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Book review of Dirt: the erosion of civilization
Book review of Dirt: the erosion of civilization
Preface. On average civilizations collapsed between 800 to 2,000 years before ruining their soil. Industrial agriculture is doing this far faster – in most of the United States half of the original topsoil is gone and industrial farming techniques erode and compact the land much more than men and horses in the past, further aggravated by large monoculture crops and business owned farmland leased out to farmers who want to make money far more than preserving the land, since they can’t leave the farm to their children.
The bedrock of any civilization is food and water. So you’d think the top priority of nations throughout history would be ensuring farmers were taking good care of the land right now because this history of erosion is well-known and has been for centuries.
The typical pattern is that at first, only be best soil in the valley bottomland is farmed, then population grows so the slopes are farmed, but the soil washes away into the valley. Now the bottom land is even more intensely cultivated, which uses the soil up as it keeps growing thinner and depleted of nutrition from continuous farming. And in the end, civilization declines and fails.
Related article: “Peak soil: Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystems and civilizations. Biofuels make it worse“.
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David R. Montgomery. 2007. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. University of California Press.
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson commented on how poorly American farmers treated their land. Washington attributed it to ignorance, Jefferson to greed. Since the principles of good land management were known for hundreds of years previously in Europe, Jefferson’s harsher view is no doubt the correct one.
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Back in time: Retracing the path to diversity
Back in time: Retracing the path to diversity
Industrial bread production is based on speed, scale and uniformity. To supply this system, industrially grown grain is limited to a few, highly controlled varieties. But greater diversity would make grain crops more adaptable and therefore more sustainable in the long run. How are some plant breeders, farmers, millers and bakers retracing the path to ancient, diverse grains that will see us eating healthier, tastier bread into the future?
All grain was once grass
Some 10,000 years ago, hunter gatherers began to eat different grasses to supplement their diet of berries, nuts, meat and fish. Over time, they domesticated some of these grasses through careful cultivation. In his book Six Thousand Years of Bread, H.E. Jacob describes how early man transformed the “wild grain into a domestic animal”. So began thousands of years of humans working with the environment to grow grain that could adapt to different climates and soils. However, with the onset of industrial farming in the early 20th century ‘ancient grains’, as they are now called, and the knowledge developed with them, became a thing of the past.
Diversity creates stability
Dr Philippa Ryan is an archeobotanist at The British Museum who specialises in studying ancient grains and understanding why some varieties might have been forgotten or lost while others were encouraged. At the Oxford Food Forum | Future of Food’s recent conference, she spoke about how Sudanese farmers have an historic capacity to adapt to changes in climate, technology and the economy. This resilience is due in large part to their diverse use of established grains such as pearl millet, sorghum, barley and wheat, which have been adapted over time.
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Industrial Farming Plows Up Brazil’s ‘Underground Forest’ | Climate Central
Industrial Farming Plows Up Brazil’s ‘Underground Forest’ | Climate Central.
PALMAS, Brazil – South and east of Brazil’s famous Amazon, the air becomes dryer and the humid rainforest gives way to emerald green patches of irrigated pasture carved from scrubby woods and native grasslands.
As global meat demand increases, farmers are plowing up more of Brazil’s enormous Cerrado, a unique “underground forest” where plants and shrubs store tremendous quantities of carbon in a sprawling root network.
Credit: Autumn Spanne
This is a different kind of forest, hidden in plain sight and far more threatened than the Amazon. Known as the Cerrado, it is the largest, most biologically diverse savannah region of South America, home to 5 percent of all life on the planet.
But industrial farming is fast swallowing this unique landscape. And its rapid transformation is creating a ticking carbon bomb that scientists warn could significantly affect the global carbon cycle if the current rate of destruction continues.
This enormous expanse in central Brazil was once as impenetrable as the deepest rainforest, so isolated that Portuguese settlers dubbed it Cerrado, or “closed.” Today roads connect the Cerrado’s southern boundary in the São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul states with its northern limits some 1,500 miles away near the Atlantic coast. Yet the Cerrado is still largely unknown, even in Brazil.
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