Topsoil Market : Dirt: Some Vendors Are Cleaning Up

SANTA BARBARA —  It is the color of bittersweet chocolate, a deep rich brown. The texture is velvety smooth. And the quality is unparalleled.

It is the finest dirt that Don Batastini sells--moist topsoil from the fertile Goleta Valley.

Batastini grabbed a handful of the dirt from a towering pile on the edge of an open pit, smelled it and briefly closed his eyes, as if savoring a fine wine.

“Earthy,” he murmured. “Rich. Alive. It just has that certain good-dirt smell.”

Batastini, owner of Santa Barbara Sand and Topsoil, is offended by the notion that dirt is simply debris best disposed of in a trash can. He takes pride in the quality of the fill dirt and topsoil that he sells to contractors, landscapers and nurseries.

Big Business

Dirt today is a big business in California. There are companies that sell dirt wholesale, companies that sell dirt retail, companies that truck dirt, companies that grade dirt, companies that mine dirt and companies that make dirt.

As housing tracts and shopping centers proliferate in California and more dirt is paved over, it has become an increasingly scarce and expensive commodity. Ten years ago a contractor could buy ordinary fill dirt for $1 a ton, said Mel Wynn, president of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California. Today it sells for about $8 a ton.

While many people take dirt for granted--along with other elements like air, fire and water--contractors view dirt as a critical element in the success or failure of a project.

“Dirt is the first thing we examine when we begin a project,” Wynn said. “It’s the foundation of everything we build on.”

Dirt Replacement

Twenty years ago if the dirt beneath a building site had too much clay or was too porous, the contractor would just find another site, Wynn said. But land has become so scarce that builders often remove all of the dirt on the site and buy better dirt. This can cost more than $200,000 for a large commercial project, Wynn said.

Dirt is now so valuable that builders with ready supplies of dirt can often submit significantly lower bids for projects than their competitors.

“When I started in this business 25 years ago, there was plenty of dirt,” Wynn said. “You could just go and dig it out of the side of a mountain. But today you’ve got to find a dirt broker and pay so much it really adds to the expense of a project.”

Dirt brokers mine dirt from quarries or buy it from construction companies at excavation sites, such as the Metro Rail project, where thousands of tons of dirt have been sold to Caltrans for the Century Freeway.

Contractors use dirt to raise foundations, fill in ravines, solidify hillsides, support parking lots. For most projects they can use fill dirt, but for landscaping, builders need topsoil, the top-of-the line dirt that sells for almost twice as much as ordinary dirt. Topsoil is fertile surface dirt that has the most nutrients. It is needed to landscape housing tracts and commercial properties, to grow gardens and lawns, to plant fruit trees and shrubbery.

Once oranges and a variety of row crops thrived in Southern California’s rich topsoil. But today top-quality dirt has become such a valuable commodity that there are firms that manufacture dirt.

James Christiansen, owner of Valley Compost & Topsoil in Santa Ynez, began making dirt three years ago and has found a steady clientele of landscape companies and back-yard gardeners. Christiansen figures the supply of topsoil decreases every year, but the demand stays constant. As a result he can count on increasing sales.

Christiansen’s recipe for topsoil is fill dirt, sand, wood shavings and a mix of manure and straw compost that he ages up to six months.

Mixed Like Batter

“I mix all the ingredients in my loader, like I’m making a cake, and I end up with a very fine top soil. I’m trying to imitate the best soil nature has to offer.”

Dirt is simply rock broken down by wind and rain, the particles mixing with decomposing plant and animal matter. But the process is glacially slow--it takes up to 1,000 years for a few inches of topsoil to develop--and that is one of the reasons for the high value placed on prime dirt.

Dirt is such an important commodity that the small Pacific island nation of Nauru claims its existence is threatened because much of its dirt has been stolen. Nauru has appealed to the United Nations for redress because it charges that Britain, New Zealand and Australia stole all of its topsoil during a 50-year colonial occupation. The topsoil was removed while the three nations scoured for phosphate, a rich fertilizer formed by eons of bird droppings.

Caltrans Project

Dirt is the critical element in a multitude of projects, such as road and freeway construction. Caltrans is spending about $1.5 million for 150,000 tons of dirt for a freeway project in Santa Barbara. This dirt is not ordinary dirt; it has to meet rigid specifications for drainage and strength.

The most expensive part of building many golf courses is the dirt, said Bruce Charlton, design associate for Robert Trent Jones Golf Course Architects in Palo Alto. The firm is building a golf course in Missouri on a limestone site that has no dirt, Charlton said, so the country club must spend about $500,000 to transport dirt from a nearby river bank. And because there is a dearth of good dirt on the island of Hawaii, Jones was forced to use finely pulverized lava rock as a substitute for dirt on a number of courses.

Dirt is also an important tool for firefighters, and countless California homes have been saved from wildfires because in areas where water is not available there always is a plentiful supply of dirt.

“You just shovel dirt on the fire and it smothers it,” said Earl Clayton, spokesman for the Los Padres National Forest. “In a lot of remote areas you have no water at all, so dirt becomes a critical tool in firefighting.”

Dirt is the foundation of America’s prosperity, said Dale Pennington, a soil chemist at Texas A&M; University. There are more than 30,000 different types of soil in the United States, and that variety enables the United States to count agriculture as its largest export.

Dirt is as varied as people, Pennington said, and each type has its own use. Rice grows well in dirt with a high clay content. Dirt with a low clay content is good for building foundations. Sandy dirt is good for growing strawberries, and avocados grow well in rocky dirt on hillsides. Dirt with gravel is used for road building and dirt with a little adobe is good for back-yard gardens.

Some West Africans consider dry, crunchy clay a delicacy.

Value Call Unappreciated

Many Americans do not appreciate the value of good dirt, said Harry Breck, who owns a Santa Barbara dirt trucking firm.

“People will pay $300,000 for a lot and another $300,000 to build a house, but they resent spending any money to bring in good dirt for the foundation,” Breck said. “The dirt business is a funny business. Everybody wants good dirt, but nobody wants to pay for it.”

Although America is blessed with a variety of rich soils, more than 5 billion tons of dirt are lost each year to natural erosion and erosion from plowing, according to Michael Whiting, a soil scientist with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. As a result, the remaining dirt is not as productive and it takes more resources to farm.

Erosion is most severe in the rolling hills of the Midwest, where the loosely packed dirt is washed away by intense rainfall. In California’s richest agricultural area, the San Joaquin Valley, erosion is not a major problem, Whiting said. But much dirt is lost along the coast, between Monterey and Ventura, where many row crops are grown on hillsides in very sandy dirt.

The Soil Conservation Service helps farmers save their dirt. The service advocates plowing and planting conservation methods, establishes watershed and flood control programs and attempts to control erosion caused by urban expansion.

“People treat our soil like dirt,” Whiting said. “We work it too hard, we pave it, we kill it with toxins. All you have to do is look back through time and you can see the importance soil plays in world history.

One civilization after another has fallen, he said, because of a lack of good dirt.