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“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain.”

A United Nations report released Thursday detailing humanity’s degradation of natural resources warns swift and sweeping reforms are needed to keep feeding the growing global population.

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point.”

The new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report argues that “a sense of urgency needs to prevail over a hitherto neglected area of public policy and human welfare, that of caring for the long-term future of land, soil, and water.”

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils,” the publication explains, “is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain, guaranteeing nature-positive production, advancing equitable livelihoods, and building resilience to shocks and stresses arising from natural disasters and pandemics.”

Entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture: Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021), the report declares that “time is of the essence.”

That tone is echoed by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a foreword to the report, which he says provides “evidence of the changing and alarming trends in resource use.”

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point,” Qu writes. “It is clear our future food security will depend on safeguarding our land, soil, and water resources.”

Already, human-induced soil degradation affects 34% of land used for food while water scarcity threatens 3.2 billion people—nearly half the total human population—in agricultural areas, according to SOLAW 2021.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How healthy is your soil?

December 3, 2021

How healthy is your soil?

In celebration of World Soil Day, December 5, 2021, we want to help farmers around the world to better understand their soil.

Our soils are an incredible resource – they have a remarkable ability to clean water and help mitigate climate change, they support biodiversity and are the reason we can grow nourishing food. However, the ability of soil to deliver these benefits has been compromised by widespread intensive farming – so much so it’s been estimated we have only 50 harvests left until our topsoil is degraded beyond repair. But not all is lost. Every day, farmers are transitioning to more sustainable farming practices which can not only prevent further deterioration of the land but can regenerate it too.

But where do you start? You can’t manage what you don’t measure – a clear indication of the health of your soil can help show you where to go next and illustrate the effectiveness of new management practices. Here are three simple soil tests from the Global Farm Metric that you can do to understand, manage and protect the health of your soil and the vital services it provides.

These tests indicate the state of your soils in terms of structure, the amount of organic matter and biodiversity. You can do this in your garden, allotment or farm.

On farm scale, choose three fields that are representative of your land (e.g. with different soil types or different enterprises such as arable or permanent pasture). Follow the sampling protocols – time of year and weather (e.g. after heavy rainfall or frost) can sometimes affect your results, so tests are best done throughout the year, when soil is moist and not waterlogged or frozen. Let’s get digging!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Drawing down atmospheric carbon

August 28, 2019

Drawing down atmospheric carbon

There are two ways of addressing rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon; reduce the amount of carbon emissions or increase the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Most of our efforts have been focused on reducing emissions. I’d like to shift the conversation to drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The picture above was taken in the corn field near my home showing the hard and cracked soil in this field. The picture below was taken in my garden earlier this spring. I simply turned over a shovel of soil and you can see worms, roots, and soil structure all indicating a healthy soil. These pictures should make clear the differences between the degraded conventional farmland and healthy organic rich soil. My garden soil contains about 9% organic matter, which is refreshed each year with mulch used to suppress weeds and feed the soil. Most Midwestern farmland has been degraded and contains a small fraction of the organic matter it had when it was first farmed.

In our county we often see a decrease in organic matter from 5% to less than 1%. The soil in the farm field is little but dust particles. The surface cracks are an indication of what happens when the soil loses organic matter. It dries out and the surface hardens. This farm soil has no soil structure because it has lost it’s thriving microbial life, the bottom of the food chain. Without worms and fungi there is nothing working to form and hold opens pores, the soil surface becomes a hardened crusted surface soon after plowing and planting.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Book review of Dirt: the erosion of civilization

March 17, 2019

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.

***

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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Down-to-earth policy: Improving soil health

June 1, 2018

Down-to-earth policy: Improving soil health

In recent years there has been a surge in research, education and advocacy efforts to catalyse agricultural policies that help farmers actively improve the health of their soil. Healthy soils are essential to agricultural and rural prosperity, to improving food security and nutrition and to enhancing vital biodiversity and ecosystem services. Unprecedented policy and soil data developments are helping to fill critical gaps in soil governance. However, concrete action and strong leadership are still needed at the regional, national and global level to guarantee healthy soils for a food-secure future.

The foundation of life

Countless cycles of birth, death, fertility and decay have transformed soil into the matrix of life on Earth: just a handful of terrestrial soil contains more organisms than there are people on the planet. These microorganisms work endlessly to provide a range of ecosystem services that are vital for the functioning and resilience of the environment. The Earth’s soils function as its largest water filter and storage tank, filtering and cleaning tens of thousands of cubic kilometres of water that pass through them each year. Soils store more carbon than is contained in all above ground vegetation, while regulating emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Soils also consume, digest, cycle and store nutrients that serve as the molecular building blocks for plants, animals and all forms of life.

Recognising the fundamental value of soil, a handful of forward-looking countries, such as Switzerland and Germany, established national legislation decades ago, to protect this natural resource. However, according to senior soil expert Dr. Luca Montanarella, the world’s soils have largely been considered a second-tier priority. As a result, the state of global soils has rapidly deteriorated, with human pressures on soil resources reaching critical limits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Soil Microbes “Key to the function of agricultural systems”

March 30, 2018

Soil Microbes “Key to the function of agricultural systems”

Interview with Dr. Kristine Nichols, Chief Scientist at the Rodale Institute, an independent research institute for organic farming.

Agricultural Innovation with John-Paul Maxfield

March 22, 2018

Agricultural Innovation with John-Paul Maxfield

John-Paul founded Waste Farmers with $9,000 and a belief that idealism and capitalism can coexist. Waste Farmers has evolved into an innovator respected by leaders in the global community for developing simple solutions to the complex problems of modern agriculture and food security.
Mar 20, 2018

John-Paul Maxfield | Photo by Joshua Lawton

Woody Tasch: What made you go into the soil business?

John-Paul Maxfield: I started with the desire to push toward a more sustainable food system. Soil is the place to start. We saw an opportunity to innovate around products and technology that reconnect people to soil. Long term, we want to be an agricultural innovation company.

Soil seems like a funny place to start with innovation . . . as basic as it can be.

Soil is incredibly complex. Just as with the human microbiome project, there is so much we have yet to discover. If we want to fix climate change, the answer is literally right beneath our feet. Da Vinci had it right when he said we understand the movements of the heavens better than we understand what is happening underfoot. We understand the soil at an intuitive level but not at a practical level.

What do you mean by the “intuitive level”?

It’s the place where all life comes from and to which it returns. We all pretty much know this. It’s not an accident that kids gravitate toward playing in the dirt.

What do you mean by the “practical level”?

We need greater understanding of how to work with soil to achieve broader goals of feeding people without destroying humanity’s ability to continue living on the planet.

So, what was the first thing you did as an entrepreneur?

I was working in private equity, but I was a square peg in a round hole. I’d always admired my grandfather. We’d drive along I-25 to go visit my grandparents in Wyoming, looking at corn fields as we went. My great-grandfather was the largest sheep producer in the country, pre-WWI. He lost everything in the Great Depression. My grandfather had feedlots and corn farms and had one of the largest livestock-sale barns in the country. It was not a mom-and-pop operation. It was vertically integrated. He was a tough old cowboy. My father and brothers sold the operation to their employees back in the ’90s. Torrington Livestock is based in Torrington, Wyoming. But I hope that, if he were here now, he’d recognize the need to redesign the food system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No-Till Farming For Healthier Soil and Lifestyles

November 7, 2017

NO-TILL FARMING FOR HEALTHIER SOIL AND LIFESTYLES

Masanobu Fukuoka, the late Japanese farmer, developed a unique farming system he called “Natural Farming.” Trying to replicate what he saw in Nature, Fukuoka´s no till system allowed the soil to continually grow in fertility. Through the use of mulch and cover crops, this system effectively allows for continuous harvests of crop rotations, eliminates weeds and builds healthy top soil allowing for organic food production that is ecologically sustainable.

PROBLEMS WITH TILL AGRICULTURE

Farmers have been tilling the soil for 10,000 years. It is what exemplifies the occupation of those who make their living from the land. Tilling the soil allowed humanity to produce higher concentrations of food in one place giving rise to the denser populations of city centers and eventually the development of modern civilization as we know it. However, tilling the soil also brought with it a whole host of undesirable effects, including erosion and the loss of the microbial life of the soil. Some studies have linked the fall of major civilizations such as the Mayans of Mesoamerica to the over farming of the land which eventually led to a decreasing soil capacity.

By tilling the soil year after year, the microscopic life of billions of creatures in the top three inches of the soil is essentially killed off. What’s left over is a barren, lifeless medium incapable of offering the nutrients plants need to grow and offer us their fruit. Furthermore, the more we till the soil, the more we leave the precious humus that is the life-sustaining “skin” of our planet vulnerable to the elements of wind and rain. The erosion of top soil caused by tilling and the “baring” of the soil has led to soil compaction, loss of fertility, poor drainage, and problems with plant reproduction.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Investing in Soil Health, One Piece of Land at a Time

April 18, 2016

Jim Baird in a field of organic vetch in the Columbia River Basin

Investing in Soil Health, One Piece of Land at a Time

Three years ago, in collaboration with a group of farmers and investors, my spouse and I formed an LLC called Living Lands. Together we wrote our purpose and articles of incorporation to place the highest priority on soil health. Under the astute guidance and leadership of Jim Baird, a longtime farmer in eastern Washington and a founding member of Slow Money, we purchased a 100-acre piece of farmland in the Columbia River Basin. Jim manages the land in conjunction with his other activities, including Cloudview EcoFarms, an educational and experimental farm project with operations in Royal City and Ephrata.

Our conversations have been wide-ranging and spirited. We have talked about soil and carbon and the best way to figure out whether we are improving the health of the soil. We are all concerned about water, and it has been enlightening to hear from Jim and Sam (another investor and also a farmer based near Ellensburg) about the history of our state’s water districts, irrigation programs, and farmer involvement. We are currently in the process of transitioning the land we purchased to certified-organic status, an important element in our pursuit of soil health, although by no means the “silver bullet.” Last year we leased the farmland to a young couple Jim has been mentoring. By leasing our land and raising commercial crops (currently alfalfa), they are able to make a living as farmers while continuing their explorations of farming practices.

We are not going to “scale” Living Lands. We may form Living Lands II and buy another piece of farmland. When we do, we’ll need to pay as much attention to it as we have to LLI.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ecological Meltdown And Nuclear Conflict: The Relevance Of Gandhi In The Modern World

January 4, 2016

Ecological Meltdown And Nuclear Conflict: The Relevance Of Gandhi In The Modern World

badruddingandhi

A few months ago, entrepreneur Charles Devenish contacted me to tell me about his plans to develop various mining enterprises across India. He spoke about the massive amounts of untapped mineral resources lying beneath India that is just lying there and has been for a long time. What he thought I might find appealing were his plans for how small-scale mining could dovetail with a model of agriculture aimed at restoring Indian soils, which have been seriously degraded by decades of ‘green revolution’ chemical poisoning, and a rolling back of the increasing and harmful corporate control of farming.

Devenish wants to set up co-operative mining enterprises in rural areas that would involve local farmers, who would then have a say and a stake in these local mines (see this report). The farmers would also benefit from the profits that would supplement their farming income and also be funnelled into investment in research and knowledge, which would enable them to restore their soils and move towards organic agriculture that would be in harmony with the local ecology.

Taken at face value, the plan sounds reasonable, especially given the current push to make farming financially non-viable, displace farmers from their lands and then implement a petro-chemical intensive system of agriculture based on the industrialised model of farming that the West has adopted. This model has led to de-nutrified food, degraded soils, contaminated water, serious health issues and various other problems. Although there are calls to help farmers by, for example, providing them with a proper living income and stopping wrongful land acquisition, waiting for policy makers in central government to address the plight of farmers could be a very long wait indeed, particularly as much of officialdom is facilitating the corporate takeover of farming.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Soil and Carbon are Related

October 13, 2015

IMG_8028Ingrid Pullen Photography

How Soil and Carbon are Related

Carbon cycle is one of the fundamental requirement of life on earth. Soil organic carbon (SOC) can be described as the amount of carbon that is stored in the soil as one of the components of the soil organic matter which comprises the animal and plant materials and different stages of decay. Organic carbon (OC) mainly enters the soil by the decomposition of the animal and plant residuals, dead and living microorganisms, root exudates and soil biota. Soil organic carbon is heterogeneous structure that varies in it particle size, carbon content, turnover time and its decomposition rate. Soil organic carbon is the main energy source for the soil microorganisms. The soil organic matter in the soil has approximately 58% carbon.

ORGANIC CARBON STORED IN SOIL CAN BE INCREASED BY THE FOLLOWING PRACTICES

The processes that can be used to increase the amount of soil carbon in the soil include; things like increasing plant growth which generally increases the input of organic carbon to the soil in roots, shoot material and root exudates example is the increasing water use efficiency and optimal nutrition. Also growing plants for longer durations each year increases the inputs of the organic carbon to the soil. Also by improving the soil structure it can also help to increase the organic carbon stored in the soil by reducing the losses of organic carbon from the soil by erosion and decomposition and this can be done by maintaining the ground cover, retaining stubbles and reduction of compaction. In addition practices like conservation farming, improving crop management through rotation, maintaining and improving forestry management and also improving grazing management can help to increase the organic carbon in the soil.

SOIL CARBON AND SOIL HEALTH

Carbon content in the soil is a major factor of the overall soil health. Soil carbon is meant to improve the physical properties of soil like increasing the cation exchange capacity (CEC).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Soil Week: A catalyst for change

May 2, 2015

Global Soil Week: A catalyst for change

As many of you already know, 2015 has been named the International Year of Soils by the UN, so never has there been a better time to get soil into the conversation. The question of ‘how do we make soil sexy?’ is something that has been troubling soil scientists, farmers and NGOs for a number of years, and quite rightly so – we should be worried about the state of our soil.

Issues surrounding soil are yet to enter the mainstream of public concern. But if current rates of land degradation continue, quite soon they will have to. There are many challenges involved in driving the change towards agricultural practices that preserve and build soil fertility, but the gathering at the Global Soil Week (GSW) conference in Berlin last week certainly made me more hopeful. The event brought together young and old, experts and newcomers, all with the overarching aim to raise awareness about the vital need to look after our soils better and to get the issue onto the political agenda.

No one can deny the fundamental importance of soil and its fertility – in fact, you could say that, along with water, it is one of the most important natural resources on earth. It stores approximately 2,000 billion tonnes of carbon globally – three times as much as the atmosphere. And one tenth of the carbon in the atmosphere has come from soil degradation. Our first and most urgent goal must be to stop any more soil carbon being released, helping to warm the planet.

In addition to being the source of 95% of our food, soil is also a key part of global nutrient cycles, and an important sink for atmospheric methane. It’s also essential for maintaining biodiversity above ground, while providing an underground home for 25% of all life on the planet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The roots of your health: Elaine Ingham on the science of soil

March 10, 2015

The roots of your health: Elaine Ingham on the science of soil

Put bluntly, Ingham’s message is that if you are interested in health, you have to be interested in soil. This lecture, and her work in general, brilliantly explains why.

Time to take a deep breath, prepare to have conventional thinking about soil turned on its head and find out why soil biology should matter to you.

Soil vs dirt

As most of us have realised, soil is not merely a prop for plants or ‘terra firma‘ for the biosphere; it is an infinitely complex underworld and inter-dependent web of micro-organisms such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and micro-arthropods to name a few.

It is this hidden world that allows our planet and our society to thrive. It is every bit as important to our health as breath itself.

But far from nurturing the soil that feeds us, agriculture often destroys it. Every time the soil is disturbed, or artificial fertilisers and pesticides are applied, soil life is killed and soil structure compromised.

Soil erosion, the leaching of water and nutrients, anaerobic conditions, pests and diseases all follow. The system gradually collapses and eventually the soil – now bereft of soil life – is degraded so much it becomes mere dirt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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ORGANIC CARBON STORED IN SOIL CAN BE INCREASED BY THE FOLLOWING PRACTICES

SOIL CARBON AND SOIL HEALTH

Soil vs dirt

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