What the Soil Taught Me

Observations · RootedNomad · October 6, 2026

I went to Uganda to help fix the soil. The soil, it turned out, wasn't the problem. Eleven months on a two-acre farm in Kamuli District, and what the farmers and the test plots said.

I went to Uganda to help fix the soil. The soil, it turned out, wasn't the problem.

What I came to study

In graduate school I studied beans. More precisely, I studied the bacteria that live on their roots.

Beans, like other legumes, partner with soil bacteria called rhizobia. The bacteria take nitrogen from the air and turn it into a form the plant can use. In return, the plant feeds them. It's called biological nitrogen fixation, and it's one of the quiet engines of farming. A field of beans can fertilize itself.

The research I was part of aimed to help smallholder farmers in East Africa grow more food. The idea was simple: introduce better bacteria, fix more nitrogen, restore tired soils. The phrase I heard most often was that African soils were worn out. Depleted from over-farming. Everyone seemed to know it.

Before anyone recommended an "improved" product to farmers, I wanted to know what was already happening in their fields. So, I went to see for myself.

Naluwoli

I landed in Uganda on the night of June 30, 2013. Driving through Entebbe, the air was thick with smoke from roadside fires, people burning the week's trash in the cool of the evening. A few days later we drove east, past Mabira Forest, to Kamuli District.

The farm was in Naluwoli Parish. Two acres: a dry upper field, and a lower field in the swamp. Not every farm there has both. The ones that do are the lucky ones. It had been farmed for generations, and parts of it had rested in fallow for years before we took it on.

I farmed it with Cornelius, my friend and research partner, who hosted me and worked beside me the whole time. We farmed it the way our neighbors farmed theirs. Hand hoes and oxen. Planting by hand. Local beans, maize and other crops grown together. No fertilizer, no inputs. I stayed eleven months and farmed two seasons.

The swamp

I was trained as an environmental scientist. I grew up in a country where wetlands are protected by law, and I could list the ecosystem services a swamp provides from memory. Planting one felt wrong.

Then our first season came, and the rains lasted about two weeks. After that they came rarely and without pattern. The village fields, usually green and lush by then, turned brown. The maize withered just as it flowered.

Only the crops in the swamps survived.

That's why a swamp field is so valuable. When the rains are heavy, the swamp floods and the upper field carries the harvest. When the rains fail, the swamp carries it. When the season is kind, both yield, and there's something to sell. It isn't carelessness. It's a strategy for living with weather nobody controls.

I planted our swamp field, like our neighbors planted theirs. Someone could argue I made the wrong choice. It was the choice I made, and I learned to see a swamp differently.

The weeds

Near the end of that first season, weeds had covered most of the ground. I wanted them gone. Everything I'd learned about gardening said they were stealing water from the crops.

Cornelius disagreed. Leave them, he said. They're shading the soil. Pull them, and the sun will dry the ground out faster, and the crops will have less water, not more.

He'd grown up farming in that region, and learned it from his parents before him. I still don't know whose instinct was more correct. I deferred to his, and we left the weeds.

What the farmers said

In 2014 I sat down with fifty farmers in the district and asked about their seeds, their practices and their soil.

Most of them told me their soil was good. When I asked how they knew, they said the crops were healthy, the yields were good. One woman said she knew because it was dark. Nearly everyone named the same bad spots: the rocky ground up top, the sandy patches in the swamp.

Almost none of them used fertilizer. They had other ways of keeping their soil. They dug deep to mix it. They cut trenches to stop erosion. They rotated fields, left some fallow, and didn't burn.

When I asked what would help them grow more, they rarely said better soil. They said seed, and money to buy it. An ox plow, or money to hire one. Money for labor at planting and weeding. Pesticides, for the termites and the pests. Rain that came on time.

And markets. One farmer told me he paid 8,000 shillings for a kilo of bean seed in town and sold his beans to middlemen for 500. A woman, asked about soil fertility, said she didn't think about it much. She just wanted to eat.

Several told me that if something went wrong, they had no one to ask. The government seminars had stopped coming.

What the soil said

Our test plots told the same story the farmers did.

The local bean varieties and the bacteria already living in that soil worked well together. They fixed nitrogen just fine. And in most of the field conditions we measured, nitrogen wasn't the limiting factor in the first place. There was already enough.

The intervention I'd been trained to help deliver was, there, unnecessary.

The problems were real. They just weren't in the soil. They were in the rain, the price of seed, the cost of labor, the reach of a market, and the distance between a farmer and anyone who could help.

Where the story came from

So where did the idea of worn-out African soil come from?

What I came to believe is that much of it came from somewhere else. From large, industrial fields, farmed hard for cash and export crops, where the soil really had been run down. That damage was real. But it got stretched into a story about a whole continent, including small family farms that had been cared for by the same families for generations.

And that story pointed to a fix that came in a bag.

What I left behind

Near the end of my stay, the district production officer asked us to run soil testing seminars for farmers. Some organizations were handing out fertilizer without testing the soil first, and the district wanted farmers able to decide for themselves.

We held six. We talked about nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and soil pH, and how to read a test before buying anything. One young man from the village learned to run the tests himself, and was offering testing to his neighbors for a small fee when I left.

That might be the most useful thing I did there. Not the bacteria. The test, and the person who knows how to use it.

What it taught me

The soil taught me to ask before I act, and then to measure before I believe, even when everyone agrees.

A farm is not just dirt and seeds. It's a long conversation between people and a place. The swamp and the upper field, the weeds left standing, the trenches, the fallow: that's culture and ecology grown together over generations. When outsiders arrive assuming it's broken, they can end up fixing the wrong thing.

I didn't stop believing in research. I started believing it has to begin in the field, with the people who work it, and then go and measure.

Cornelius told me once, "A Musoga sees with his hands. If I say 'let me see,' I want to hold it. Touch it."

That was the impulse that took me to the soil in the first place. I didn't want to read about it. I wanted to hold it.

The soil wasn't the problem. The story about it was.

Wander Deeply. Live Rooted.

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