Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
    Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
    Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
    Audiobook10 hours

    Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life

    Written by David R. Montgomery

    Narrated by Eric Michael Summerer

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The problem of agriculture is as old as civilization. Throughout history, great societies that abused their land withered into poverty or disappeared entirely. Now we risk repeating this ancient story on a global scale due to ongoing soil degradation, a changing climate, and a rising population.



    But there is reason for hope. David R. Montgomery introduces us to farmers around the world at the heart of a brewing soil health revolution that could bring humanity's ailing soil back to life remarkably fast. Growing a Revolution draws on visits to farms in the industrialized world and developing world to show that a new combination of farming practices can deliver innovative, cost-effective solutions to problems farmers face today.



    Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility. In addition, he discusses how these practices translate into farms that use less water, generate less pollution, and lower carbon emissions. Combining ancient wisdom with modern science, Growing a Revolution lays out a solid case for an inspiring vision where agriculture becomes the solution to environmental problems.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 9, 2017
    ISBN9781541471900
    Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
    Author

    David R. Montgomery

    David R. Montgomery, Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, is author of King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon.

    More audiobooks from David R. Montgomery

    Related to Growing a Revolution

    Related audiobooks

    Environmental Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Full Monty

      Mar 16, 2023

      If I knew I were to die in six months’ time, what would I do in the garden? Perhaps the notion of planting for a future I could not share would seem pointless. But I doubt it. Gardening transcends time. Gardens never exist in any one moment. They are

      3 min read

    • Article

      Make Peace With Weeds

      Dec 2, 2021

      Make Peace With Weeds
      4 min read

    • Article

      Perennial VEGETABLES

      Mar 30, 2018

      Perennial VEGETABLES
      6 min read

    • Article

      Plan Your Permaculture Plot

      May 14, 2021

      Plan Your Permaculture Plot
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Bee Lawn

      Feb 24, 2022

      The Bee Lawn
      3 min read

    • Article

      Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism

      May 4, 2020

      Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism
      3 min read

    • Article

      Growing In Drought And Heat

      Dec 8, 2017

      Growing In Drought And Heat
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cotton: The Ideal Crop For Reducing Carbon Emissions And Poverty

      Feb 4, 2022

      What impact is climate change having on South Africa’s cotton farmers? Hennie Bruwer (HB): Ironically, we’re currently seeing, and will continue to see, an increase in the number of cotton farmers in South Africa as a result of climate change. This i

      6 min read

    • Article

      Backyard Orchards: A Better Way

      Jun 9, 2021

      Backyard Orchards: A Better Way
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Growing Choice

      Jun 5, 2021

      Direct drills are firmly back in vogue as the emphasis shifts towards boosting soil health as well as cutting establishment costs. Some machines will only perform to their best in no-till conditions – working into the firm surface underneath stubble,

      13 min read

    • Article

      Deep Litter MANAGEMENT

      Feb 7, 2020

      Repugnance for what comes out the far end of an animal is not merely cultural conditioning—our senses are warning us of potential danger: Feces can be a vector for disease. Joel’s quote above implicitly advises us to trust that repugnance: If it smel

      8 min read

    • Article

      Starting A Food Forest

      Aug 20, 2014

      Starting A Food Forest
      6 min read

    • Article

      There Is No Blueprint

      Mar 18, 2022

      There Is No Blueprint
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Yard of Our Own

      Jan 13, 2023

      A Yard of Our Own
      6 min read

    • Article

      Saving Seeds, Saving Cultures

      Mar 1, 2019

      Saving Seeds, Saving Cultures
      5 min read

    • Article

      Douglas Tallamy

      Feb 24, 2022

      Douglas Tallamy
      8 min read

    • Article

      Grow Green Manure

      Apr 10, 2020

      Grow Green Manure
      8 min read

    • Article

      Health From The Earth!

      Aug 18, 2023

      Health From The Earth!
      8 min read

    • Article

      What Lies Beneath

      Jun 12, 2024

      What Lies Beneath
      5 min read

    • Article

      Gillian Burke

      Jun 2, 2022

      Gillian Burke
      2 min read

    • Article

      Future-Proof the PLANET

      Mar 8, 2022

      Future-Proof the PLANET
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Growing a Revolution

    4.5/5

    66 ratings7 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a superb and informative book about the potential for stemming ecological, economic, and societal problems through soil-building practices. The book explains the importance of not tilling soil, growing cover crops for mulch, and rotating crops to create rich and nutrient-producing soil. The implications of these practices are cross-cutting for all types of farming. However, one negative review mentions that the author takes a doomsday climate activist approach, suggesting alternative books and resources for those interested in regeneration agriculture.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Listened to this twice, could listen to it again. A revolution in farming!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Was hoping to learn a bit about regeneration agriculture. Instead I was overwhelmed by the doomsday climate activist approach the author took. Try DIRT TO SOIL by Gabe Brown or THE ONE STRAW REVOLUTION by Masanobu Fukuoka. Shawn and Beth Dougherty, authors of THE INDEPENDENT FARMSTEAD also have a pretty informative series on YouTube.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Really informative book about the potential for stemming the tide in a number of ecological, economic, and societal problems. The book’s premise of creating “food forests” by promoting soil-building practices is very simple and very thoroughly explained:
      1: don’t till soil (it destroys important soil microbial communities)
      2: grow cover crops for mulch (to balance soil temperature, improve water retention, and provide nutrition for microbial communities)
      3: grow a wide variety of crops in rotation (better balances soil chemistry, crowds out weeds, makes the whole plot more insect and blight resistant, creates economic diversification for farmers).

      This creates the rich, crumbly black stuff even the most urban of humanity instinctively know as good soil (high in carbon and thriving nutrient-producing microbiome community). The implications are cross- cutting for both traditional and organic, small and large, temperate and tropical, arid and humid, urban and rural farming. The result is similar or higher yields, reduced input costs, less chemical pollution, and more economically stable farms, and more sustainable production over the long-term.

      Really liked the depth of examples and the personal stories about individual farmers the author uses to make and illustrate his points.

      If I had a complaint, it would be that the writing style is super repetitive, especially in the first chapter (felt like I was hearing whole passages on loop), but I can understand the need to re-explain and emphasize certain points. The fact that this same core idea has ”cropped up” independently in so many parts of the world is one of the book’s most important points.

      Overall, everyone needs to learn about this stuff either from this book or from somewhere. Soil may not be sexy, but this stuff really does affect absolutely everything of consequence on the planet (food, energy, political stability, environmental health, greenhouse gases, global economics, societal health, etc) on a scale that very, very few other things do. This stuff is not complicated, but it will require agricultural creativity in a way that agro-business has all but starved out of modern agriculture.

      Overall this presents a powerfully hopeful story of how farmers (together with the rest of us) can save the world from the most pressing issues of our time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      In a nutshell, the equivalent of ‘The gospel according to living soil’. No need to be in the business of ‘growing things’ to understand and champion this revolution.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Superb book, a must read for all interested in farming

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      "Growing a Revolution" is essentially a sequel to Montgomery's earlier work, "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations". While the previous work set out to show the consequences of poor soil management and agricultural practices, "Growing a Revolution" is a more upbeat and thrilling account of the author's research into how to avoid the bad endings that "Dirt" chronicled.

      The book, broadly speaking, is a survey of conservation agriculture, told through a narrative lens of the author's encounters with the farmers themselves. I found this approach to be very engaging. Academic books, even those written for a lay audience, have the tendency to be dry and distant from their topics. This book, in contrast, is rich with the sense of the author's joy and wonder at the topic as well as enough recourse to the underlying science to satisfy the more skeptical reader. You could easily imagine Dr. Montgomery sharing some of these tales with you over small glasses of the Costa Rican mango brandy he describes.

      The strength of the book, in my opinion, is connecting threads commonly seen in the organic agriculture community around no-till methods, soil amendment, and economics. There are many books on each of these topics, but fewer that draw attention to the interconnection between them.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      We can only hope, little by little, thing will change to a more sustainable model.

      1 person found this helpful