Dirt - Earth Day Theme

Andi 0:01

we can't make dirt.

Tanner 0:03

But we can ruin it so fast. Easily. Yeah.

Sups 0:07

okay. Ooh,

Tanner 0:08

Hmm. I'm not though. Yeah. Hmm. That's awfully wide ranging. Almost all.

Sups 0:14

All, yeah.

Andi 0:16

We are gonna talk about Worms. ever wondered why when it rains you see a bunch of worms up? Yeah.

Tanner 0:23

they come out of the soil onto the pavement.

Andi 0:25

Yeah. You know what they're doing? Hello, and welcome to this episode of the I Should Have Known podcast, the trivia podcast that can't be trusted. Each week our Quizmaster presents you with four big facts on a topic, but one of those facts is a lie, and we're finishing up Earth Month with this final episode. I'm your host today, Andy, and I'm going to be presenting you with four facts about dirt.

Sups 0:49

Okay,

Andi 0:51

So yeah, I will be giving you four facts about dirt, lowercase, e Earth but one of my facts is a lie. So join our other hosts, soups and Tanner in figuring out which one it is.

Sups 1:02

I don't think I know anything about dirt other than that. It gets you dirty. Let's do dirty.

Andi 1:08

Oh yeah. We're gonna talk about dirt. So The low-hanging fruit is. What is another word for dirt derived from Latin?

Tanner 1:19

Soil.

Andi 1:20

Soil. Yeah. It's soil. Yeah. So soil is probably from. soul or solium, which means like seat or the ground. In Latin. So dirt though. is of Germanic origin. Mm-hmm. It's one of these examples of metathesis. So metathesis is this concept where you flip the sounds. Mm-hmm. So that's how we got like, Butterfly and bird and dirt. So it used to be Dr

Sups 1:46

sounds better.

Andi 1:47

And Dr is a word of Germanic origin. for poop.

Sups 1:51

Mm oh, okay.

Andi 1:53

Yeah, it meant Feces.

Tanner 1:54

Yeah.

Andi 1:55

so. If you don't know English is a bastard language where it's of Germanic origin, but we have a ton of words of Latin origin. So dirt is Germanic and soil is Latin. So in science, it's almost always called soil. Mm-hmm. Soil is the scientific word for what you're thinking of, the stuff on the ground. That we grow plants in. Mm-hmm. Right. so a lot of people will try to attribute different meanings and say that dirt is the inorganic and Dead part of soil, Right. Or dirt is the stuff that gets on your clothes, that makes you dirty, but not the stuff on the ground. So lots of people make up meanings for dirt Yeah. That to differentiate it from soil. Yeah. Simply the difference is dirt is Germanic and so it tends to have a more negative connotation or a less prestigious connotation. Soil is of Latin origin, so it tends to be more prestigious, more scientific. So we're going to use the term soil and dirt interchangeably today. Okay. It's dirt. Mm-hmm. So there's my mini rant

Sups 2:55

All right. All right. I'm with you

Andi 2:57

So fact number one. 80% of terrestrial carbon is in soil,

Tanner 3:03

So the carbon that's on earth. 80% of it is in soil, not in

Andi 3:08

people. So it's not terrestrial as in the planet earth. Yeah. But as in like the continents, The

Tanner 3:14

that is right.

Sups 3:15

yeah.

Andi 3:15

So not the ocean. Yeah.

Sups 3:17

Yeah.

Andi 3:17

yeah, carbon, if you don't know, is like the basic element for life. on earth. So every living thing, you, me, every worm, every bug, every person, every tree has carbon in it. a lot of carbon actually, but there's far more carbon in the soil itself than all the living things on earth.

Tanner 3:36

Wow. Yeah. You're saying four fifths is in the dirt,

Andi 3:39

I should say, Not on earth, the planet earth, the ground, the ocean has far more carbon. Right. on land. it's about 2,500 gigatons of carbon, which is a nonsense number, I think, but it's a but load. Yeah. In comparison the atmosphere has about 800 gigatons and living things have about 560 gigatons of carbon. Mm-hmm. So the soil has far more.

Tanner 4:03

Okay. So it's basically comparing carbon in the dirt to carbon in the living creatures.

Andi 4:09

Yeah. And in the air. So soil stores a lot of carbon, actually a lot of carbon emissions especially since 1850, have come simply from tilling soil and from changing land purpose. So turning a meadow into a field releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Tanner 4:26

Wow.

Andi 4:27

Yeah. Really? about one third of the greenhouse gases released since 1850 were from land use change.

Tanner 4:34

that's a lot.

Sups 4:35

yeah. You're impacting the natural balance, right. Of all the things you're changing in a way. The structure, right. but I think this fact checks out because think of all the plants that need carbon Right to. Grow.

Tanner 4:48

Where do they get

Sups 4:49

that Yes. And if all the roots are connected to the soil and they're all deep underground.

Tanner 4:55

Right.

Sups 4:55

that makes sense.

Tanner 4:56

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because we would get it from eating things, but Right. Water plant's supposed to get it from yeah.

Andi 5:01

I mean, it's cyclical, right? Mm-hmm. So like the carbon in the soil was probably originally in living bodies, Right. Right. That decomposed. And then the plants use the soil and so they get carbon from the soil. We eat the plants, or animals, eat the plants, and we eat those animals that the carbon is being reused over

Sups 5:18

and

Tanner 5:18

over. And the carbon cycle.

Andi 5:19

The carbon cycle, it's actually a thing.

Tanner 5:22

80 percent's a big number though.

Sups 5:24

but if not, I think then the question is what is a soil composed

Tanner 5:29

Yes.

Sups 5:30

And and

Tanner 5:30

is that carbon? I don't know, I think this checks out.

Sups 5:34

I'm on board with this This is not a dirty fact, you mean. Okay. Okay. I'm with you. I'm with you. Yeah.

Andi 5:39

All right. Do you wanna hear some bad news now? Oh, no. Okay. So speaking about the release of Carbon through agriculture fact number two, about one third of the world's soil is moderately to highly degraded.

Tanner 5:54

What does that mean? What does degraded mean?

Sups 5:57

It's not worth it

Andi 5:58

anymore. so this comes from the un the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization study this and release this number. Okay. Basically degraded soil means unhealthy soil. So soil is considered an ecosystem on its own. Mm-hmm. It is not just a part of an ecosystem, it is its own ecosystem. There are lots of things living in soil and these like cycles we talked about of how. Plants and carbon is transferred. So there's a lot of nutrients in the soil itself.

Tanner 6:28

Yeah. We tend to think of it just as a dead thing that gets in the way. Right, right. Oh, I got dirt on my shoes or

Sups 6:34

Now you have to think, oh, I've got a whole ecosystem

Tanner 6:37

all my shoes. Many thinks, did I just step on? Don't know

Andi 6:41

But actually, and so degradation. Can refer to erosion. So it's just simply washed away salinization, so it gets salty pollution, so just straight up has pollutants in it and it's no longer. As healthy or sustainable. So there are lots of, ways that it can degrade and nutrient depletion is another one. Mm-hmm. And the same organization found that depending on the nutrient the of that nutrient in the soil is between six and 38% lower in 1999 than it was in 1950, meaning, If you're eating plants grown in this soil, you'd have to eat more of that vegetable in order to get the same amount of that nutrient in 1950.

Sups 7:25

Yeah. I would agree. think about all the development, that has happened around the world and the way people have built things, not really caring about nature. Yeah. Right. Even if you taste vegetables today, right? I mean they're all the ones which are grown with all the pesticides and everything. It doesn't taste

Tanner 7:44

Yeah. I totally agree. I think that erosion and natural disasters and just like nature has. taken toll on this dirt on the soil,

Andi 7:53

And this is especially bad because soil is mostly rock, actually. Okay. And for a rock to break down, Enough to become like movable by living Thingss in order to add all those nutrients and stuff in them. It takes about 500 years for one inch or three centimeters of soil to form. Wow. So if you're digging, meters into the ground, you're digging into like thousands, if not millions of years of time to make that. And we can't make dirt.

Tanner 8:24

But we can ruin it so fast. Easily. Yeah. You can wash it away. You could dig it up and just move it somewhere else, and then it's just like it dies. You know? It's disconnected from its system.

Andi 8:33

and that's a good point. Soil can actually die, If the living things inside the soil die, plants can't

Sups 8:38

use it

Andi 8:39

Mm-hmm. And actually one of the biggest culprits of that is monoculture farming, when you see a field that has nothing in it, it's just a brown dirt field. Mm-hmm. That is terrible for the soil because the sun is just murdering all the microbes in there. They have no protection. Yeah. So crop rotation and crop cover is one of the best ways to protect the soil. One of the good things though, As easy as it is to destroy the soil. you can bring it back through different methods, fertilization, natural fertilizers, like poop. And using crop rotation and cover. And depending on the kind of soil and where you are, they estimate between two and 10 years. To bring back the health. So it's possible. Yeah.

Sups 9:22

And I think now the farmers are encouraged, grow other crops, right. To to keep it, from getting destroyed.

Tanner 9:28

Yeah.

Andi 9:29

Well, if you're an individual who would like to do something. Now one small thing that you can do that can help is buying organic fruits and vegetables. Because even though The nutrient load in those fruits and vegetables for you as a person is probably not much better than the non, organically grown form. But organic farming is so, so much better for the soil. Mm-hmm.

Tanner 9:51

So this fact about dirt?

Andi 9:53

Yeah. One third of all world's dirt.

Tanner 9:56

I don't know if I believe a third of it is unhealthy.

Andi 9:59

it's degraded.

Tanner 10:00

degraded. The earth is pretty big. So I'm skeptical of this cuz I think that the farmed world Yes. Is less than a third. So I think maybe this is overestimating.

Sups 10:11

So

Andi 10:12

fact number three. Nearly all antibiotics used today were originally derived from microbes found in soil.

Tanner 10:21

huh? So using dirty things to get us healthy. Yeah.

Andi 10:24

I kind of thought that was fun. That's

Tanner 10:25

weird.

Andi 10:26

We,

Sups 10:26

yeah. Two negatives make a positive. So I wanna go

Tanner 10:30

that I know that a lot of things were discovered accidentally, right?

Sups 10:33

But modern day allopathy aren't these chemicals just derive in a lab,

Tanner 10:38

Yes. But where did they

Andi 10:40

that? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, nowadays most of the cultures, you know, they've been taken out of the soil and grown in so many different labs and Some of them are bioengineers, some of them, it's just simply if you watch. Microbes grow. They go through so many generations in so little human time that if they start to have a useful mutation, well now you just created a new drug. Mm-hmm. You can use from that microbe. But originally, the microbe came from the soil So penicillin is the classic example. The mold that is used for that is naturally found in the dirt. Mm-hmm. It has always been in the dirt,

Tanner 11:16

Right. So it's almost all antibiotics. We're originally found founded dirt.

Andi 11:20

They're originally derived from microbes that can be found in dirt.

Tanner 11:23

So then my question is, where else would they be? In the water

Sups 11:26

Oh, just straight up created it in the lab? Yeah. Yeah.

Andi 11:29

Yes. You just answered your own. Yes.

Tanner 11:32

just making

Sups 11:33

I'm

Andi 11:33

not or from, from plants. From animals within our own

Tanner 11:38

Already. within

Andi 11:38

exactly.

Sups 11:39

Yeah. okay. Ooh,

Tanner 11:41

Hmm. I'm not though. Yeah. Hmm. That's awfully wide ranging. Almost all.

Sups 11:47

All, yeah.

Andi 11:48

So one of the most famous ones is Streptomycin. Which is used to kill tb. Tuberculosis. Mm-hmm. Was originally from a sample of dirt from New Jersey in the US in the 1940s. They just took the dirt and they, they looked at what was in the dirt and They found microbes that were killing all their microbes and then they isolate the mechanism, and then that's the drug.

Tanner 12:08

I love that. That's such cool. R and d. Yeah, like what's your research? I just scooped up some dirt. We're gonna see what's in there and I'm gonna inject it.

Andi 12:15

Yeah. So in a teaspoon of soil, Which is about four grams. There are between 1 million to 1 billion bacteria, and then in that same sample there's about 75,000 species of living things, including bacteria, fungus, protozoa, and nematodes.

Tanner 12:35

Wow.

Sups 12:35

Who is sitting and calculating those? One, two

Tanner 12:38

4.

Andi 12:39

Yeah.

Sups 12:40

bacteria. 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay. There's another

Tanner 12:43

Yeah.

Sups 12:43

Because the range is huge. Million to a billion you said? Yeah. Yes. Billion and a billion. Yeah. Okay. That's sure. Yeah.

Andi 12:50

that.

Tanner 12:51

Did you count

Sups 12:51

to a billion? Yeah.

Andi 12:53

Wow. Yeah. So there's a lot of living things in the soil. Right. And the idea here is like, well, microbes and living things have been fighting each other in this soil for millennia, since Soil first formed and life first formed. So, a lot of things that are bad for humans are also in the soil. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, the bacteria that causes tetanus is in the soil. Mm-hmm. it kinda makes a lot of sense that the things that are best at fighting the baddies mm-hmm. The, the kinds of microbes that hurt us mm-hmm. Would be. In their natural environment.

Sups 13:22

right? Mm-hmm. Something check. Yeah. Right.

Tanner 13:24

it's just so mind blowing that that's so many. And that's something that we never think of. No soil science. It's

Andi 13:32

it's just dirt and it's kind of underappreciated, I guess. All right, and one final group of living things in the soil that I think personally are the heroes of soil. We are gonna talk about Worms. So fact number four, a single worm casts. 2.1 times its body weight into the soil per year, and cast That's the sciencey name for poop.

Sups 13:57

poop. Nice. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's called

Andi 14:00

castings. Is worm poop.

Tanner 14:02

Worm poop.

Sups 14:03

So they poop 2.1 times their body weight.

Andi 14:06

per year.

Sups 14:07

How much does the worm be? 10 grams.

Andi 14:09

About three grams actually.

Sups 14:10

grams,

Tanner 14:11

okay. An average worm. Okay.

Andi 14:13

So in an acre, which is about, 4,000 square meters. over a year, that's about 6,300 kilograms of warm poop

Sups 14:21

one poop

Andi 14:22

year.

Sups 14:22

That's a lot of

Andi 14:23

Yeah. of all the worms,

Tanner 14:25

Yeah. Yeah. Oh Yeah. yeah.

Sups 14:27

sure.

Tanner 14:27

That's so much worm poop, but I guess that's what's keeping that soil from getting degraded.

Andi 14:32

Yeah, so some people argue that worms create soil, that there was no soil before worms. So they just literally take it into their mouths. as they move through the soil, and then it passes through their bodies. And so many worms they cast together at the same time. So Have you ever wondered why when it rains you see a bunch of worms up? Yeah.

Tanner 14:53

they come out of the soil onto the pavement.

Andi 14:55

Yeah. You know what they're doing? They're pooping.

Tanner 14:59

pooping.

Andi 15:00

why?

Sups 15:01

why? Yeah. why?

Andi 15:04

Yeah, they're coming

Sups 15:05

up poop. Yeah.

Andi 15:06

So they don't poop like regularly. They poop depending on the weather, so they poop when it rains. so they poop more in the spring and fall when it rains more than in the summer. And so, They're just holding onto all of that in their bodies normally. Yeah. And so it moves through their bodies. They take out what in it they can use, and then they kind of poop out a different version of it because the microbes and the stuff inside of their bodies are different than the ones. Outside, and so it's kind of cycling right through all of these. They take out some nutrients. They put in some nutrients, and they churn the soil basically and cycle it through themselves and that Right. Creates a more diverse entity. Okay.

Sups 15:47

So until we can say warms are actually scientists. Yeah.

Tanner 15:51

And little farmers. Little tiny farmers.

Sups 15:54

Poor farmers. I love it. I love it. little rules.

Andi 15:58

Yeah.

Tanner 16:00

hat. Yeah. Yeah. yes.

Andi 16:02

I love that. So yeah, those are my facts about dirt.

Tanner 16:05

Wow,

Sups 16:06

Was really cool. I learned a lot.

Tanner 16:09

feel buried in facts.

Sups 16:11

Oh, wow.

Tanner 16:12

So before we. Dig deeper into these four dirty facts. Could you repeat them for us and we can take a guess as to which one is a lie?

Andi 16:21

Yeah. Fact number one, 80% of terrestrial carbon is in soil. Fact number two, one third of the world's soil is moderately to highly degraded. Fact number three, nearly all antibiotics used today were originally derived from microbes found in soil. And fact number four, a single worm casts 2.1 times its body weight into the soil per year. One of those is a lie.

Tanner 17:01

I'm leaning towards thinking that the last one is false because I think it's more poop.

Sups 17:06

Okay. Point Or maybe it's not warm, it's something else.

Tanner 17:10

I said, we talked a lot about

Sups 17:11

Worm. We, we,

Tanner 17:13

else,

Sups 17:13

I know right?

Tanner 17:14

it's a

Andi 17:15

a

Sups 17:15

about works and Suddenly it's not actually warm. It's something else. Yeah. Yeah.

Tanner 17:19

yeah.

Sups 17:20

I actually think it's fact number two. Yeah. Yeah. The one-third. it doesn't sit right with me. I think one third is a lot. Mm-hmm. I mean, and I know, okay. There's a lot of environmental damage in the planet, but that's a big number. Yeah. Okay. We gotta pick one. Which one are you thinking? I

Tanner 17:39

think we're underestimating how much poop there is from

Sups 17:42

I think Okay. And then I think I'll go with number two.

Tanner 17:47

Okay. Okay.

Andi 17:48

Technically, if you go with number two, it's the same as Tanners. So Tanner is exactly right. Okay. I did lie about worm poops poop. Humans poop about 2.1 times their body weight per year. Worms poop about. 10 times their body weight per year. Yeah. Okay. Meaning they produce 36,287 kilograms or 40 tons of poop per year. Per acre. per

Sups 18:15

all, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andi 18:16

There's a lot

Sups 18:17

Cause there's like soil just out

Tanner 18:20

there. Yeah. And

Sups 18:21

have nothing else to do. And when

Tanner 18:23

they weighed mm-hmm. That's when it caught me. When you're like, It's like

Andi 18:26

gram, it's three grams. Three grams. yeah. So a three gram worm poop's about 36 grams per. Year.

Tanner 18:33

Yeah, see that number sounds about right to me cuz worms are so busy

Sups 18:36

Yeah. they don't need No, they don't

Tanner 18:38

need to go on

Andi 18:38

vacation. But

Tanner 18:39

they

Andi 18:39

also only poop like once a

Sups 18:41

week, Mm-hmm. Depending on their,

Tanner 18:42

That's really weird to me.

Andi 18:44

So if it doesn't rain,

Tanner 18:45

just

Sups 18:46

are

Tanner 18:46

in

Sups 18:46

the poop. Yeah. Aye, aye,

Andi 18:49

Yep. Basically. Yeah. So they poop way more than I said it was humans.

Tanner 18:56

so. Okay. That's really gross. That's also really sad then because, The degradation fact is true. A third of the soil on the planet is just crap.

Sups 19:07

Mm-hmm.

Andi 19:08

to highly degraded.

Sups 19:10

So that means we need more worms. We need them pooping all the time. yeah, yeah, I should have known

Tanner 19:15

I should have known

Andi 19:17

Thank you for listening to this episode of the I Should Have Known podcast. We've finished up our Earth Day theme for the month. Hope you enjoyed it. next month, we are going under the sea, and as always, thanks for listening.

Tanner 19:31

How much does a poop weigh?