Matthew Evans is a chef and food critic turned farmer-food activist. He lives on a mixed farm that occupies a one-time apple orchard in the Huon Valley outside Hobart. He is nationally best known for his long-running SBS series Gourmet Farmer (six seasons), set on Fat Pig Farm's 70 acres, but also was the star of food documentaries What's the Catch? and For the Love of Meat. He has authored or co-authored 14 books on food, and is regularly interviewed on radio about all things to do with farming, growing, soil and eating. He has capitalised on his broad appeal hosting weekly farmhouse feasts and on-site cooking classes, which are often booked out months ahead. He is beloved of television audiences but also widely respected in the food world as someone who lives his truth - giving up the apparently coveted life of a Sydney food critic to create something real and meaningful with Sadie on their small parcel of land in southern Tasmania.

Contents
Preface xiii
Introduction From the Ground Up
Chapter 1 What You Eat is Made out of Thin Air
(and a Tiny Bit of Dirt)
Chapter 2 Soil, the Earth’s Miracle Skin
Chapter 3 The Earth’s Kidneys: When Good Soil Turns Bad
Chapter 4 Plants Don’t Eat Dirt: The Underground Economy
Chapter 5 Here, There and Everywhere: The ‘Old Friends’
Hypothesis
Chapter 6 Look After the Soil, and the Plants Look After Us
Chapter 7 Nutritional Dark Matter
Chapter 8 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Chapter 9 Big Ones, Small Ones, Skinny Ones,
Fat Ones: Worms
Chapter 10 Bombs, Germs and Plants: 100 Years of Fast Fixes
Creating Big Problems
Chapter 11 How the Green Revolution is Turning the
World Brown
Chapter 12 You’ll Never Plough a Field by Turning it Over in Your Mind
Chapter 13 Burying Charcoal and Building Soil
Chapter 14 Weeds: What We Can See Tells Us About What We Can’t
Chapter 15 Home Gardeners Rock
Chapter 16 Compost, Compost and Compost
Chapter 17 If it Quacks, is it a Duck?
Chapter 18 We Are All, Temporarily, Not Soil
Chapter 19 Keep Them Dawgies Movin’
Chapter 20 A Grain of Truth: Regenerative Agriculture
Chapter 21 What’s the Beef with Methane?
Chapter 22 Money in the Bank
Chapter 23 They Germinated a Seed on the Moon
Chapter 24 Loaves and Fishes: Feeding a Hungry World
Soil FAQs
References & Recommended Reading
Acknowledgements
Index