Healing From the Ground Up
From At the Iowa Farm Table Podcast by From the Iowa Food System Coalition
February 9, 2026 · 9 min · Season 2 · Episode 3
About this episode
This episode explores the connection between healthy soils and healthy people, featuring insights from farmers and nutrition experts.
“Food as medicine.” The phrase is everywhere in the news and on social media. But food and farming impacts not only our bodies. In this episode of At the Iowa Farm Table , we look at the concept of healing our bodies, by choosing better foods and by healing our soils. “If we’re going to have healthy people, we have to have healthy soils that produce healthy plants. That gives us healthy people,” says Shaffer Ridgeway, farmer and Soil Conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the arm of the US Department of Agriculture that works directly with farmers to help them improve their soil health. Ridgeway will be part of a new Summit to be held in Iowa on March 2 + 3 in Cedar Falls, called Healing from the Ground Up . You can view the entire speaker lineup and register to attend at the webpage here . “The goal of this Summit is to create the social movement necessary to build the bridge between producers and consumers,” said Tommy Hexter, the IFSC Executive Director and one of event’s planners. “We will not only talk about the microbes in the soil, or the microbes in your stomach—we’ll also talk about how we get food from the farm to the table in Iowa, in a…
People in this episode
Guests: Shaffer Ridgeway, Tommy Hexter, Jenn Arndt
Topics covered
- food as medicine
- soil health
- healthy eating
- farming
- sustainable agriculture
Keywords
- food as medicine
- soil health
- healthy people
- farming
- Iowa Food System
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Iowa Food System Coalition
Places: Iowa, Cedar Falls
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- Can Restaurants Transform Iowa into a Farm-to-Table Mecca? · March 24, 2026 · 14 min
- Iowa Restaurants, Broadliners, and Meh Food · March 10, 2026 · 12 min
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