I worked with hydroponics for a couple of years. Soilless gardening — mineral salts dissolved in water, no dirt, no microbes, just chemistry. The growth was fast and the yields were real. I was trying to feed a family that lived with us. The father had Long Covid and was bedridden much of the time. His wife and six young girls needed help keeping themselves fed.
Hydroponics seemed like the answer. Then the father got better. He believed his diet had done it, so he extended it to the rest of the family. A carnivore household has no use for hydroponic vegetables, and that was the end of it.
The Lord has saved my life through ALS. I do not mean He healed me — I mean He saved me in the way that matters. The changes have all pointed to glorifying the God who did it. At first I had trouble walking. His mercies are new every morning, and by October 2024 I could walk without support. By the fall of 2025 I was able to build the ladies a chicken house. Then in 2026 the Lord showed me the wonders of His creation, and I came to look at the soil as an extension of His will.
When I looked into it, things were not as they said they were.
Whose they? The works of man. In many cases they run contrary to the will of God.
The soil was cursed in Genesis 3:17 — “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” But a curse for our sake is not abandonment. The ground still works. The ground has been working since the Fall, doing what it was made to do, even under the curse.
We have lost our way. What was given to us to husband and manage, we have replaced with a shortcut. The trouble with hydroponics is that it uses mineral salts to grow food. It grows food. But consider this: would you rather be blessed by the Creator of all in the consumption of food, or go with the knowledge of man — which, when you look at things as a whole, is where the problem started in the first place.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband, and he did eat. — Genesis 3:6
The rhizophagy cycle — a digestive system shared between plant and soil.
A root tip secretes sugars into the dirt. Bacteria come. The root takes them in through its softest cells, strips their walls off with a burst of reactive oxygen, and pulls nutrients from what remains — magnesium, calcium, iron, the metals that stick to bacterial cell walls. The bacteria, now wall-less, replicate rapidly inside the plant’s own cells. Then the root secretes them back out through root hairs, with enough food to rebuild. The bacteria return to the soil, recover, and the cycle starts again.
Hours, not seasons. Every growing tip. Every plant.
This is called the rhizophagy cycle. It was discovered in our lifetime. It has been there since the beginning.
The plant does not feed itself. The plant and the soil feed each other. The root tip attracts bacteria with sugars it made from sunlight, the bacteria deliver minerals the root cannot reach, the plant extracts what it needs, and returns the living bacteria to the soil to do it again. It is a digestive system shared between a plant and the ground it grows in.
Root hairs do not form without these microbes. The plant does not develop properly without them. No antioxidants, no phenolics, no amino acids in the fruit — or at least not enough. The microbes enter the plant’s cell nuclei during division and cause the plant to demethylate its own DNA, turning genes on. The plant’s genome is more expressed, more diverse, more alive when the system runs as designed.
A seed is not sterile. It carries its microbial inheritance.
Seeds carry these microbes inside their cells, packed around the embryo. They are inherited. A seed is not a sterile object dropped into sterile dirt. It is a living package carrying its microbial inheritance into the next generation.
This is not a theory. It is observable, repeatable, and has now been documented in every plant examined for it.
Here is what man built instead.
We learned to pull nitrogen from the air with the Haber-Bosch process — a genuine feat of chemistry. We mined phosphorus and potassium. We spread them on fields. The plants grew. We called it progress, and it was, in the sense that more people were fed.
But thirty to forty percent of that fertilizer makes it into the plant. The rest runs off or sits in the soil doing damage. The soil’s microbial community collapses. The plant, now fed from outside rather than from within, stops producing the compounds that protect it. Disease moves in. We answer with fungicides. The fungicides kill more microbes. The soil degrades further. We add more fertilizer. The cycle accelerates.
We sterilize seeds. We grind and treat them so they store and ship cleanly, and in doing so we destroy the microbial inheritance packed around the embryo. Some conventional cultivars have lost the genes for microbial association entirely. Not the genes for the trait — the genes for the relationship. The plant can no longer do what it was built to do, because we bred the capacity out of it.
We did not improve on the design. We did not understand the design. We didn’t even know it was there. We saw a plant growing in dirt and assumed the dirt was inert and the plant was doing the work. We were wrong. The soil is alive. The plant is not growing alone.
Consider the work of God.
The designed system and the replacement. One is alive. The other produces bulk.
He made a system where a seed carries its own microbial inheritance. Where a root tip and a bacterium feed each other in a cycle that runs in hours and repairs itself. Where the plant’s genome is more alive, not less, when the system runs as built. Where the soil is not dead matter but a living participant in the plant’s life.
And man looked at it and said, “I can do better.”
He made a dead system. One-directional. Extractive. The plant is force-fed. The soil is a container. The seed is a sterile object. The microbes are pests. The relationship is replaced with a pipeline.
The dead system works — for a while, and only in the narrow sense of producing bulk. It does not produce the same food. Biological produce has more phenolics, more antioxidants, more amino acids, more diversity of gene expression. The fruit of the designed system is richer than the fruit of the replacement. This has been measured.
This is not a conspiracy. It is not a scandal. It is a pattern as old as we are. We see the work of God, and we build something we can control, and the thing we build is worse. Then we keep doing it because the thing we built is ours.
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. — Proverbs 14:12
The rhizophagy cycle does not need us. It ran before we found it. It will run after we stop interfering with it. The mercy of God is that the system is resilient — it recovers when the chemicals stop. Dr. Walter Goldstein has rehabilitated conventional corn cultivars by putting the microbes back in. It takes three or four years. The plants recover their associations. The relationship can be restored.
That is the character of the God who built it. The system He designed does not just sustain itself — it restores itself when given the chance. The created order is not fragile. It is patient. It waits for us to stop long enough to let it work.
The next time you see a plant growing in a field, consider what is happening underground. The root tip is not pushing through dirt. It is running a digestive system it shares with the soil. It is feeding and being fed. It is doing what it was built to do.
We did not make it. We barely understand it. We replaced it with something worse.
The ground still works. The mercy of God still runs through it.
