Rural Heritage April/May 2026

Water Crisis and Opportunity We have a water crisis in agriculture … . We have soils that do not hold water very well. They’ve lost their aggregate structure, crumb structure, and so water doesn’t infiltrate into the soils very well anymore. Soils have also lost much of their water holding capacity due to loss of organic matter and aggregate structure, etc. – John Kempf 7 John Kempf of Advancing EcoAgriculture has said about Dr. Pollack’s work: “Gerry’s research in how water functions in plants and in cells has tremendous implications for how we understand plant nutrition, nutrient absorption and nutrient flow within plants and very importantly how we understand the absorption of nutrients and compounds by plant root systems and by plant leaves.”

John continues, “One of the key pieces for me was thinking about how biology in the soil can actually increase the soil’s water holding capacity directly by developing an environment that can hold more of this exclusion zone water around biological substances and biological substrates even before we begin building large amounts of organic matter. This is actually something we have observed in the field where we may apply a biological inoculant, and we get an almost immediate response in the water holding capacity and drought resilience even though there hasn’t yet been time to build large amounts of soil organic matter.” If structured water is in every cell, then it certainly follows that increasing biology in the soil would increase the amount of structured water there, especially if those microorganisms can also create environments to hold it.

Vibrantly healthy sheep and wool, clean due to stewardship, not washing. These sheep have access to three sources of water, not just the one that comes from the sky. Photo Courtesy Ian and Diane Haggerty

April/May 2026

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