Illustrations can be helpful, although they can be overused.
We’ve all heard about the pastor who tells some story he thinks is funny, and it ends up having only a tenuous connection to the Scripture passage. He just wanted to tell the joke, whether it illustrated anything useful or not.
On the other end of the spectrum, imagine a sermon without any illustrations … the truth may be there, but it’s unlikely to be memorable.
So, we need good illustrations to help us understand important concepts. But illustrations are just that — imperfect approximations of the truth.
Consider the idea that soil organic matter helps retain water on a landscape. This is a vital concept within regenerative agriculture. We’ve all heard that every 1 percent increase in soil organic matter means that the land can retain an additional 20,000 gallons of water. This is powerful information — it can help transform the way we manage and steward our land.
But what is 20,000 gallons of water? What does that look like? A swimming pool? As it turns out, yes — the average American backyard swimming pool is about 15 by 30 feet, with an average depth of seven feet, and that calculates to 23,625 gallons. But swimming pools are fairly variable in size. A better benchmark is a 40-foot shipping container. This is a standard item we’re all familiar with, and at 40 by 8 by 8.5 feet, it could contain 20,400 gallons of water.
Imagine a shipping container worth of water being released on your pasture or field. That’s a pretty powerful image of how important soil organic matter is.
Another helpful illustration about soil and water comes from author and educator Didi Pershouse. As she describes it, flour is analogous to dirt while bread is like soil. The difference between flour and bread is of course that yeast — a fungal microorganism — has been added and, after baking, it transforms the flour into a completely different product. Similarly, soil is dirt that has a plethora of microorganisms added to it so that it is, in a sense, living.
Didi’s metaphor becomes more powerful when she explains what happens when you add water to a bowl of flour and to a piece of bread. Even if the water is well mixed with the dry flour, after a couple of hours the mixture will dry out. But the piece of bread remains moist for several days. The addition of microorganisms has created a product that is capable of retaining water for an additional order of magnitude of time.
And so it is with soil: when plain dirt also contains bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms, dung beetles, etc. — i.e., when it becomes living soil organic matter — it is able to retain an extra shipping container worth of water on every acre.
Let’s make this illustration come to life on every acre we steward.
And that’s the view from the country.
