Hundreds of people sought refuge beneath a sprawling open-air tent during the sweltering June heat at the 2024 Homestead Festival in Columbia, Tennessee. They had come to hear soil consultant and regenerative farmer Kevin Krause speak about something most of us rarely consider: the hidden world beneath our feet.
His premise was surprisingly simple. Every harvest begins in the soil.
Kevin and his wife, Mikki, own Liberty Trace Farm in Hampshire, Tennessee, where they practice regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and careful stewardship of the land. Their work is rooted in the belief that healthy soil produces healthy plants, healthy animals, and ultimately healthier people.
As he spoke that afternoon, the pieces began falling into place for me. Gardening, nutrition, farming, and human health were not separate subjects after all—they were all connected by the living community beneath the surface of the ground.
The ideas themselves were not complicated.
Healthy soil serves as a reservoir of minerals and nutrients. It is also home to an astonishing diversity of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and countless other microscopic organisms. Working together with plant roots, this unseen community unlocks minerals and nutrients that eventually become part of the food we eat.
When the soil flourishes, everything above it has the opportunity to flourish as well.
For me, this was more than an interesting agricultural concept. It reframed stewardship.
If we have been entrusted with caring for the earth, then caring for the life within the soil becomes one of the most practical expressions of that calling. Healthy soil is not merely a means of producing crops; it is the foundation upon which thriving gardens, resilient farms, and nourishing food are built.
Curious to see these principles lived out, Keith and I visited Liberty Trace Farm the following month. Walking the pastures and gardens alongside Kevin and Mikki transformed abstract ideas into tangible reality. Everywhere we looked, the emphasis was not on fighting nature but on working with it—building soil rather than simply feeding plants.
By August, my curiosity had grown into commitment. I enrolled in Kevin’s final Living Soil Workshop of the season, where we spent an entire day learning soil biology and constructing a biologically active compost pile from the ground up.
The workshop had three straightforward goals: to understand the living biology of the soil, to learn how to cultivate it, and to discover how to restore that life wherever it has been diminished. By the end of the day, those objectives had become more than classroom lessons. They had become practical skills I could carry home.
That autumn I began gathering leaves, wood chips, compost ingredients, and every other material needed to build my own living compost pile. It felt less like starting another garden project and more like participating in something much older—a partnership with the quiet, unseen processes God designed into Creation from the beginning.
Sometimes the most significant changes in our lives begin not with what we see growing above the ground, but with what is happening beneath our feet.
