 I talk about these as laborers, but they're really not just laborers, there's a real community. What they're doing in the community is they're breaking down materials in the soil, they're freeing up components like say nitrogen from decomposing in the residues. Another organism is taking that nitrogen and maybe oxidizing it and gaining its energy and another set of organisms actually is reducing that nitrogen back to ammonia and they're essentially breathing it just like we do oxygen and in doing so they're getting their energy. So there's all these interactions where this material is being swapped back and forth and you basically have an economy in the soil that is supported by this labor force, by this diverse labor force that are all employed doing different jobs so they can survive but they're also barter and trade so it's an active economy and it's not just among the soil microbes that involves the plants and of course their physical surroundings and to complete the metaphor here they're communicating. They are communicating chemically that the soil microorganisms and the plants are sending chemical signals back and forth to each other in the soil that stimulates certain activities. So this community is not just a simple community of laborers, it's a community of where labor is divided into certain skilled or unskilled or specialist or one percenters but there's an active barter system, there's communication and as long as we continue to supply good food and lots of it in terms of residues and root exudates and as long as we provide good habitat like soil structure, lower disturbance type environments, different root architectures, this labor force will thrive and all these different components of the workforce will thrive, interact, communicate, perform their job so they can survive and in doing so recycle all the nutrients that the next generation of plants will need. It was a holistic network that was building up and not holistic floppy hat bib overalls but holistic looking at the whole picture. I was a little afraid of that term at first but then I learned that it means looking at the whole picture.