🪱 Why Do Farm Kids Have Stronger Immune Systems?

That's Sam, about a decade ago. Our kids would come in looking like this pretty much daily. I'll admit, it annoyed me. The mud. The laundry. Andrea scrubbing boots on the porch.

Turns out it might have been the best thing for them.

A teaspoon of healthy soil holds more living organisms than there are humans on Earth. Roughly eight billion. Most of them microbial. In fact, 59% of all life on Earth lives in soil - more than the rainforest, more than the ocean.

And we've been eating medicine out of that same dirt for a century. More than half of the antibiotics prescribed in this country come from soil bacteria.

A New England Journal paper found that kids raised around livestock have roughly half the rates of asthma and allergies as kids raised without daily animal contact.

Then in 2020, researchers in Finland took a daycare playground that was covered in concrete. Ripped it up. Put down real forest soil and vegetation. Let the kids play on it for 28 days. Drew blood. The kids on living soil had measurably more regulatory T-cells. The immune cells that go missing in asthma, allergies, and autoimmune disease.

One month of getting dirty. That's all it took.

I've spent twenty years trying to take care of those microbes. What I didn't understand until recently is that they were also taking care of my kids.

Over the past hundred years, we decided microbes were the enemy and waged war on all of them - including the ones in our soil and in our food.

Chlorine washes. Ultra-pasteurization. Glyphosate sterilizing millions of acres of soil. Industrial meat raised on a constant drip of antibiotics. Our kids are paying the bill. Asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease, gut disorders. All of it climbing while we keep scrubbing.

We've gotten "cleaner." But we've also gotten a lot sicker.

Germ theory was one of the greatest discoveries in human history. I'm not arguing against handwashing or the appropriate use of antibiotics. I'm arguing the pendulum swung too far and kept swinging. We stopped asking which microbes were the enemy and started treating all of them like one.

Earth Day's this Wednesday. Everybody'll be talking about the planet you can see. I keep thinking about the eight billion organisms in a teaspoon of soil. The ones that feed the grass that feeds the animals that feed us. Our whole food chain runs through them. And we've spent a hundred years trying to sterilize it.

I don't expect everyone to go start a farm, though we do need more farmers. But there are other ways to put those microbes back in your life. So celebrate this Earth Day by:

• Sending your kids or grandkids outside and encouraging them to get muddy.

• Putting your hands in some garden dirt this weekend.

• Cutting back on ultra-processed foods and leaning into the fermented: real yogurt, sauerkraut, sourdough, kimchi. The food that's still living when it hits your table.

• Buying from farmers who prioritize soil health.

I'd love to hear what you're doing to boost your family's microbiome. Comment and I'll share what's working for others in a future posts.

Your (microbe) farmer,
Cody