Elaine Ingham
The soil food web — and teaching a generation of growers to check their own ground under a microscope instead of sending it away.
The record
- Standing
- foundational work
- Years
- died 2026
- Based
- Soil Food Web School
- Trained as
- MS in microbiology, Texas A&M; doctorate from Colorado State University.
- Taught
- Joined the faculty of Oregon State University in Corvallis in 1986, remaining associated with it until 2002. Afterwards, multi-day workshops built around building compost piles and hours at the microscope.
- The idea
- Her school credits her with developing the concept of the soil food web — the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and microarthropods whose predation cycles make nutrients plant-available.
- Published
- Dozens of research papers in scientific journals through the 1980s and 1990s.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Ingham’s academic work in the 1980s and 1990s was on the microbiology of soil; her lasting influence came from what she did with it afterwards. She taught growers to look.
The workshops were unusual in their combination: build a compost pile in the morning, spend the afternoon at a microscope identifying what is in it, and learn to read the ratio of fungi to bacteria as a management signal rather than a curiosity. That put a diagnostic tool in the hands of people who had previously had to mail a sample to a laboratory and accept a number back.
Her school’s obituary credits her with developing the concept of the soil food web itself. She retired in October 2025 and died on 16 February 2026, aged seventy-three. The Soil Food Web Foundation was launched as a nonprofit to carry the teaching forward.
Where to read them
- Publications — Soil Food Web School The list of her research papers.
- Dr. Elaine’s Soil Food Web School The courses and the consultant network built on the method.
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.