The Incredible Story of Soil
Join Dan Bourchier and Matthew Evans as they discuss the importance of soil and how it keeps us and the earth healthy.
Learn how soil helps to nourish and fuel our bodies and what role it plays in our planet’s long term health.
About Matthew Eavns
Matthew Evans is Australia’s favourite tree-changer. A former chef and food critic, Matthew is now a Tasmanian smallholder, food writer and food activist. He fattens pigs, milks cows, tends a garden and writes about food from his office on Fat Pig Farm, in the gorgeous Huon Valley.
Matthew is the star of the long-running SBS TV series The Gourmet Farmer, as well as the recent documentary on seafood, What’s the Catch?, in which he advocates for a change to Australian food labelling laws.
Dan Bourchier is a multi-award-winning multi-platform broadcaster with the ABC, accomplished company director on commercial, and in-demand public speaker and event MC and facilitator.
Dan anchors ABC Canberra’s flagship 7pm news, and as well as being a member of the University of Canberra Council, Dan has extensive experience in governance, leadership, strategy and strategic communications, and Indigenous affairs.
Dan grew up in the remote Northern Territory town of Tennant Creek, where he was mentored by elders from around the region while coming to understand his own Indigenous heritage from his mum’s side of the family in coastal and inland parts of Victoria.
He was driven to news and reporting from an early age, and began a traineeship at the Tennant and District Times as a teenager still at school. Dan has worked as a radio broadcaster, newspaper reporter, video journalist, foreign correspondent, political reporter, and social commentator.
As a broadcaster, Dan is driven by giving voice to the voiceless, holding to account those in positions of power, and telling really great stories – while his work as a company director is underpinned by cultural and ethical governance.
Soil – The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy.
What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves.
Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as a swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed.
For too long, we’ve not only neglected the land beneath us, but we’ve also squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing. But if we want our food to nourish us, and to ensure our planet’s long-term health, we need to understand how soil works – how it’s made, how it’s lost, and how it can be repaired.
In this ode to the thin veneer of Earth that gifts us life, commentator and farmer Matthew Evans shows us that what we do in our backyards, on our farms, and what we put on our dinner tables really matters, and can be a source of hope.
Isn’t it time we stopped treating the ground beneath our feet like dirt?
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