We cannot build the soil fertility and productivity as well as earthworms. We can work in harmony with the earthworms, spreading a layer of leaves 12" thick, on the soil, and allow the earthworms to come, multiply, feed on the leaves, burrow down 24" and maybe even 60"or more, defecating in their burrows, aerating the soil while also leaving abundant plant nutrients, and they can do this without expensive man made fossil fuel guzzling mechanical tractors.

We can eat food, and it takes trillions of naturally occurring microscopic bacteria in our digestive track to digest, to take ‘energy’ and nutrients from that food, and make it available to us. We need these bacteria as partners, to sustain us, our health.

We need oxygen for life. We breath in air, containing oxygen, and we exhale CO₂. Green plants must take in CO₂ from the air, to get the carbon they need to produce plant material, and through the process of photo-synthesis, the plants take the carbon, and give off oxygen, which we need to sustain our lives. There are so many essential synergistic relationships in nature. We may be mighty, but only as long as we co-exist in graceful harmony with the many other parts of the natural world.

While we may think of ourselves as the supreme intelligence, I have the illusion that we’re part of a much more complex synergistic team, and that as we have strayed and disrupted natural relationships, we’ve created diseases and endangered our own future.

Over the past year I have observed with awe the wonderful role that the earthworms have played in my garden, and maybe I’m only aware of a very small part of a much bigger picture. I have grown to have a reverence for those earthworms.

Last September (2009), when I pulled up corn stalks, I measured root that had gone down 21½" and have no idea how much root broke off, how deep the roots went. I credit the earthworms for tilling the soil, for distributing their castings down deep, so the roots went down, and had a much broader area from which to draw water and nutrients.

While we may build roads, skyscrapers, computers, airplanes, we cannot build soil quality as well as the earthworms. We’ve got to grow to respect the other critters and vital parts of nature, and learn to live in harmony with them, because without the earthworms, the soil will not be able to yield really healthy food, which we NEED to sustain our own health.