Phil Emundsen, and in this podcast series, we unpick some of the complexities, challenges, and opportunities on the topic of climate resilience with some inspirational thought leaders. Whether you're working on local adaptation projects, planning for climate risk, or simply looking for hope backed by science, you're in the right place. If you enjoy these conversations, be sure to follow the podcast and subscribe wherever you listen. Share with your friends and colleagues too anyone interested in building a more resilient future. Now, let's jump into today's episode. We'll start today's episode with a question. What do soils, climate resilience, food, human health, and a rock star have in common? Well, the answer is my guest today, Professor Jack Gilbert, who is a global expert on soils and soil health. We're going to be chatting about why resilient landscapes start underground. And if you think that soils might sound a bit dull, well, trust me, we're going to change your mind because we're going to have a great conversation. Jack, I'm delighted that you've come on the podcast. It's great to have you. So welcome. And uh maybe you could start by giving a short introduction to yourself and your uh career background.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Sure, my I'm Jack Gilbert, as you said. I'm a professor of pediatrics and oceanography at the University of California San Diego, which obviously makes no sense with regards to soil health. Uh, but um, my background is in microbiology, and microbes are everywhere. You know, you you have 40 trillion of them in your body. In a gram of soil, there's over a billion cells. Um, every teaspoon of seawater has a million cells. So we're talking about an enormous um expansive microbial world. Really, this is just a microbial planet that we've come along to colonize in the last few million years. Um, and they colonized us and they use us in their to their whims. So uh as a microbiologist, I can study everything. In fact, I think I'm the world's first pediatric oceanographer or oceanographic pediatrician. I'm not entirely sure what I am, but uh microbes are my uh my friends and the things I study.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Brilliant, good stuff. Well, um, as I said, absolutely delighted to have you on the podcast. And uh we've got a lot that we want to talk about. So, look, I'm gonna take you back um maybe 25 odd years to the early 2000s. Um, I was uh I was an undergraduate doing a geography degree, and I did a module on soils. So um I did that student thing where you pop off down to the local bookshop, pay you 25 pounds or whatever it is to get the course textbook. And uh if I if I'm honest, the the first line uh disappointed me somewhat because it said that, and I and I quote from my memory, soils are the stuff in which plants grow. Um so quite quite a low bar uh that I'm hoping we can expand on and elaborate on today. Now, look, um if I was to uh define what a resilient landscape is, I would probably say that it's a a dynamic system, a diverse system that can adapt over time and maintains um human health and and also ecological um integrity. But I think that perspective is shaped by the above-ground lens. So, Jack, let's let's ease into this gently, right? What does climate resilience look like below the surface?

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah, I mean, you you actually captured it pretty well, right? Uh above as it is below. Um in this context, I like to think of the soil um like a giant sponge. Um, it's one of the one of the most visually compelling things I can think of. Um, the microbial worlds that live in the soils, these are all the fungi, the bacteria, the viruses, and even the little protists that run around inside there, they play a foundational role in managing how water moves through soil. If you've got a rich, diverse rainforest of microbial organisms in that soil, that soil will hold a lot of water, it will maintain water content. Um, and if you don't, it will just flood through like it's sand, right? And so um understanding resiliency is all about understanding water dynamics and understanding the movement of water through a system. Um, if you if you can keep water present in soil, your crops will have more water when they need it, uh, but they'll also have less water when they don't, because that soil hydrology will be um will be uh functional. It will make sure that the the plants have what they need. So a resilient soil system is one that can maintain water um content at a an appropriate level and also manage the nutrients and the richness of the soil to manage uh growth and opportunity when things uh run out, right? When there's not enough of the nutrients or the water available.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

And so when we think about a changing climate then, um you know our our our soils will be increasingly exposed to um uh seasonal waterlogging, um extreme heat, extreme uh wildfires uh linked to that. So I suppose how does a soil maintain and sustain its resilience to these increasing stresses that we're seeing?

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yeah, and uh, you know, a lot of that is just let nature take its course, and we've kind of ignored that over the last few hundred years. Um, the Industrial Revolution saw a uh the introduction of herbicides and pesticides and chemical fertilizers, chemistry, uh which really was the science of um of the 19th century, um, you know, physics being the science of the 20th century, and biology now finally getting its heyday as the science of the 21st century. But chemistry provided us with an opportunity to massively increase the yields that our um soil systems could produce so we could feed the world. Um, but the problem with doing that is we overburdened those soils with chemicals, um, nitrogenous fertilizers, uh, phosphates, uh, potassiums. Um, and you know, we added in a load of uh compounds which killed off the weeds and killed off the insects, and we ended up with a soil system which was not was pretty monocultural, um, not in terms of what goes on above ground, but what goes on below ground. We selected for a microbial monoculture in the soil, and that meant that the soil wasn't particularly resilient, it didn't have the diversity of microbial life to adjust and adapt when things went wrong. So, you know, what we what we talk about when we talk about resilient soil is one that has a living, dynamic microbial world living inside it, and some little macrobes like worms and plants and buffalo or whatever you want to call them. But you know, those the microbes are the most important, and those microbes and they make the soil more porous, they make the soil soil more spongy so it can suck up water. They also cycle all those nutrients and keep the nutrient system functioning properly, so you've got enough nutrients going to the plants. So you've got this ecosystem of services, which we don't have to provide, but that can help to fuel those systems to produce adequate crops and systems which enable us to feed the world effectively.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Yeah, yeah. And um without wishing to jump the gun to a conversation that we'll have later in the episode, how do we get that diversity, that variety?

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Yeah, there's multiple. This is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

I mean, there's multiple ways of getting to that end, right? There's multiple ways of making sure we can we can uh produce a healthy soil, uh healthy agricultural system. You know, and we've seen this, we've known this for years, you know, cover crops, um, uh the rotation systems, ensuring we have diverse cropping systems, you know, so like you know, row crops that allow us to have different plants growing in different parts of the soil system, um, making sure that we uh you know um are uh effectively managing fertilizer inputs with potentially organic fertilizers, um, using uh different kinds of cropping uh animal grazing strategies uh to allow for um the manure and the animals to support the growth of those systems. Uh we there are many ways, different ways of doing it. We we have recently started to develop and adapt ways of um using microbes as uh almost like soil probiotics or crop probiotics, you know, living bugs that we can add back into the soil to help them regenerate faster and help those systems to become more stable more quickly.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Brilliant, brilliant. Um you touched, I think, very briefly on uh in in at the start about the role that soil plays for human health. So I want to turn attentions to that. Um so so from from soil health to to human health, if if you will. Um continuing the thread a little bit, why is it important then that we reverse soil degradation, but particularly when it comes to to human health? And and as a as a follow-up question, um, and and I've got a vested interest in this as a father of two uh young boys, but I I was in a talk you gave uh a couple of months ago when you set out a very clear link between um uh childhood interaction with nutrient-rich soil, and I think I'm writing say an increased learning capacity or potential in the classroom. And that completely blew my mind. So, two questions in one there, but maybe you could you could pick those up and we could take that forward as a as a thread.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Yeah, we we as a species grew up in a microbial world, right? Um, our species is approximately um a hundred thousand to maybe a million years old. We have uh an ape lineage going back about five million years, our mammalian lineage is maybe 250, 260 million years old. It's not particularly long, right? Microbes have been on this planet for four billion years. So we you know we're talking about um a novel innovation. So our species and our body plan grew up in a world where we're constantly exposed to microbes. Um, our immune system really developed less as a um an army ready to like kill all the bad bugs and bad things that come into contact with us, but much more like a gardener or a farmer. You know, it's there to manage the microbial exposures that we have every day, every minute, and to use or cultivate those microbes that um provide benefits to supporting our body. So our body evolved in a world where it's surrounded by life and it's now using that life through our immune system to support its health and processes. When you take somebody and you isolate them from those sources, from those microbes, from that life, um, their body will not function as it was evolved to do, right? As we were selected function. And so, you know, for years now, we've been exploring whether children, um, especially because their immune systems and their bodies are developing and growing, especially in early life, whether children are who are living in urban environments who you know are um subject to extensive um, you know, uh hypercleanliness standards. Uh, there's a difference between hygiene, by the way, and uh cleanliness, but anyway, um, hygiene is just uh help-promoting environment, and and that could be many things. But um uh there's you know uh some of these kids are being totally removed from nature. And what we saw is that that leads to an increase in allergies, it leads to an increase in um physiological um uh differences in their bodies, it can lead to an increase in neurological differences in their bodies, and some of these situations um potentially can lead to deficits in those properties. Um so kids can grow up with um with uh reductions in uh neurological and physiological outcomes, which uh may not be uh beneficial for them or preferable for them. Uh, so what we've actually found is that when kids are reintroduced to some of these um uh biological phenomena like a healthy soil or a healthy environment, it can actually help their bodies to develop and grow effectively so that they can um uh improve uh upon uh or maybe get back to the the physiological and and neurological state that they had prior, or we had as a species prior to that isolation mechanism. Um, you know, uh I I could riff on this for ages because it gets really expensive.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Feel free because as I say, it it genuinely blew my mind this this this um this scientifically proven link between uh as I say interaction with with the soils that you've been talking about and and then learning potential in the classroom. So look, I I I'm fortunate, I live out in the country, we have an allotment, and just this last weekend um we uh we opened up the hatch at the bottom of the compost bin and took out some really dark, beautiful um compost, and and my boys were there and it was it was wonderful. And and I was explaining the process because actually if you lift the lid off, of course, at the top you've got you've got potato peelings and apple cores and grass cuttings and all that stuff. So, you know, actually that process was wonderful to see uh you know in in in in their eyes, but also it was just a lovely experience to be able to touch and feel that really dark, rich soil and and and and compost and and and spread it out. But let's go back to that link then, that scientific link which um which improves classroom learning capacity. Is it the capacity for learning? Was that was that the yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Well, capacity or potential. I mean, so um a child that grows up in uh we started this research uh almost 15 years ago working with two groups of agricultural communities in the US called the Amish and the Hutterites. And the Amish a lot of people are aware of, right? They don't really like technology, um, and they live on family farms and they drive buggies and horses, um, and you know, don't like uh engines and uh electronics. Um so we we found a um a unique disparity between the Amish and the Hutterites. Both of them live in these kind of technologically uh depauprate environments, right? No iPads, no iPhones, no cars. Yeah um, but the they have two different ways of farming their land. The Amish live on family farms, right? The kids grow up working on the farm, the front door's 50 feet from the barn door, right? The you know they it's a working environment and the kids are very, very much part of it. The Hutterites, um, their families are um are actually living in uh housing communes which are distant from the farm. And only boys over the age of 14 years old are allowed on the farm, right? They've got a very strict policy. Now, these people are all come from Central Europe, Northern Europe, right, originally, and they have very, very similar genetic predispositions towards the development of allergic disease, things like asthma, right? And we found though that they were very discordant for asthma. What does that mean? The Amish had maybe 4% of their population developing asthma. The average for the US is like eight or nine percent, right? So it's it's you know significant reduction in the likelihood of developing asthma. But the the uh the people in living in hoterite communities had almost 25 to 30 percent asthma and um a significant increase in neurodevelopmental conditions, and their school readiness scores were lower than the Amish, right? And what do I mean by school readiness? That means that a kid can come into kindergarten or first grade here in the US um and uh be ready and be able to uh participate in the classroom. So we were we thought this was fascinating, right? It turned out we we could take dust from Amish children's bedrooms, which very much look like farmyard dust, right? Makes sense if they're working there and they're going to sleep in that room and breathing all that dust in deeply into their bodies. Um, that you take that dust and give it to an animal and it would alleviate any allergic disease in the animal. Um, you know, I'm I'm hyperbolically stipulating that, but that's what the evidence pointed to. Um, subsequently, we've taken children and randomized them to receive healthy soil exposure when they're in kindergarten or preschool. And it's remarkable when you take these kids and you randomize them, say, look, hey, here's a big tub of healthy soil, and here's a tub of soil from an urban environment. And we're going to randomize you kids go and play in this tub of healthy soil from this forest, you kids go and play in this tub of soil from an urban park parking lot, um, and we'll see what happens. The kids that interact with the soil from the forest, um, healthy, rich, diverse soil, uh have lower levels of inflammation, and they tend to um have much more um be much more ready intellectually for school when they go to school at kindergarten at the age of five. And we've currently got a study on growing up in Washington where we're literally taking kids and randomizing them to either receive an outdoor education in a uh forest environment or an indoor education in Seattle in a in an indoor preschool. Um and in our preliminary data, we're seeing a very similar trend. Kids have lower levels of inflammation and are more ready for kindergarten when they uh have their outdoor education. So, all this points to the fact that when you, as a child, are exposed to a rich, diverse microbial ecosystem in that soil, a rich diverse soil with lots of immune stimulation, you're much more likely to develop immunologically and physiologically and neurologically as our ancestors would have expected us to develop. And therefore, our our bodies are more standard, right? Less depurpic. And this to me is an indication that we can potentially package this healthy soil environment up and give it to people as a way of helping their bodies to develop uh to the to the fullness of opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Yeah, I mean that's it's just it's phenomenal stuff and great scientific research. But um, as I say, it absolutely just blew me away when when I heard that for the first time. Um there's there's an interesting thing that you've just been talking about there with with the example of those two cultures, um which I'd like to I'd like to sort of dive into a little bit more, and it's about the link between soils and a sense of place in many respects. So as we said, living, dynamic, resilient landscapes rely on healthy soils, but I think there's a lot more to it, actually, particularly in respect of culture, identity, uh local knowledge. So why is it that soils are were historically and culturally important? And how can we perhaps use some of that to inform land stewardship, land management now, particularly given all those stresses that we've spoken about, particularly climate change, but increased um sort of uh you know fertilizer and pesticide use, etc.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah, one of my favourite authors, Philip Marsden, who's also uh I think he lives in Cornwall in the UK. He's uh he's um a um uh a wonderful author and he talks about place and uh and what it means to be in a place. And uh, you know, I've been an immigrant now for a long most of my life. I've lived uh uh outside of the UK much longer than I've lived inside the UK where I was born. Um and and it's it's it's quite remarkable how much you miss aspects of your home environment, not just you know, chocolate and hot crust buns, although I had to do a job for both, but um the environment which you grew up in, yeah, right. And this is this is uh um an interesting ancestral identity, right? It's not we we we think of place as being extremely important because it grounds us, and we use that language, grounding of us, right? Our ability to be grounded in an environment, um, and that's very linked to the soil, right? Obviously, by byological ideology and also reality. And there's an interesting um historical uh perception to this. The the Chinese um living in uh in uh ancient uh uh um empire based China used to take a pot of soil from their hometown when they were uh sent to the peripheries of the empire. Empire to you know to uh administer different regions. Um because they believed that when when they were feeling um uh sad or um or got sick, uh you know, GI issues or uh or you know just mental health issues, that taking some of that soil and making it into a tea and drinking it would make them feel better. You know, you know, the world is a strange place, right? And uh they also you know ancient peoples used to think many things which uh which may not be reality today, but the these same people also um develop strategies of taking uh something wonderful called uh yellow soup, where they take a bowl of uh infant pure child's feces and uh leave them with a piece of cheesecloth over the top outside uh overnight to ferment and then make someone who has persistent diarrhea drink it in order to make themselves feel better, which sounds crazy, yeah, but turns out to be one of the first recorded evidences of a fecal microbiome transplant, which has become our primary um most effective strategy for treating recurrent clostrudioides difficile infections in our human populations today, and it's one of the only FDA improved microbiome therapies in the world. So um, so they they may be on something. So the idea that you could take dirt or soil from your home community and use it to stimulate your immune system, rebalance, therefore, your mental, your neurological inflammation and your physiological homeostatis, may have extraordinary merit, right? And that idea that it grounds us to have um a home that where our childhood physiology developed, I find absolutely fascinating. Isn't it just you know it may be highly nuanced, but I think there's a there's a big opportunity there uh to explore ways of using the microbiome in our home environments to help us live a healthier, more um profound life.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Yeah, yeah. So uh I now live in um the southwest of England, but I'm originally from from Telford, and I think it's safe to say nobody's ever made tea with um with soil from Telford uh when they've been feeling low or or under the weather. But uh maybe I'll maybe I'll give it a go. You've never tried, maybe never tried exactly knit back to Telford and take take some soil with me next time I go. Um I mean this is just phenomenally fascinating stuff. Um one of the uh introductions I gave was to a rock star. And so that is because the first uh interaction I had with you was at the anthropy gathering uh at the Eden Project earlier in the year. And um for listeners, if you've not listened to the episode um from uh December of 2025 when I had a conversation with John O'Brien, who's the founder of Anthropy, then I'd I'd recommend that you go back and listen to that. But the Anthropy Gathering was was superb, and you shared a stage with the edge from you two talking about soils. Now that sounds incredibly impossible, but it is because it's framed around a soil stars initiative. So tell me what Soil Stars is all about there.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

Yeah, the Soil Stars is a think tank, if you will, of independent scientists that is run by a British charity, um a scientific society called Applied Microbiology International, which is actually one of the oldest microbiology societies in the world. Um, but this uh this you know, microbiological societies are like all kinds of scientific societies, it's just a group of geeks that get together and and talk about things. Um so we we developed the soil stars because we um found a uh a group of people who were extraordinarily passionate about trying to save our soils. Um, our soils are degrading around the world, they are they are being um wiped out by uh industrial agriculture. Um uh you know, changes in climate are causing significant erosion of our soils. We're losing millions of tons of topsoil uh every month across the world, and it's it's significantly damaging our ability to maintain agricultural productivity, let alone the environmental and ecological uh toll that it's putting upon our planet. So um, we are in a in an urgent situation where we need to develop and design techniques and strategies and actually employ those strategies, do something, not just talk about it, to facilitate um uh uh backstopping our ability to maintain soil health around the planet and potentially to reverse the decline in our soils to make sure that in a hundred years we have um highly functional, highly um stable soil systems, and to put the passion back in the soil. And if you if you want passion, go and speak to musicians, right? And uh, you know, the edge, um, uh who I think uh um his fellow bandmates call him um professor as a a joke, but also because he is one of the um more intellectually rigorous ones in the in the band, I'm sure, um as the lead guitarist. But he uh he he is an incredible intellect when it comes to identifying and strategizing um ways of solving problems, and he really has bent that intellect towards soil health. It's become a passion of his. So, you know, I was introduced to him two years ago, um, and I immediately saw the opportunity to integrate him into a think tank um that would facilitate us leveraging his passion and his energy, and you know, to be honest, his convening power, to facilitate us building a narrative, global narrative, around soil health. And along with my colleagues Janet Jansen and lots of um other scientists um and now musicians um and leaders um in soil health, such as Sir Tim Smith, who um who uh founded the Eden project and the Gloss Gardens of Helligan, we are building a community of thought leaders to help us put uh the science into practice, the ideas um into um into rigorous application so that so that we can actually move the needle in terms of supporting uh regeneration of our soils and maintenance of uh soil health.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

And and and that is that is that is fantastic, and actually neatly brings me on to what will probably be our last conversation topic. Um, and that and that is particularly about how we turn your years of um scientific rigour into, as you say, climate action, something that will improve soil health, soil resilience around the world. And this is where oath biome comes in. So um I know this is something that you're hugely passionate about. So tell us what uh oath biome is, what it's all about.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yeah, so oath biome is a um or um oath life, uh, oath soil health, whatever you want to call it. It's a it's a actually a public benefit corporation. It's a corporation that was put together by a group of um uh uh um scientists, um, musicians, the uh U2 is one of their main backers, um, alongside other um leading lights in Hollywood um and beyond, and and some uh impact investors in the VC community who really wanted to put together a company that actually wanted to make a difference. Um, not not just make money, but make a difference in the world. Um it's this is the only company I've ever been involved with as a as an independent scientist where um science has been first. Many, many, many, uh, many companies come and say, I've got a product, can you can you be a consultant, put your name to this? Um, and they just want your name. They want to you know use your reputation and say, look, I've got serious scientists on board. This company, um, you know, and maybe this is because uh um uh Edge is one of a their co-founders, this, this, uh, this company has come at it from a completely different perspective. They said to the scientific community, you tell us uh what's the best strategy here? What should we be doing to address this critical problem in the world? And then not just the scientists, right, but the farmers, the the people actually doing the growing, the people getting up at five o'clock in the morning and and maintaining these farming environments. They've they've actually brought on board the entire farming community, uh, government operations, scientists around the world, and said, hey, we want to make a difference. How do we do that now? And so um, this is a let's say public benefit corporation. I you know, I do have stocks and shares in that company, I do have a conflict of interest with them. Um, but I I honestly believe it's a force for good in terms of trying to change the world now with practices that will have real impact. And the strategy that Oath has been going after is uh focused on microbial technologies, which is obviously a very big passion of mine being a microbiologist. We I think we can use microbiology to solve some of the world's biggest problems, and one of the world's biggest problems is soil health and the degradation of our soils. So um Oath has uh taken that on board, take on board the scientific direction of the entire community, um, well, a significant proportion of them, and has said, okay, let's explore this. And they're developing microbial technologies to replace synthetic fertilizers, to improve water holding capacity, to uh replace or reduce the need for things like herbicides and pesticides, so that in addition to other regenerative practices like no-till, like cover crops, um, you can have another technological solution embedded in your practice to help to accelerate uh soil restoration and make soils more resilient uh for future dynamics. And so, you know, hey, uh we have an urgent problem here, right? Yeah, and we need urgent solutions. And it's time for us as scientists to back solutions that we think have real merit. And that's why I put my name and reputation behind an organization which is trying to achieve that.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

Ah, it's it's it's so refreshing, and I can hear the passion in your voice, and you're right, we're faced with a with with a climate emergency and we have to take action. So um really wonderful to hear um everything you're doing to improve uh resilience of soils. Um, I said that was probably going to be the last uh sort of conversation topic. But I I would like to close though um with something a little more profound, perhaps. So um Jack, if we get soils right, what what changes? Not just uh environmentally, but but culturally and and and socially, what what changes?

SPEAKER_00 33:25

One of my uh very good friends and uh mentors, uh Joe Handelsman, who was the scientific advisor to the Obama administration, um, led the uh Office for Science, Technology and Policy, and is a one of the world's uh most eminent microbial microbiologists and soil scientists um says it best. She goes, Um, you know, uh we we start with the soil. Um our bodies are um uh you know, in every religious culture on earth, we you know, we come from the soil, um, and our our our entire um uh lives are dependent upon the soil, you know, uh outside of uh aquaculture, agriculture is incredibly important to us. So it's you know, while while uh improving soil health, soil resiliency, making soils uh more spongy, making sure they can suck up more water, making sure they can they can um uh be more resilient in terms of nutrient density is important. And it will help, you know, uh reduce pollution in rivers and in oceans. It will help um uh mitigate climate change by drawing down carbon. It will help with so many different practices, it will make agriculture cheaper, right? The key thing that we need to achieve is making um soils the center of our society and our social structures. We want people to understand, to ground themselves in the soils in their community, to do essentially what you're doing, Phil, with your kids. You know, like let's get out there, let's start, let's start understanding where our food comes from, let's work with our farming community to to um hold them up as leaders, as uh as social cultural um heroes for our community. Um they are the stewards of our soil. We need the government of the world, and I you know speak to you as a person living in the United Kingdom, the government of the United Kingdom to support our growers and our farmers um and help them to engage with the latest in soil science so that it's part of our social cultural um uh reality, it's a part of our social cultural identity that soils are at the center of our society and community. If we can achieve that, we can save the world.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

And and and and there it is, there is the the the passionate and scientific scientifically informed call to arms. Um, Jack, that's been an enormous amount of fun. I've learned an awful lot, and I can only thank you for bringing your your valuable and wonderful insights to this episode of the podcast. So, Professor Jack Gilbert, thanks for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Thank you so much. Lovely to be here.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

So we've reached the end of our time today. If you've enjoyed listening, please hit the subscribe button so you're ready for our next episode in a month's time. And if you'd like to support the show, consider sharing it with others or leaving us a short review wherever you're listening. It really helps more people to discover and enjoy the podcast. Thanks for joining us. I'm Phil Emonson, and you've been listening to the Climate Resilience Podcast brought to you by JBA Consulting.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

If we can achieve that, we can save the world.