Some Important and Foundational Information
Before we get into soil health itself, I want to walk through a little basic biology, because it's the foundation for everything that follows. There's a nutrient cycle at play that most people sense intuitively but rarely think through, and once you see it clearly, the connection between soil and food stops being abstract.
Plants absorb nutrients from the soil they grow in, and for nearly every crop, forage, vegetable, or grain, the majority of what you're looking at in the field came from that soil. Here's the part that surprises people: most of a plant, somewhere between 65 and 85 percent, is simply water. What's left breaks into two categories. A small slice, roughly 1 to 5 percent, is mineral content, called "ash" because that's literally what remains after you burn off everything carbon-based. The rest, somewhere between 10 and 30 percent, is built through photosynthesis, the process by which a plant pulls carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with water to build sucrose, a simple sugar made of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule bonded together. Sucrose is the foundational building block that the plant transports throughout itself to construct everything else: cell walls, proteins, fiber, the whole structure.
I share that breakdown because it sets up the real point. When we talk about nutrient density, we're talking about two genuinely different things, and conflating them is where a lot of food conversations go sideways. The first is mineral content: macronutrients like potassium, calcium, and magnesium, and micronutrients like boron, cobalt, and zinc, categorized by how much the body needs each. The second is what the plant builds itself: vitamins (the B's, C, A, E, D, K) and the lesser-known but increasingly important secondary metabolites, also called phenolics, phytonutrients, or bioactive compounds. That second category doesn't come from the roots. The plant manufactures it internally, inside its own cells, using sucrose and soil minerals as raw material.
So here's the bottom line, and it's worth holding onto as we move forward: plants don't make minerals, they absorb them, and those minerals have to be present in the soil to begin with. Whether they're present or absent determines whether the plant has the raw material to build vitamins and bioactive compounds at all. Minerals from soil and vitamins built in the plant aren't two unrelated facts. One enables the other.
What Exactly Is Soil Health
The term soil health isn't new, but it's getting real mainstream attention alongside the broader regenerative movement, and I think it's worth being precise about what it actually means before diving into where it came from.
A useful working definition: soil health is the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans (Doran & Zeiss, 2000). What I like about that definition is what it implies. It shifts soil from a static resource you manage for yield to a dynamic biological system you manage for long-term capacity. Maintaining and improving that capacity comes down to three interconnected domains: soil structure, biological activity, and hydrological function, in other words, how the soil holds together, what's living in it, and how it moves and holds water.
There's also a more abstract layer to soil health, tied less to measurement and more to values and philosophy. A scientist friend once asked me a question I haven't stopped thinking about: how do you look at a person and know whether they're healthy? There's no single number. You're reading a whole system. Soil works the same way.
A Brief History of the Term Worth Knowing
I’m going to tangent here for a brief second, but I believe understanding history is important, so let’s go there briefly. The first documented use of "soil health" in agricultural literature dates to 1910, though it meant something narrower then, mostly soil fertility and nutrient supply. The term resurfaces with more weight in 1936, when the USDA's Agricultural Adjustment Administration published a report titled "Soil Health and National Wealth." Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture at the time, is credited by historians as a likely first user of the term in this institutional sense, and the timing isn't coincidental. The country was still climbing out of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, watching topsoil blow off the Great Plains in storms that darkened skies a thousand miles away. For the first time, the federal government had to publicly reckon with the idea that soil isn't infinite, and that how we treat it bears directly on national wealth and survival. That's a piece of history worth not forgetting.
But the deeper, living version of the idea, soil as a dynamic system rather than a stockpile of nutrients, came from a different direction. Albert Howard, working in India in the early 20th century, was already arguing that soil fertility, plant health, and human health were links in one chain, not separate concerns. Lady Eve Balfour, part of the organic and biological farming movement in England, picked up that thread and is credited with coining the phrase in something closer to its modern sense in the 1950s. Where Wallace's USDA was responding to a national emergency, Balfour and Howard were building a worldview, one where living soil was the foundation on which everything else stood, decades before any government agency gave the idea formal standing. It's the same arc we traced with Hippocrates and Food is Medicine: an idea practitioners lived and understood long before institutions caught up and gave it a name.
The Soil Health to Plant Function Connection
Those same three domains, structure, biology, and water, are what we weigh every time we make a management decision at Caney Fork Farms. When we need to draw on the land's resilience, we try to do it consciously and judiciously rather than by default. The tools we use to build that resilience are familiar ones: cover cropping, crop rotation, planned and AMP grazing, intercropping, organic fertilizers, mulching, and keeping the ground covered as much as the season allows. Used together, these practices improve soil structure and water retention, and that combination creates the conditions soil biology needs to thrive.
This is the part that genuinely excites us, because the connection between these practices and more nutrient-dense food isn't just a feeling anymore. The science is catching up.
Montgomery et al.'s 2022 study found that crops grown under regenerative management averaged 34% more vitamin K, 20% more total phenolics, and 22% more phytosterols than conventionally grown counterparts. That's a striking number on its own, but it's not a new story. Back in 2007, Dr. Alyson Mitchell at UC Davis published a ten-year comparison tracking two flavonoids, quercetin and kaempferol, in tomatoes grown under organic versus conventional management. Organic tomatoes averaged 79 percent more quercetin and 97 percent more kaempferol, and critically, those levels climbed over the decade as soil organic matter accumulated in the organic plots, while the conventional plots stayed flat the whole time. That's not a single snapshot showing one system ahead of another. That's a living system improving year over year, with the food improving right alongside it.
Our produce and crops are following a similar pattern, with 7 out of 8 crop families sent in 2025 being equal or higher on almost every nutrient and bioactive compound that they should be a good or rich source of, as well as being a good and rich source of compounds that weren’t even listed as being a good or rich source in the USDA database. We still have work to do, but these trends tell me that we are on the right path.
Additionally, I want to be honest that these results don't show up identically in every study, and the real picture is more complicated than a clean regenerative-versus-conventional line. But the trend holds, and there's enough of it accumulating that we manage for soil health as a primary goal on this farm, not an afterthought. Montgomery put the mechanism well: living, biologically active soils move nutrients into plants and animals in ways degraded soils simply cannot.
That same mechanism extends into meat, and this is where Stephan van Vliet's work at Utah State becomes essential. Van Vliet runs metabolomic analysis, measuring hundreds of compounds at once, on beef raised under different grazing systems, and his findings show that beef from cattle on diverse pastures carries significantly higher phytochemical richness than beef from monoculture pasture or feedlot systems. In one analysis spanning roughly 500 metabolites, the top 30 compounds separating grass finished beef from grain finished beef were vitamins, phytochemicals, and lipids, with niacin alone measuring nine times higher in the grass finished beef. Even more telling: his data shows fresh forage carries about one and a half times the phytochemical content of dried hay or silage, and that drought stress or overgrazing measurably reduces that richness as the forage itself loses vigor.
That detail matters because it tells you the animal isn't building those compounds on its own. The forage built them first, through the same biosynthesis we described in plants above, and the animal becomes the vehicle that concentrates and carries them forward into the meat you eat.
Soil health drives forage diversity and vigor. Forage diversity and vigor drive phytochemical richness. That richness ends up on your plate. It's the same chain we traced with vegetables, just one link longer.
Rounding it all out
Which brings us back to where we started. Remember that soil health and the soil's capability to perform over time are tied to biology, soil structure, and its ability to hold water. As soil health improves, the soil's capacity to hold both minerals and water increases. When minerals and water are sufficient in the plant tissue, the plant functions at a high level, and most of what it absorbs becomes raw material for the bioactive compounds we've been discussing: antioxidants, anti-inflammatory compounds, anti-carcinogenic compounds, the molecules tied to brain function and metabolism, in the plant first, and then in us. It starts with minerals and water in soil, nurtured by biology, and it ends in increasingly sophisticated molecules built inside the plant, and one step further, inside the animal that eats it.
When we manage soil health, we are managing our health because food cannot be medicine if it cannot produce the medicinal elements that we need. Becoming aware of this is foundational in our personal health journeys. As we become more conscious of the role that food plays in our bodies and in our health, and what it takes to make healthy food, our relationship with both the food and farms, and where we source our food, can change. Soil is more than a substrate holding up the plant, just like food is more than something that you eat until you feel full.
We’re all in this together.