The Forgotten Element: How Upregulating the Soil Can Change Your Business While Saving the Planet

By Trevor Smith

Most landscape professionals can rattle off a plant palette, calculate irrigation zones, and spec hardscape in their sleep.  But, ask a room full of pros, “What’s your soil program?” and you’ll often get a shrug.  That missing piece—the forgotten element—is quietly eroding profits, creating avoidable callbacks, and limiting how much impact your work can have on the climate and the communities you serve.

This article is about what happens when you upregulate the soil: when you treat soil not as inert “dirt” to plant into, but as a living system you intentionally tune for performance. Do that well, and three things happen at once: 

• Your landscapes perform better and fail less 
• Your business becomes more profitable and differentiated 
• Your projects become part of a real climate solution, not just a pretty picture 

What Does It Mean to “Upregulate” Soil?
In biology, to upregulate is to turn up the activity of a pathway so it does more of what it’s designed to do. Soil has pathways too—just not the kind you see on a lab diagram. When you upregulate soil, you’re deliberately increasing its capacity to: 

• Infiltrate and store water instead of shedding it 
• Hold and cycle nutrients instead of needing constant fertilizer 
• Support dense, deep roots instead of shallow, stressed plants 
• Host diverse biology that protects plants from pests and pathogens 

In practice, that means managing three intertwined dimensions of soil health: 

1. Physical – structure, aggregation, compaction, water movement
2. Chemical – pH, nutrient balance, cation exchange capacity (CEC) 
3. Biological – microbes, fungi, roots, organic matter,soil fauna 

You don’t have to become a soil scientist, but you do need a clear framework and process for prioritizing soil as a deliberate design and maintenance choice, not an afterthought.  

The Business Problem Hiding Under Your Feet
If you install or maintain landscapes for a living, you’re already feeling the cost of poor soil—even if you’re not calling it that.  It shows up as: 

• Plant warranties and replacements 
  • Trees that never root past the planting pit 
  • Perennials that melt out in year two 

• Runoff and erosion issues
  • Clients complaining about washed-out beds and muddy walks  
  • Extra visits after big storms to fix what failed 

• Escalating input costs 
  • More fertilizer, more irrigation, more pesticides just to keep things alive 

• Labor drag 
  • Crews spending time fighting symptoms (weeds, disease, bare spots) instead of doing higher-value work 

Most of that work is treated as the normal cost of doing business. It isn’t. It’s a performance problem at the soil level.  When you fix it there, a lot of chronic headaches quietly go away. 

The Business Upside of Healthy Soil
Upregulating soil is not a feel-good side project. It’s a business strategy. Here’s what changes when soil health becomes part of your standard operating procedure: 

• Installations “take” faster and fail less 
  • Better soil structure and biology equals faster root establishment 
  • Plants hit growth stride sooner and handle stress better 
  • Warranty costs drop, and those anxious “Did it survive?” calls decrease
•  Maintenance becomes more predictable (and more profitable)
  • Healthier soil equals fewer disease flare-ups and hot spots 
  • Less emergency response; more planned, high-margin work 
  • Fertility can be fine-tuned instead of guessed at every season 
• Irrigation use—and complaints and service calls—go down
  • Soils with good organic matter and structure act like a sponge 
  • Beds hold more water, drain excess better, and buffer dry spells 
  • That translates into less water use and fewer “my plants are crispy” emails 
• You differentiate your brand in a crowded market 

Most firms still sell aesthetics first: how the landscape looks on day one. You can credibly sell aesthetics AND long-term performance: 

• Landscapes that improve over time instead of degrading 
• Designs that help meet municipal storm water, heat island, or biodiversity goals 
• A soil program that makes you the “long-term partner,” not just the installer 

That’s the kind of story property managers, institutions, and municipalities are actively looking for—but rarely hear in a concrete, actionable way. 

Soil as an Asset, Not a Variable
Think of soil the way a building engineer thinks about a mechanical system. You wouldn’t ignore duct sizing, pump capacity, and controls and then complain that the building is uncomfortable and inefficient. So why design plantings and irrigation around compacted, tired, low-organic matter soil and expect long-term performance? A simple shift in mindset: Soil is infrastructure. Treat it as an asset to be built, not just a condition to work around. From that perspective, upregulation becomes a phased, practical process—not a philosophical leap. 

Three Levers to Upregulate Soil (without overcomplicating it)
You can build a very effective soil program around the three dimensions mentioned earlier: 

• Physical: loosen, protect, and structure 
• • De-compact intelligently 
    • Subsoiling, broadforking, or air spading where appropriate  
    • Avoid working soils when they’re wet and prone to smearing

• • Add organic matter with structure in mind 
    • Compost, wood chips, shredded leaves, and living roots
    • Design permanent beds and defined traffic lanes so gains aren’t crushed
  • Keep soil covered 
    • Install mulch, groundcovers, understory planting, and cover crops in larger areas
    • If you can see bare soil, it’s losing carbon, structure, and life 
• Chemical: balance, don’t blast 
  • Test, then act 
    • Track pH, organic matter, and basic nutrients over time, not just once
  • Aim for moderate, stable fertility 
    • Prevent extremes that stress plants and microbes 
    • Avoid high-salt products that fry biology and compact structure
  • Use organic matter as your primary buffer 
    • It boosts CEC, moderates pH shifts, and feeds biology that cycles nutrients 

1. Biological: keep the system fed and diverse 
   • Prioritize living roots 
     • Perennials, shrubs, trees, and cover crops keep carbon flowing underground
   • Use compost as inoculum, not just as “top dressing” 
     • Well-made compost introduces biology and stable carbon 
   • Consider microbial tools where appropriate 
     • Compost teas, extracts, and biologically active amendments
     • Integrate them as part of a bigger system—not a silver bullet 

None of this requires exotic products. It requires intentional design and sequencing: what you disturb, what you add, and what you plant, in that order. 

How this Helps “Save the Planet” (without Greenwashing)
Landscaping sits on some of the most powerful levers we have for climate resilience, but we rarely name them. When you upregulate soil: 

• Carbon moves into stable forms 
  • Organic matter in aggregates and deep roots locks up carbon for years to decades 
• Flooding and drought risk are both reduced 
  • Better infiltration, higher water-holding, slower runoff 
  • That matters in a world of extremes: “too much water” followed by “not enough” 
• Urban heat islands cool slightly 
  • Healthier, denser vegetation and moister soils moderate temperature swings 
• Biodiversity has somewhere to thrive
  • Insects, microbes, fungi, and small fauna all depend on soil condition 

These outcomes can be measured and reported. That’s where your business gains another edge. You’re not just planting trees; you’re documenting how your projects increase organic matter and infiltration over time. You’re not just meeting a spec; you’re helping clients hit ESG, resilience, or climate targets they’re under pressure to show progress on.  That’s value you can charge for. 

Bringing Soil Upregulation into Your Business Model
This doesn’t have to be an overnight reinvention. You can phase it in. 

Step 1: Start with Assessments 

• Add a simple soil health intake to your sales process: 
  • Basic compaction check 
  • Visual structure and root-depth observations 
  • A few targeted lab tests for key projects 
• Capture this in photos and simple language clients can understand 

Step 2: Design Tiered Soil Programs 

• Offer soil upgrades as clear, compelling, named options, not line items buried in a bid: 
  • “Standard install” vs. “Performance soil upgrade” 
  • “Maintenance only” vs. “Soil health program” 
• Spell out benefits in business terms: 
  • Fewer replacements 
  • Less water 
  • Better long-term curb appeal and property value 

Step 3: Train Your Teams to See Soil 

• Teach crews what good vs poor structure looks like 
• Build simple field checks into your SOPs (probe resistance, infiltration, root observation) 
• Reward people for spotting soil issues early, not just for finishing a task quickly 

Step 4: Track a Few Metrics over Time
You don’t need a dashboard with 30 KPIs, but quantifying some key results is powerful. Establish a baseline and then track your impact. Start with: 

• Organic matter % on representative sites
• Visible compaction and infiltration (simple tests) 
• Warranty replacements per project type before/after soil programs 

Those numbers become part of your sales story—and will guide you to smarter internal decision-making.

The Forgotten Element Becomes Your Edge
In an industry obsessed with what customers can see on day one, you have an opportunity to lead with what they’ll feel and measure over the next ten years. Upregulating the soil: 

• Makes your projects more resilient and lower-maintenance 
• Reduces your risk and increases your margins 
• Gives you a credible climate and resilience story 
• And, quietly, helps rebuild the very ground we all depend on 

So the question isn’t whether soil matters. It’s whether you’ll continue to treat it as background—or elevate it to the core performance system of every project. The firms that choose the latter won’t just look different on paper. Their landscapes, their bottom line, and their reputation in the market will vastly outpace their competitors’.

About the Author
Trevor Smith is an ecological landscape designer, speaker, and educator specializing in native plants, green infrastructure, soil regeneration, and habitat creation. For more than two decades, he has helped homeowners, institutions, and municipalities design and build landscapes that manage stormwater, support biodiversity, and perform under real-world climate stress. Trevor is the founder of ReEarth Solutions, a soil-focused venture dedicated to “changing the industry from the ground up” by bringing high-performance, biologically rich soil systems to the landscape trade. Through his projects, trainings, and talks, he works to bridge the gap between cutting-edge soil science and everyday landscape practice—so that doing right by the planet also makes good business sense.

Learn More:
NOFA – Massachusetts
Soil over time: Strategies & Assessments for Healthy Gardens
Saturday, May 9, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Marston Mills, Massachusetts
This hands-on workshop helps professionals and home gardeners connect management decisions to measurable changes in soil health, ecosystem function, and landscape resilience. CEU’s available toward AOLCP. Read more.