Ray Archuleta has more hope for the soils affected by the 1985 Chernobyl nuclear power-plant explosion than he does for most agricultural fields in the U.S.

While scientists said after the disaster that Chernobyl would be a wasteland and no life would ever return due to radioactive waste that spewed onto the land, now there are many written accounts about how quickly the land there is healing.

Why? Because there are no humans there, Archuleta says, speculating Chernobyl will heal quicker than U.S. agricultural fields.

“The Chernobyl ground is getting recovery time,” he explains. “But our agricultural soils are continually bombarded by chemistry and tillage.”

Archuleta, a soil health specialist and retired conservation agronomist for the NRCS in Greensboro, N.C., says that when he left agronomy school, farming was about “forcing, controlling and manipulating” the ecosystem through chemicals and tillage. In school, Archuleta says he was indoctrinated with the idea that farming was about yield.

But he encourages no-tillers to take a new approach to crop production with biomimicry. Calling it the “new science of the future,” biomimicry is what the soil health movement is all…