Why We Stopped Fertilizing with Chemicals and Started Feeding the Soil
From Bombs to Bread
Not long ago, the way we thought about farming changed forever, not in a field, but in a laboratory, in fact before WWI, most agriculture relied on natural fertilizers: compost, manure, guano, and crop rotations with legumes for nitrogen fixation, these century old practices contributed to keeping a complex ecosystem in the soil alive and well.
But during WWI, the German chemist Fritz Haber developed a process (the Haber-Bosch process) to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, for scalable production of explosives. At the center of this effort was ammonium nitrate, a compound rich in nitrogen, so, during the two World Wars of the last century, nations raced to develop the chemistry of explosives and Nitrogen.
After World War II, as the guns fell silent, the factories didn’t. They had been scaled, perfected, and paid for, and now, they needed a new purpose. Thus, the explosive industry became the fertilizer industry.
Ammonium nitrate, urea, and other by-products of wartime chemistry (and machinery) were repackaged as agricultural solutions. They were fast, cheap, and effective. Factories that once fed war machines were now feeding crops, using the same chemicals, redirected through economics, with the modern shortsightedness to long term consequences and in disregard of ecology.
This shift didn’t just change how we grow food. It redefined what soil is for millions of farmers.
What had once been a living ecosystem, full of worms, microbes, fungi, and invisible transactions, was now treated as a neutral medium. Fertility became a question of input and output. NPK: nitrogen (for leaves), phosphorus (for roots and flowers), potassium (for strength and water balance). Easy to measure, easy to sell.
But in simplifying the equation, something profound was lost: What Chemical Fertilizers Can’t Replace!
Plants don’t grow in isolation. They grow in relationships, with each other, with the soil, with water, with fungi, with bacteria, with the entire microbial food web that makes nutrients available, protects roots, and helps plants adapt to stress.
When you pour synthetic NPK salts onto the soil, they do feed the plant temporarily. But they also:
– Disrupt microbial communities
– Increase soil salinity and acidity
– Accelerate organic matter loss
– Create dependency, the more you use, the more you need
And over time, you get what we now see on millions of hectares: tired, compacted soil that still looks like dirt, but no longer behaves like it. A medium that holds the plant up, but no longer feeds it with any real depth.
At the same time, food grown this way has become less nutrient-dense and more dependent on external inputs for basic growth, defense and survival.
And using the same industry friendly thinking, we produce more chemicals to cure the symptoms rather than attempting to solve the “root” cause of the problem – intensive farming is slowly undermining the long-term vitality of soil, plant, and human health.– but supporting very well the agrochemical and life sciences industry.
A Different Way: Keep Soil Alive
In our minute scale, and thanks to the efforts of farmers that have shared their findings, we began to ask: what if we stopped treating soil like a machine, and started treating it like a community?
That’s when we turned toward regenerative soil practices, and in particular, toward microbial agriculture, an approach based on the invisible conversations between plants and the living world beneath them.
Roots don’t just absorb nutrients, they exchange. They release exudates (sugars, amino acids, phenols) to attract specific microbes. In return, those microbes:
– Fix nitrogen from the air
– Unlock phosphorus from rock
– Suppress pathogens
– Build soil structure
– Signal plant defenses
It’s an underground economy, a trade system that’s been evolving for millions of years. Our job is not to override it, but to support it.
Compost: A Memory of the Forest
To do that, we start with compost. Real compost. Ours is made from vermicompost (earthworm digested organic matter) and from compost gathered under wild, healthy forest canopies. The kind of soil that smells like rain and humus and life.
Compost isn’t just decomposed material, it’s a living carrier of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, actinomycetes, and all the microscopic life that makes soil function. When applied to fields, compost helps:
– Restore carbon
– Increase water retention
– Feed microbes
– Rebuild structure
But compost works slowly. To activate it, to bring its biology into a form we can spread through irrigation and even foliar sprays, we brew compost tea.
Olea Prilis pumping station
Compost Tea: A Living Infusion, not a Myth
There’s nothing fancy about the way we make compost tea, but there’s something magical in the way it works.
It begins with compost. But not just any compost. We use earthworm compost, dark, spongy, and rich with humic acids, along with compost gathered carefully from forest undergrowth, where leaves, fungi, and roots have coexisted undisturbed for thousands of years. This is compost that remembers the forest and carries its microbiome.
We mix this compost with clean, non-chlorinated water in a large open tank and add just a touch of raw cane sugar or molasses. Not to feed the trees, but to feed the microbes that will multiply in billions of individuals. Then we aerate the mixture for 24 to 36 hours, day and night, bubbling air through the solution to keep the organisms alive and thriving.
During this time, something remarkable happens. The tea becomes a living soup, an explosion of microbial life:
– Bacteria that fix nitrogen, degrade organic matter, and solubilize phosphorus
– Fungi that help build soil structure, protect roots, and form symbiotic bonds
– Protozoa that graze on bacteria, creating a cycling of nutrients
– Actinomycetes that help break down complex organics and suppress disease
By the time the brew is ready, it’s no longer just water with compost, it’s a highly active ecosystem in liquid form, carrying billions of beneficial organisms per liter.
We apply it through our fertigation system; a network of pipes that runs along each row of our olive trees, letting it flow down into the root zones. But we also spray it on the leaves, where microbial metabolites can stimulate plant defenses and form a living film that competes with pathogens.
This isn’t folk wisdom. It’s science: microbiology, soil ecology, plant physiology. In fact, modern research increasingly shows that the plant-microbe relationship is foundational to nutrient uptake, resilience to stress, and overall crop quality.
From Root to Oil: What It Means for the Olive
We don’t only do this just for the soil. it changes the fruit, and a lot more…
Healthier soils mean trees that don’t struggle. Trees that are in balance, not overfed and lazy, not hungry and stressed. And when a tree is in balance, it produces olives with a better biochemical profile, more stable, more aromatic, and potentially higher in polyphenols, the compounds responsible for bitterness, complexity, and much of olive oil’s famed antioxidant power.
While polyphenol content is influenced by many factors (cultivar, climate, harvest timing), it’s increasingly clear that soil microbiota plays a role in the way olives metabolize nutrients and stress. A living soil doesn’t just grow food, it programs it.
A Way Forward, Not Backward
Some still roll their eyes at practices like compost tea. They call it “witchcraft.”
But that’s the agrochemical industry talking, the same one that built its empire on products derived from wartime chemistry, and still promotes a model where farmers depend on inputs year after year, while soils degrade silently beneath their feet.
In truth, what we’re doing isn’t new. It’s older than agriculture.
And it’s backed today by soil scientists, microbial ecologists, regenerative agronomists, and an entire movement of farmers who are returning to the understanding that the health of the plant begins with the health of the soil.
Creating a community
This kind of farming isn’t just about growing food. It’s about restoring balance to the land, to the ecosystems that sustain life, and to a food culture that has forgotten where nourishment truly begins.
When we work with living soil, we step into a community that starts beneath our feet; billions of bacteria, fungi, and roots exchanging signals, nutrients, and protection in a constant, invisible dialogue. It’s this underground community that makes real food possible. And it doesn’t end there.
From soil to tree, from fruit to oil, from hand to table the community extends outward. To farmers, to cooks, to families. To anyone who chooses to care.
Because every time someone chooses food grown this way, they’re not just feeding themselves. They’re nurturing a living system, supporting a way of farming that gives back more than it takes, and strengthening the ties between land, food, and people.
We believe that farming should be measured not just by what it produces, but by what it regenerates, soil, health, relationships.
Every purchase is a signal. Every meal is a choice.
And with each choice, consumers can either reinforce the extractive systems that degrade our world, our communities, or help build a regenerative one that heals them.
A living planet begins with a living soil and ends in a living community. One whole, interconnected system. And we are all a part of it.
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