We met with Research Microbiologist Dr. Mike Lehman (ARS) on the research station in Brookings, South Dakota to talk soil microbes. Dr. Lehman isn’t just a well-respected scientist, it turns out that he’s also a great communicator. In this and the next two videos, Dr. Lehman takes a shovel full of soil and talks about it, the number of microbes you are likely to find (15 trillion) as well as their diversity, their roles and how they all work together as a community! What is really interesting is how Dr. Lehman uses human society, specifically the labor force and its diversity, as a metaphor for soil microbial life and how microbes can work for us. We feel that this short series of three videos is the ideal segue into the rest of Merit or Myth’s second season where we try to step back and look at the big picture, as farmers and scientists grapple with the idea of integrating soil health principles into their systems.