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The Man Who Saved the Nation From One of the Worst Environmental Disasters in History
Hugh Bennett was critical in rescuing the United States from the Dust Bowl. Yet almost no one has ever heard of him.
By Michael Behar • 5280 September 2020
Born in 1881 in Anson County, North Carolina, Bennett was raised on a cotton plantation—the eighth of nine children—where he helped his father dig graded terraces out of hillsides before seeding. “I can still recall my father’s reply to my question as to why we were doing the work,” Bennett said during a lecture he gave in 1958 at North Carolina State College in Raleigh. “?‘To keep the land from washing away,’ was his laconic answer…. I could scarcely have understood it except in a vague sort of way.”
Hugh Bennett points out severe erosion. Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
https://www.5280.com/2020/09/the-man-who-saved-the-nation-from-one-of-the-worst-environmental-disasters-in-history/?fbclid=IwAR18ZY9h57N_ak2HTevSoczahNnMHjOY2j2S5ySmx-nKQoT7rFvxyuL3bWY
The scientists whose garden unlocked the secret to good health
Lucky Rock
Sun 29 Nov 2015
When Anne Biklé and David Montgomery fed their failing soil with organic matter, they were astonished by the results. Stimulating the microbes that live beneath the surface led the garden to flourish. Then, when Biklé was diagnosed with cancer, the couple had an idea…
https://tinyurl.com/yav2h38p
Peak soil: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself
New research on land, oil, bees and climate change points to imminent global food crisis without urgent action
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/07/peak-soil-industrial-civilisation-eating-itself?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3SUManuZmUuhU0tV8UdxhrGV7OIHhVXm7J63119CtOlRZpmRwJLRrTLf0
'It's a groundswell': the farmers fighting to save the Earth's soil
Matthew Taylor
Wed 24 Apr 2019
John Cherry turned to conservation agriculture eight years ago, and says his costs have plummeted while yields remain high. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
https://tinyurl.com/y29dvetf
Peak soil: Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystems and civilizations. Biofuels make it worse.
Posted on August 31, 2017 by energyskeptic
http://energyskeptic.com/2017/peaksoil/
Book review of Dirt: the erosion of civilization
Posted on March 16, 2019 by energyskeptic
http://energyskeptic.com/2019/book-review-of-dirt-the-erosion-of-civilization/?fbclid=IwAR1Al4WMaGIPS9PD1jPR513SZWL7GEeLASvF3rSlHokEAue1gEBIA1bgZ1k
How to Get High on Soil
M. vaccae, a living creature that resides in your backyard compost pile, acts like a mind-altering drug once it enters the human body, functioning like antidepressant pills to boost your mood.
Donald Barger / Shutterstock
Pagan Kennedy
Jan 31, 2012
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/how-to-get-high-on-soil/251935/?fbclid=IwAR2-3uXxYmFl3m5Skf4DGRIVDvt4iLMKXMMB8lmv06fgl6r8yJbfB0EzJwQ
I'm holding a bowl of dirt up to my nose, in hopes of getting high on the fumes of my backyard compost pile. The microbe that I'm after today is M. vaccae, a living creature that acts like a mind-altering drug once it enters the human body. It has been shown to boost the levels of serotonin and norepinephrine circulating in the systems of both humans and mice. In other words, it works in much the same manner as antidepressant pills. And yes, it is possible to dose yourself by simply breathing in the smell of good dirt.
The drug-like effects of this soil bacteria were discovered, quite by accident, about a decade ago. A doctor named Mary O'Brien created a serum out of the bacteria and gave it to lung-cancer patients, in hopes that it might boost their immune systems. Instead, she noticed another effect: The hospital patients perked up. They reported feeling happier and suffered from less pain than the patients who did not receive doses of bacteria. Further studies in mice confirmed the mood-boosting effect of the soil bugs.
So now I'm poking at the dirt in this dish, trying to release as much of the M. vaccae as I can. The compost looks like chocolate cake -- it's a rich brown-black color, and it holds together with that same kind of moistness that we love in baked goods. I'm eager for something to make me feel jaunty on this winter day. Outside, the sky glimmers a dim, silver-gray -- it's filled with clouds that Virginia Woolf would have described as "implacable." I have always been sensitive to such days. The dishwater light trickles through the window and infects me with malaise.
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As I huff the soil, I have no way of knowing exactly how much M. vaccae is floating into my lungs -- or whether it's enough to change my mind. But I can sure smell this compost. The odor hits like a punch and triggers a memory: I recall a day in Western Massachusetts on a friend's farm, turning earth with a pitchfork. Dried mud extended up my arms, like a pair of long-sleeved gloves, as if I were dressed for a gala event with forest-fairies. I felt dazzled that day, boozed up on sunshine, and in love with the potatoes I'd just dug out of the soil.
That same smell hovers over this dish now -- a sexy, outdoorsy tang. It's an odor produced by microbes in the soil as they break down plants. Scientists call it "geosmin," this dirt smell that lends the earthy taste to beets and carrots. It's the flavor of life.
Cooks have another own word for it. "Terroir" is what makes a loaf of sourdough from San Francisco taste so different from its cousin in Bordeaux. The regional microbes, in the soil and air, impart their particular notes to the bread. You can taste terroir in your wine, your cheese, and even your chocolate -- all of which are produced with the help of specialized bacterias that can vary from town to town.
This soil in the bowl is redolent with my own particular terroir. It is made from the apples that plummeted to the ground in our backyard. It contains, too, a sweetening of ashes from our wood stove. It is the smell of an unfolding revolution in microbiology. New tools -- like desktop gene sequencers -- allow scientists to read a sample of soil and find every species of microbe inside it. This is science that you can smell and taste. And sometimes, you can get high on it too.
To Feed the World Sustainably, Repair the Soil
A reconceived farming system can rapidly improve fertility without chemical fertilizers, and without sacrificing crop yields
By David R. Montgomery on July 16, 2018
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/to-feed-the-world-sustainably-repair-the-soil/
Can Dirt Save the Earth?
Agriculture could pull carbon out of the air and into the soil — but it would mean a whole new way of thinking about how to tend the land.
By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFFAPRIL 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/dirt-save-earth-carbon-farming-climate-change.html?search-input-2=soil+and+co2
Edible Ecosystems
February 2014
https://carbonpilgrim.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/edible-ecosystems/
Third of Earth's soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture
Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study
Tuesday 12 September 2017 13.18 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of-earths-soil-acutely-degraded-due-to-agriculture-study
We need to protect the world's soil before it's too late
Book Excerpt: The Ground Beneath Us
By Paul Bogard March 21, 2017
http://www.popsci.com/topsoil-agriculture-food
As without, so within…
By Zaia on September 11, 2015
https://kendallpermaculture.com/2015/09/11/as-without-so-within/
As above, so below… Ancient wisdom has never been more correct than today. Rather than looking at it from a spiritual perspective, this article will look at it from a physical and environmental perspective.
Since the industrial revolution began, mankind have had an enormous impact on the environment, more than ever before. As we increasingly hurt the environment, we are increasingly hurting ourselves.
Over the last few decades, as use of pesticides and herbicides increased on earth the enormously important soil biota (life of the soil) has drastically changed. This is no longer a local problem, it has happened all over the world. The make up of soil has changed, making previously beautiful fertile land into dust bowls and deserts. Even if we can still grow food in the soil of some areas, if we do not focus on building that soil, we will be destroying it. Top soil loss is an enormous problem worldwide. On average the world only has around 3 feet of topsoil (I believe this to be optimistic, as more and more land is now prone to desertification). As we deforested and used the land for large crops and un-managed animal grazing, we stopped the soil creating process in its tracks. Soil is created by fallen trees, plants and other natural debris (humus). To put it simply, the soil biota start eating the fallen organic matter and reproducing, thereby making new soil (from their poop and their dead bodies once they die) and more soil bacteria and funghi (their offspring). This then becomes a rich and fertile soil full of life. A handful of healthy soil should have billions of good bacteria in it! However, by getting rid of all the diverse plant life in order to grow crops, taking these crops away so no fallen plants are left to form humus and then spraying the land with herbicides, fungicides and pesticides, we are killing all life in the soil. No new soil is formed, the old soil is dead and becomes dust. This dust is then easily washed away by rain or blown away by wind.
In the past 20 or so years we have seen an enormous increase in new diseases, especially gut disease. Leaky gut, Crohn’s disease, diverticulitis, IBS and others are all disease hardly heard of decades ago. These diseases all seem to have one thing in common and that is compromised gut biota. In other words, rather than having billions of good bacteria in you gut, all the good bacteria you gut needs in order to digest your food properly and help your body function at optimal levels is depleted, overgrown with bad bacteria, no longer able to do their job or otherwise compromised. Sound familiar?
We have more people now than ever before taking medication for gut related ailments. We have also more people now than ever with undiagnosed gut problems, with symptoms like alternating diarrhea and constipation, heartburn, gluten intolerance issues, food related allergies or sensitivities and much more. We are losing our gut bacteria as we are losing our soil bacteria.
What can we do? In order to restore our bacterial activity, we have to start with the soil. Build the soil, create more soil than you deplete every time you grow a plant. Compost, compost, compost, build a forest on a fallen forest, ensure there is humus once more. Foster those bacteria in the soil, they are doing an amazing job and cause vitamins and minerals to be mobilised in the soil for uptake by plants. Healthy food can only be grown in healthy soil.
Steaming hot from the pot!!
Once you have this healthy food but your gut has already been compromised, be careful how you eat this food. You may want to slow cook this over low temperatures until it is soft, to avoid further damaging your insides with harsh foods that your gut bacteria is unable to digest. If you can deal with fermented foods, try and have some with each meal. Some very compromised guts may have trouble with pro-biotics and ferments, in that case just stick with slow cooked whole foods and add bone broth. Bone broth is very healing and gentle for the gut, and is great as a fast breaker first thing in the morning. I think it is good for everyone, compromised gut or not! As with any healing process, this is very personal and should always be assessed on an individual level.
What we all need to do is to start caring for our soil and our planet. Once we encourage the growth of healthy good bacteria in our soil again, I believe that we will see a decrease in the instances of gut issues. Healthy soil means a healthy gut, a healthy gut means a happy and healthy you!
Scientists Hope to Cultivate an Immune System for Crops
Carl Zimmer
JUNE 16, 2016
Brassica seed meal is spread in an apple orchard in efforts to alter the soil microbiome. Credit Shashika Hewavitharana
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/science/soil-microbiome-immune-system-pesticides.html?emc=eta1&_r=1
The world’s crops face a vast army of enemies, from fungi to bacteria to parasitic animals. Farmers have deployed pesticides to protect their plants, but diseases continue to ruin a sizable portion of our food supply.
Some scientists are now investigating another potential defense, one already lurking beneath our feet. The complex microbial world in the soil may protect plants much like our immune system protects our bodies.
Scientists have known about so-called “suppressive soils” for decades. In 1931, a Canadian scientist named A. W. Henry discovered the spores of the common root rot, a fungus that strikes wheat crops, in a range of soil samples. But try as he might, he could almost never get the spores to grow.
Dr. Henry eventually realized that he needed to sterilize the soil to permit the spores to develop. The microbiome in healthy soils keeps pathogens at bay.
But exactly how soil microbes defend plants was a puzzle Dr. Henry couldn’t solve.
Today scientists are cataloging a staggering number of diverse species that live underground, and they’ve discovered some of the ways in which these fungi, bacteria and other organisms fight pathogens. But they’re still a long way from learning how this environment operates, because life in the soil is so complex.
“We don’t have a firm grasp on what it is and what it’s doing,” said Mark Mazzola, a plant pathologist at the Department of Agriculture.
Writing on Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Mazzola and Jos M. Raaijmakers of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology noted intriguing parallels between soil immunity and our own immune system.
A micrograph of Rhizoctonia solani, a soil-borne plant fungus that causes root rot and decay in various crops. Credit Shashika Hewavitharana
Researchers divide our immune responses into two types: an all-purpose defense against invaders, and precise assaults on specific enemies. Soil microbes seem to rely on a similarly two-pronged strategy.
When soils are loaded with microbes, they use so many nutrients that it’s hard for a lethal blight or other pathogen to gain a foothold. Some may manage to survive, but they don’t flourish — or wreak havoc on plants.
When scientists heat up soil and kill its native microbes, pathogens begin to grow, feasting on the nutrients in the soil and eventually attacking plants.
Along with this general defense, soil microbes can also target individual species of pathogens. Scientists have found that a strain of Pseudomonas bacteria, for instance, can protect wheat from a fungal disease called take-all root rot.
The bacteria are drawn to the damaged roots of sick plants, where they feed on the nutrients leaking out. As they multiply, the bacteria produce a compound that is toxic to the fungus. That toxin, scientists have found, can bring a fungal outbreak to a halt.
Some of the precision weapons made by soil microbes already are appearing at your local garden store. You can buy spores of a fungus called Trichoderma, for example, that attack another fungus that causes Pythium root rot.
“There are some success stories, but they are very few,” said Dr. Mazzola.
One reason that most biological control measures fail, he suspects, is that microbes exist in a dense ecological web, depending on many other species for their well-being. Taking a disease-fighting microbe out of one ecosystem and dropping it into another may leave it struggling to survive among strangers.
Another reason for the low rate of success is that soil immunity is generally not the work of a single species. “As time goes by, we find there are more players,” said Dr. Mazzola.
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Making matters even more complex, plants turn out not to be passive beneficiaries of soil immunity. They seem to be orchestrating it.
Recent experiments have shown that when pathogens attack a plant, it responds by releasing chemicals into the soil that attract a number of microbial species. As those microbes gather around the plant, they release compounds that can kill the pathogen.
“It’s a triangle that’s much more complex than we originally envisioned,” said Dr. Mazzola.
Rather than import a single microbe in the hopes that it’s a silver bullet, Dr. Mazzola said, it may be possible for farmers to foster plant-protecting microbes dwelling in their fields. “There are some viable approaches to manage what we have in the system already,” said Dr. Mazzola.
In their own research, Dr. Mazzola and his colleagues added seed meal — the mashed-up husks of mustard and canola seeds — to apple orchard soil. They found that the seed meal encouraged the growth of certain soil microbes, and they in turn protected the apple trees from disease-causing fungi and nematode worms.
Two years after adding the seed meal to the orchards, the scientists found that the ecology of the microbes had changed. New species of protective fungi and bacteria had taken over, and the original ones had become rare. But the soil still continued to defend the trees.
Another potential strategy would be to breed crops that do a better job of summoning the microbes they need.
Experiments have already revealed that various strains of wheat and apples attract different combinations of microbes to their roots. Dr. Mazzola thinks that it may be possible to breed plants that send out a call to bring the best defenders to their side.
“We’re breeding for yield or color, but we’re not breeding for resistance,” said Dr. Mazzola.
Healthy Soil Microbes, Healthy People
The microbial community in the ground is as important as the one in our guts.
Mike Amaranthus and Bruce Allyn Jun 11, 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/healthy-soil-microbes-healthy-people/276710/
A Boon for Soil, and for the Environment
By BETH GARDINER
MAY 17, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/business/energy-environment/a-boon-for-soil-and-for-the-environment.html?_r=0
At a farm in Peru, charcoal from bamboo burned in special ovens is used to fertilize the soil. Carbon farming is seen as a way of replenishing depleted farmland and helping reduce damage to the environment. Credit Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters
LONDON — When Gabe Brown and his wife bought their farm near Bismarck, North Dakota, from her parents in 1991, testing found the soil badly depleted, its carbon down to just a quarter of levels once considered natural in the area.
Today the Brown farm and ranch is home to a diverse and thriving mix of plants and animals. And carbon, the building block of the rich humus that gives soil its density and nutrients, has more than tripled. That is a boon not just for the farm’s productivity and its bottom line, but also for the global climate.
Agriculture is often cast as an environmental villain, its pesticides tainting water, its hunger for land driving deforestation. Worldwide, it is responsible for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, though, a growing number of experts, environmentalists and farmers themselves see their fields as a powerful weapon in the fight to slow climate change, their very soil a potentially vast repository for the carbon that is warming the atmosphere. Critically for an industry that must produce an ever-larger bounty to feed a growing global population, restoring lost carbon to the soil also increases its ability to support crops and withstand drought.
“Everyone talks about sustainable,” Mr. Brown said. “Why do we want to sustain a degraded resource? We need to be regenerative, we need to take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the cycle, where it belongs.”
Since people began farming, the world’s cultivated soils have lost 50 percent to 70 percent of their natural carbon, said Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at the Ohio State University. That number is even higher in parts of south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, he added.
Globally, those depleted soils could reabsorb 80 billion to 100 billion metric tons of carbon, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 38 to 50 parts per million, Mr. Lal said. That does not include the carbon that could be simultaneously sequestered into vegetation, but the numbers are significant on their own, equaling up to 40 percent of the increase in concentrations since pre-industrial times. Last year, atmospheric carbon dioxide for the first time hit a monthly average of 400 parts per million, a symbolic threshold but one that many experts say could indicate that warming will soon spiral beyond control.
When carbon escapes from soil, it combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Sometimes the loss is gradual, the result of plowing that leaves upturned layers of earth exposed to the elements, or of failure to replant or cover fields after harvest.
Sometimes it happens more suddenly. The thick prairie sod of America’s Great Plains was a rich carbon store until settlers tore it up for farms, leaving hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil to be blown away in the Dust Bowl years. The destruction of millions of acres of carbon-rich Indonesian peatlands for palm oil plantations is helping to drive climate change today.
Low carbon levels leave the ground nutrient-poor, requiring ever-greater amounts of fertilizer to support crops. They also make for thin soil that is vulnerable to erosion and less able to retain water, so yields suffer quickly in times of drought.
To bring levels back up, a set of techniques known as carbon farming, or regenerative farming, encourage and complement the process by which plants draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, break it down and sequester carbon into soil. They include refraining from tilling, or turning, the soil; mixing crops together rather than growing large fields of just one type; planting trees and shrubs near or among crops; and leaving stalks and other cuttings on fields to decay.
Mr. Brown keeps his fields planted for as much of the year as possible to minimize nutrient loss. When he mixes clover and oats in the same field, the clover fixes nitrogen into the soil. After the oats are harvested, livestock graze the clover and leave their manure behind.
Such strategies have allowed him to stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, reducing costs. And the rich soil not only yields higher volumes, but the crops are more nutritionally dense than those grown on depleted land, he says.
“Economically, it’s much, much, much more profitable,” he said.
Mr. Brown’s approach is very different from the techniques of industrial-scale farming that have taken hold in the United States and other wealthy countries, where single crops stretch over many acres, and fertilizers and pesticides are used heavily.
Things are worse in poorer nations, where farmers’ desperation often means they are unable to care for the soil, Mr. Lal said. He recalled seeing a Mexican sharecropper carting corn straw away from the fields to sell: “I said, ‘Why don’t you leave it on the land? The land will be better next year.’ And he said, ‘This land will not be mine next year, and I need money now.”’
There is some momentum behind a shift. The French government, which helped broker last year’s landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, is pushing an effort to increase soil carbon stocks by 0.4 percent annually, which it says would halt the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Mr. Lal called the target unrealistic, but said achieving just a quarter of that sequestration would be meaningful. In a generation, he said, agriculture could become carbon neutral, removing all the emissions it creates, for example through the energy used by farm equipment.
Worldwide, 5 percent to 10 percent of growers are using regenerative, climate-friendly techniques, said Louis Bockel, a policy officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. That number is likely to increase, he said, as multinational institutions and wealthy nations start incorporating carbon sequestration incentives into existing aid to farmers in poor countries.
“More and more additional funding will be available” to encourage such efforts, Mr. Bockel added. “We are moving quite quickly on this.”
Farmers need financing to help them adopt new techniques, though generally only through a two-to-three-year transition period, said Eric Toensmeier, author of “The Carbon Farming Solution.” That money could come through a higher price charged for foods whose cultivation encourages sequestration, via a carbon tax or through trading systems in which polluters buy credits to offset their emissions, he said. Programs known as payment for environmental services, in which governments or others pay farmers for stewardship of land, are another potential avenue.
With that kind of support, the industry could be ready to do things differently, said Ceris Jones, a climate change adviser at the National Farmers Union in Britain.
“People say that farmers are pretty conservative, but actually practice can change quite quickly,” she said.
Another obstacle is the lack of an agreed-upon system for measuring carbon sequestration in soil, which will be required as the basis for any payments, Mr. Toensmeier said.
Technically, though, many elements of carbon farming are ready to be put into practice quickly, he said. Something as simple as planting trees around fields drastically increases the amount of carbon fixed into soil, Mr. Toensmeier said.
“I would love to see a huge, major transformation of agriculture in the industrialized world, but if we started with just adding trees to the system we have, it’s a huge gain,” he said. “We can sort of meet farmers where they are”
It’s not just crops. The earth beneath the world’s grasslands, from America’s Great Plains to the Tibetan Steppe and the Sahel of Africa, holds about a fifth of all soil carbon stocks, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates. In many places that soil is badly depleted.
“This land is waiting to be filled up again with carbon if we could manage it sustainably,” said Courtney White, author of the book “Grass, Soil, Hope.”
That means moving livestock frequently so each patch of land is grazed just once a year, mimicking the patterns of the native bison that once roamed the American West, he said. The combination of stimulation during animals’ brief presence and long periods of rest encourages plants to lay down more carbon, Mr. White said.
With policies that encourage change, Mr. Toensmeier said, agriculture could benefit the climate rather than harming it. “There do seem to be a remarkable number of win-win opportunities, which is great news,” he said. “You don’t hear a lot of great news about climate change.”
We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it
George Monbiot
Wednesday 25 March 2015 03.00 EDT
'While it now seems that ploughing of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil, there are plenty of means of farming without it.' Photograph: Lester Lefkowitz/Corbis
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life
Why prairies matter and lawns don’t
November 17, 2013
https://healthylandethic.com/2013/11/17/why-prairies-matter-and-lawns-dont/
A secret weapon to fight climate change: dirt
By Debbie Barker and Michael Pollan December 4
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2015/12/04/fe22879e-990b-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html
Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say
Experts point to damage caused by erosion and pollution, raising major concerns about degraded soil amid surging global demand for food
Soil erosion takes effect on Suffolk farmland in the UK. Photograph: Alamy
Oliver Milman
December 2, 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage?CMP=share_btn_fb
How Soil Health Impacts All Wealth
A focus on the importance of healthy soils
by harnsoper
Monday, November 23, 2015, 9:13 PM
http://tinyurl.com/hr2f9p6
Mystery behind earthworm digestion solved
Date: August 4, 2015
Source: Imperial College London
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150804142947.htm
It's the International Year of Soils — can we quit treating this resource like dirt?
CC/Flickr/Natural Resources Conservation Service Soil Health Campaign
Soil may be one of the four cornerstones of human life on this planet – with sunlight, water and breathable air — but outside certain specialist communities, it gets substantially less attention.
By Ron Meador | 07/28/15
http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2015/07/its-international-year-soils-can-we-quit-treating-resource-dirt
America is running out of soil
by Matt Hansen
May 13, 2015
http://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil
Peak soil: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself
New research on land, oil, bees and climate change points to imminent global food crisis without urgent action
Wind causing soil erosion in agricultural fields, Suffolk, on 18 April 2013. Photograph: Alamy
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/07/peak-soil-industrial-civilisation-eating-itself
Vandana Shiva: ‘All Life Depends on Soil’
Dr. Vandana Shiva | February 16, 2015 9:14 am |
http://ecowatch.com/2015/02/16/vandana-shiva-life-depends-soil/
We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it
George Monbiot
Wednesday 25 March 2015 03.00 EDT
'While it now seems that ploughing of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil, there are plenty of means of farming without it.' Photograph: Lester Lefkowitz/Corbis
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life
Five reasons why soil is key to the planet’s sustainable future
It may look plain but soil is a natural resource essential to sustaining life on Earth
Agricultural employees harvest cotton in a field in Benha, Egypt Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
http://www.theguardian.com/fao-partner-zone/2015/feb/10/5-reasons-why-soil-key-to-the-planets-sustainable-future
Dirt in Danger: How Soil Around the World is Threatened
30 October 2014
The health of the world’s soil takes center stage at recent G8 Food Security Working Group meeting. (shutterstock)
http://tinyurl.com/p6skpxz
Three Chemical Elements Essential To Plant Growth (And How To Increase Them In The Soil)
http://www.openpermaculture.com/magazine/three-chemical-elements-essential-plant-growth-increase-soil
Britain has only 100 harvests left in its farm soil as scientists warn of growing 'agricultural crisis'
Study shows soil in urban areas is actually much more fertile on average than the intensively over-farmed UK countryside
http://tinyurl.com/pehr6yw
Where has all the soil gone?
During these times of high drought and potential dust storms, focusing on soil loss is important
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Susan V. Fisk, Public Relations Manager, 608-273-8091, sfisk@sciencesocieties.org
June 18, 2014--You may hear the phrase: “We are losing our soil.” Sounds serious…but how do we lose soil? Nick Comerford, a member of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) and professor at the University of Florida, provides the answer.
The rest:
https://www.soils.org/newsroom/releases/2014/0618/634/
Our Good Earth
The future rests on the soil beneath our feet.
By Charles C. Mann
Photograph by Jim Richardson
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text?rptregcta=reg_free_np&rptregcampaign=20131016_rw_membership_r1p_us_dr_c1#
On a warm September day, farmers from all over the state gather around the enormous machines. Combines, balers, rippers, cultivators, diskers, tractors of every variety—all can be found at the annual Wisconsin Farm Technology Days show. But the stars of the show are the great harvesters, looming over the crowd. They have names like hot rods—the Claas Jaguar 970, the Krone BiG X 1000—and are painted with colors bright as fireworks. The machines weigh 15 tons apiece and have tires tall as a tall man. When I visited Wisconsin Farm Technology Days last year, John Deere was letting visitors test its 8530 tractor, an electromechanical marvel so sophisticated that I had no idea how to operate it. Not to worry: The tractor drove itself, navigating by satellite. I sat high and happy in the air-conditioned bridge, while beneath my feet vast wheels rolled over the earth.
The farmers grin as they watch the machines thunder through the cornfields. In the long run, though, they may be destroying their livelihoods. Midwestern topsoil, some of the finest cropland in the world, is made up of loose, heterogeneous clumps with plenty of air pockets between them. Big, heavy machines like the harvesters mash wet soil into an undifferentiated, nigh impenetrable slab—a process called compaction. Roots can't penetrate compacted ground; water can't drain into the earth and instead runs off, causing erosion. And because compaction can occur deep in the ground, it can take decades to reverse. Farm-equipment companies, aware of the problem, put huge tires on their machines to spread out the impact. And farmers are using satellite navigation to confine vehicles to specific paths, leaving the rest of the soil untouched. Nonetheless, this kind of compaction remains a serious issue—at least in nations where farmers can afford $400,000 harvesters.
Unfortunately, compaction is just one, relatively small piece in a mosaic of interrelated problems afflicting soils all over the planet. In the developing world, far more arable land is being lost to human-induced erosion and desertification, directly affecting the lives of 250 million people. In the first—and still the most comprehensive—study of global soil misuse, scientists at the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) in the Netherlands estimated in 1991 that humankind has degraded more than 7.5 million square miles of land. Our species, in other words, is rapidly trashing an area the size of the United States and Canada combined.
This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world's soil (see "Dirt Poor"), have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world's bad soils. "Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root," Lal says. "In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil."
When I met Zhang Liubao in his village in central China last fall, he was whacking the eroded terraces of his farm into shape with a shovel—something he'd been doing after every rain for more than 40 years. In the 1960s, Zhang had been sent to the village of Dazhai, 200 miles to the east, to learn the Dazhai Way—an agricultural system China's leaders believed would transform the nation. In Dazhai, Zhang told me proudly, "China learned everything about how to work the land." Which is true, but not, alas, in the way Zhang intended.
Dazhai is in a geological anomaly called the Loess Plateau. For eon upon eon winds have swept across the deserts to the west, blowing grit and sand into central China. The millennia of dust fall have covered the region with vast heaps of packed silt—loess, geologists call it—some of them hundreds of feet deep. China's Loess Plateau is about the size of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined. For centuries the silt piles have been washing away into the Yellow River—a natural process that has exacerbated, thanks to the Dazhai Way, into arguably the worst soil erosion problem in the world.
After floods ravaged Dazhai in 1963, the village's Communist Party secretary refused any aid from the state, instead promising to create a newer, more productive village. Harvests soared, and Beijing sent observers to learn how to replicate Dazhai's methods. What they saw was spade-wielding peasants terracing the loess hills from top to bottom, devoting their rest breaks to reading Mao Zedong's little red book of revolutionary proverbs. Delighted by their fervor, Mao bused thousands of village representatives to the settlement, Zhang among them. The atmosphere was cultlike; one group walked for two weeks just to view the calluses on a Dazhai laborer's hands. Mainly Zhang learned there that China needed him to produce grain from every scrap of land. Slogans, ever present in Maoist China, explained how to do it: Move Hills, Fill Gullies, and Create Plains! Destroy Forests, Open Wastelands! In Agriculture, Learn From Dazhai!
Zhang Liubao returned from Dazhai to his home village of Zuitou full of inspiration. Zuitou was so impoverished, he told me, that people ate just one or two good meals a year. Following Zhang's instructions, villagers fanned out, cutting the scrubby trees on the hillsides, slicing the slopes into earthen terraces, and planting millet on every newly created flat surface. Despite constant hunger, people worked all day and then lit lanterns and worked at night. Ultimately, Zhang said, they increased Zuitou's farmland by "about a fifth"—a lot in a poor place.
Alas, the actual effect was to create a vicious circle, according to Vaclav Smil, a University of Manitoba geographer who has long studied China's environment. Zuitou's terrace walls, made of nothing but packed silt, continually fell apart; hence Zhang's need to constantly shore up collapsing terraces. Even when the terraces didn't erode, rains sluiced away the nutrients and organic matter in the soil. After the initial rise, harvests started dropping. To maintain yields, farmers cleared and terraced new land, which washed away in turn.
The consequences were dire. Declining harvests on worsening soil forced huge numbers of farmers to become migrants. Partly for this reason, Zuitou lost half of its population. "It must be one of the greatest wastes of human labor in history," Smil says. "Tens of millions of people forced to work night and day on projects that a child could have seen were a terrible stupidity. Cutting down trees and planting grain on steep slopes—how could that be a good idea?"
In response, the People's Republic initiated plans to halt deforestation. In 1981 Beijing ordered every able-bodied citizen older than 11 to "plant three to five trees per year" wherever possible. Beijing also initiated what may still be the world's biggest ecological program, the Three Norths project: a 2,800-mile band of trees running like a vast screen across China's north, northeast, and northwest, including the frontier of the Loess Plateau. Scheduled to be complete in 2050, this Green Wall of China will, in theory, slow down the winds that drive desertification and dust storms.
Despite their ambitious scope, these efforts did not directly address the soil degradation that was the legacy of Dazhai. Confronting that head-on was politically difficult: It had to be done without admitting Mao's mistakes. (When I asked local officials and scientists if the "Great Helmsman" had erred, they changed the subject.) Only in the past decade did Beijing chart a new course: replacing the Dazhai Way with what might be called the Gaoxigou Way.
Gaoxigou (Gaoxi Gully) is west of Dazhai, on the other side of the Yellow River. Its 522 inhabitants live in yaodong—caves dug like martin nests into the sharp pitches around the village. Beginning in 1953, farmers marched out from Gaoxigou and with heroic effort terraced not mere hillsides but entire mountains, slicing them one after another into hundred-tier wedding cakes iced with fields of millet and sorghum and corn. In a pattern that would become all too familiar, yields went up until sun and rain baked and blasted the soil in the bare terraces. To catch eroding loess, the village built earthen dams across gullies, intending to create new fields as they filled up with silt. But with little vegetation to slow the water, "every rainy season the dams busted," says Fu Mingxing, the regional head of education. Ultimately, he says, villagers realized that "they had to protect the ecosystem, which means the soil."
Today many of the terraces Gaoxigou laboriously hacked out of the loess are reverting to nature. In what locals call the "three-three" system, farmers replanted one-third of their land—the steepest, most erosion-prone slopes—with grass and trees, natural barriers to erosion. They covered another third of the land with harvestable orchards. The final third, mainly plots on the gully floor that have been enriched by earlier erosion, was cropped intensively. By concentrating their limited supplies of fertilizer on that land, farmers were able to raise yields enough to make up for the land they sacrificed, says Jiang Liangbiao, village head of Gaoxigou.
In 1999 Beijing announced it would deploy a Gaoxigou Way across the Loess Plateau. The Sloping Land Conversion Program—known as "grain-for-green"—directs farmers to convert most of their steep fields back to grassland, orchard, or forest, compensating them with an annual delivery of grain and a small cash payment for up to eight years. By 2010 grain-for-green could cover more than 82,000 square miles, much of it on the Loess Plateau.
But the grand schemes proclaimed in faraway Beijing are hard to translate to places like Zuitou. Provincial, county, and village officials are rewarded if they plant the number of trees envisioned in the plan, regardless of whether they have chosen tree species suited to local conditions (or listened to scientists who say that trees are not appropriate for grasslands to begin with). Farmers who reap no benefit from their work have little incentive to take care of the trees they are forced to plant. I saw the entirely predictable result on the back roads two hours north of Gaoxigou: fields of dead trees, planted in small pits shaped like fish scales, lined the roads for miles. "Every year we plant trees," the farmers say, "but no trees survive."
Some farmers in the Loess Plateau complained that the almonds they had been told to plant were now swamping the market. Others grumbled that Beijing's fine plan was being hijacked by local officials who didn't pay farmers their subsidies. Still others didn't know why they were being asked to stop growing millet, or even what the term "erosion" meant. Despite all the injunctions from Beijing, many if not most farmers were continuing to plant on steep slopes. After talking to Zhang Liubao in Zuitou, I watched one of his neighbors pulling turnips from a field so steep that he could barely stand on it. Every time he yanked out a plant, a little wave of soil rolled downhill past his feet.
Sometime in the 1970s, "Sahel" became a watchword for famine, poverty, and environmental waste. Technically, though, the name refers to the semiarid zone between the Sahara desert and the wet forests of central Africa. Until the 1950s the Sahel was thinly settled. But when a population boom began, people started farming the region more intensively. Problems were masked for a long time by an unusual period of high rainfall. But then came drought. The worst effects came in two waves—one in the early 1970s and a second, even more serious, in the early 1980s—and stretched from Mauritania on the Atlantic to Chad, halfway across Africa. More than 100,000 men, women, and children died in the ensuing famine, probably many more.
"If people had the means to leave, they left," says Mathieu Ouédraogo, a development specialist in Burkina Faso, a landlocked nation in the heart of the Sahel. "The only people who stayed here had nothing—not enough to leave."
Scientists still dispute why the Sahel transformed itself from a savanna into a badland. Suggested causes include random changes in sea-surface temperatures, air pollution that causes clouds to form inopportunely, removal of surface vegetation by farmers moving into the desert periphery—and, of course, global warming. Whatever the cause, the consequences are obvious: Hammered by hot days and harsh winds, much of the soil turns into a stone-hard mass that plant roots and rainwater cannot penetrate. A Sahelian farmer once let me hack at his millet field with a pick. It was like trying to chop up asphalt.
When the drought struck, international aid groups descended on the Sahel by the score. (Ouédraogo, for instance, directed a project for Oxfam in the part of Burkina where he had been born and raised.) Many are still there now; half the signs in Niamey, capital of neighboring Niger, seem to be announcing a new program from the United Nations, a Western government, or a private charity. Among the biggest is the Keita project, established 24 years ago by the Italian government in mountainous central Niger. Its goal: bringing 1,876 square miles of broken, barren earth—now home to 230,000 souls—to ecological, economic, and social health. Italian agronomists and engineers cut 194 miles of road through the slopes, dug 684 wells in the stony land, constructed 52 village schools, and planted more than 18 million trees. With bulldozers and tractors, workers carved 41 dams into the hills to catch water from the summer rains. To cut holes in the ground for tree planting, an Italian named Venanzio Vallerani designed and built two huge plows—"monstrous" was the descriptor used by Amadou Haya, an environmental specialist with the project. Workers hauled the machines to the bare hills, filled their bellies full of fuel, and set them to work. Roaring across the plateaus for months on end, they cut as many as 1,500 holes an hour.
Early one morning Haya took us to a rainwater-storage dam outside the village of Koutki, about 20 minutes down a rutted dirt road from Keita project headquarters. The water, spreading oasis like over several acres, was almost absurdly calm; birds were noisily in evidence. Women waded into the water to fill plastic jerry cans, their brilliant robes floating around their ankles. Twenty-five years ago Koutki was a bit player in the tragedy of the Sahel. Most of its animals had died or been eaten. There was not a scrap of green in sight. No birds sang. People survived on mouthfuls of rice from foreign charities. On the road to Koutki we met a former soldier who had helped distribute the aid. His face froze when he spoke about the starving children he had seen. Today there are barricades of trees to stop the winds, low terraces for planting trees, and lines of stone to interrupt the eroding flow of rainwater. The soil around the dam is still dry and poor, but one can imagine people making a living from it.
Budgeted at more than $100 million, however, the Keita project is expensive—Niger's per capita income, low even for the Sahel, is less than $800 a year. Keita boosters can argue that it costs two-thirds of an F-22 fighter jet. But the Sahel is vast—Niger alone is a thousand miles across. Reclaiming even part of this area would require huge sums if done by Keita methods. In consequence, critics have argued that soil-restoration efforts in the drylands are almost pointless: best turn to more promising ground.
Wrong, says Chris Reij, a geographer at VU (Free University) Amsterdam. Having worked with Sahelian colleagues for more than 30 years, Reij has come to believe that farmers themselves have beaten back the desert in vast areas. "It is one of Africa's greatest ecological success stories," he says, "a model for the rest of the world." But almost nobody outside has paid attention; if soil is MEGO, soil in Africa is MEGO squared.
In Burkina, Mathieu Ouédraogo was there from the beginning. He assembled the farmers in his area, and by 1981 they were experimenting together with techniques to restore the soil, some of them traditions that Ouédraogo had heard about in school. One of them was cordons pierreux: long lines of stones, each perhaps the size of a big fist. Snagged by the cordon, rains washing over crusty Sahelian soil pause long enough to percolate. Suspended silt falls to the bottom, along with seeds that sprout in this slightly richer environment. The line of stones becomes a line of plants that slows the water further. More seeds sprout at the upstream edge. Grasses are replaced by shrubs and trees, which enrich the soil with falling leaves. In a few years a simple line of rocks can restore an entire field.
For a time Ouédraogo worked with a farmer named Yacouba Sawadogo. Innovative and independent-minded, he wanted to stay on his farm with his three wives and 31 children. "From my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather, we were always here," he says. Sawadogo, too, laid cordons pierreux across his fields. But during the dry season he also hacked thousands of foot-deep holes in his fields—zaï, as they are called, a technique he had heard about from his parents. Sawadogo salted each pit with manure, which attracted termites. The termites digested the organic matter, making its nutrients more readily available to plants. Equally important, the insects dug channels in the soil. When the rains came, water trickled through the termite holes into the ground. In each hole Sawadogo planted trees. "Without trees, no soil," he says. The trees thrived in the looser, wetter soil in each zai. Stone by stone, hole by hole, Sawadogo turned 50 acres of wasteland into the biggest private forest for hundreds of miles.
Using the zaï, Sawadogo says, he became almost "the only farmer from here to Mali who had any millet." His neighbors, not surprisingly, noticed. Sawadogo formed a zaï association, which promotes the technique at an annual show in his family compound. Hundreds of farmers have come to watch him hack out zai with his hoe. The new techniques, simple and inexpensive, spread far and wide. The more people worked the soil, the richer it became. Higher rainfall was responsible for part of the regrowth (though it never returned to the level of the 1950s). But mostly it was due to millions of men and women intensively working the land.
Last year Reij made a thousand-mile trek across Mali and then into southwestern Burkina with Edwige Botoni, a researcher at the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel, a regional policy center in Burkina. They saw "millions of hectares" of restored land, Botoni says, "more than I had believed possible." Next door in Niger is an even greater success, says Mahamane Larwanou, a forester at Abdou Moumouni Dioffo University in Niamey. Almost without any support or direction from governments or aid agencies, local farmers have used picks and shovels to regenerate more than 19,000 square miles of land.
Economics as much as ecology is key to Niger's success, Larwanou says. In the 1990s the Niger government, which distributed land in orthodox totalitarian fashion, began to let villagers have more control over their plots. People came to believe that they could invest in their land with little risk that it would be arbitrarily taken away. Combined with techniques like the zaï and cordons pierreux, land reform has helped villagers become less vulnerable to climate fluctuations. Even if there were a severe drought, Larwanou says, Nigeriens "would not feel the impact the way they did in 1973 or 1984."
Burkina Faso has not recovered as much as Niger. Sawadogo's story suggests one reason why. While villagers in Niger have gained control over their land, smallholders in Burkina still lease it, often for no charge, from landowners who can revoke the lease at the end of any term. To provide income for Burkina's cities, the central government let them annex and then sell land on their peripheries—without fairly compensating the people who already lived there. Sawadogo's village is a few miles away from Ouahigouya, a city of 64,000 people. Among the richest properties in Ouahigouya's newly annexed land was Sawadogo's forest, a storehouse of timber. Surveyors went through the property, slicing it into tenth-of-an-acre parcels marked by heavy stakes. As the original owner, Sawadogo will be allotted one parcel; his older children will also each receive land. Everything else will be sold off, probably next year. He watched helplessly as city officials pounded a stake in his bedroom floor. Another lot line cut through his father's grave. Today Yacouba Sawadogo is trying to find enough money to buy the forest in which he has invested his life. Because he has made the land so valuable, the price is impossibly high: about $20,000. Meanwhile, he tends his trees. "I have enough courage to hope," he says.
Wim Sombroek learned about soil as a child, during the hongerwinter—the Dutch wartime famine of 1944-45, in which 20,000 or more people died. His family survived on the harvest from a minute plot of plaggen soil: land enriched by generations of careful fertilization. If his ancestors hadn't taken care of their land, he once told me, the whole family might have died.
In the 1950s, early in his career as a soil scientist, Sombroek journeyed to Amazonia. To his amazement, he found pockets of rich, fertile soil. Every Ecology 101 student knows that Amazonian rain forest soils are fragile and impoverished. If farmers cut down the canopy of trees overhead to clear cropland, they expose the earth to the pummeling rain and sun, which quickly wash away its small store of minerals and nutrients and bake what remains into something resembling brick—a "wet desert," as these ruined areas are sometimes called. The certainty of wrecking the land, environmentalists argue, makes large-scale agriculture impossible in the tropics. Nevertheless, scattered along the Amazon River, Sombroek discovered big patches of (black Indian earth). As lush and dark as the plaggen of his childhood, it formed a rich base for agriculture in a land where it was not supposed to exist. Naturally, Sombroek paid attention. His 1966 book, Amazon Soils, included the first sustained study of terra preta.
Later Sombroek worked across the globe, eventually becoming director of ISRIC and secretary general of the International Society of Soil Science (now International Union of Soil Sciences), positions he used to convene the first ever world survey of human-induced soil degradation. All the while he never forgot the strange black earth in Brazil. Most restoration programs, like those in China and the Sahel, try to restore degraded soil to its previous condition. But in much of the tropics, its natural state is marginal—one reason so many tropical countries are poor. Sombroek came to believe that terra preta might show scientists how to make land richer than it ever had been, and thus help the world's most impoverished nations feed themselves.
Sombroek will never see his dream fulfilled—he died in 2003. But he helped to assemble a multinational research collaboration to investigate the origin and function of terra preta. Among its members is Eduardo Göes Neves, a University of São Paulo archaeologist whom I visited not long ago at a papaya plantation about a thousand miles up the Amazon, across the river from the city of Manaus. Beneath the trees was the unmistakable spoor of archaeological investigation: precisely squared off trenches, some of them seven feet deep. In the pits the terra preta, blacker than the blackest coffee, extended from the surface down as much as six feet. Top to bottom, the soil was filled with broken pre-Columbian pottery. It was as if the river's first inhabitants had thrown a huge, rowdy frat party, smashing every plate in sight, then buried the evidence.
Terra preta is found only where people lived, which means that it is an artificial, human-made soil, dating from before the arrival of Europeans. Neves and his colleagues have been trying to find out how the Amazon's peoples made it, and why. The soil is rich in vital minerals such as phosphorus, calcium, zinc, and manganese, which are scarce in most tropical soils. But its most striking ingredient is charcoal—vast quantities of it, the source of terra preta's color. Neves isn't sure whether Indians had stirred the charcoal into the soil deliberately, if they had done it accidentally while disposing of household trash, or even if the terra preta created by charcoal initially had been used for farming. Ultimately, though, it became a resource that could sustain entire settlements; indeed, Neves said, a thousand years ago two Indian groups may have gone to war over control of this terra preta.
Unlike ordinary tropical soils, terra preta remains fertile after centuries of exposure to tropical sun and rain, notes Wenceslau Teixeira, a soil scientist at Embrapa, a network of agricultural research and extension agencies in Brazil. Its remarkable resilience, he says, has been demonstrated at Embrapa's facility in Manaus, where scientists test new crop varieties in replica patches of terra preta. "For 40 years, that's where they tried out rice, corn, manioc, beans, you name it," Teixeira says. "It was all just what you're not supposed to do in the tropics—annual crops, completely exposed to sun and rain. It's as if we were trying to ruin it, and we haven't succeeded!" Teixeira is now testing terra preta with bananas and other tropical crops.
Sombroek had wondered if modern farmers might create their own terra preta—terra preta nova, as he dubbed it. Much as the green revolution dramatically improved the developing world's crops, terra preta could unleash what the scientific journal Nature has called a "black revolution" across the broad arc of impoverished soil from Southeast Asia to Africa.
Key to terra preta is charcoal, made by burning plants and refuse at low temperatures. In March a research team led by Christoph Steiner, then of the University of Bayreuth, reported that simply adding crumbled charcoal and condensed smoke to typically bad tropical soils caused an "exponential increase" in the microbial population—kick-starting the underground ecosystem that is critical to fertility. Tropical soils quickly lose microbial richness when converted to agriculture. Charcoal seems to provide habitat for microbes—making a kind of artificial soil within the soil—partly because nutrients bind to the charcoal rather than being washed away. Tests by a U.S.-Brazilian team in 2006 found that terra preta had a far greater number and variety of microorganisms than typical tropical soils—it was literally more alive.
A black revolution might even help combat global warming. Agriculture accounts for more than one-eighth of humankind's production of greenhouse gases. Heavily plowed soil releases carbon dioxide as it exposes once buried organic matter. Sombroek argued that creating terra preta around the world would use so much carbon-rich charcoal that it could more than offset the release of soil carbon into the atmosphere. According to William I. Woods, a geographer and soil scientist at the University of Kansas, charcoal-rich terra preta has 10 or 20 times more carbon than typical tropical soils, and the carbon can be buried much deeper down. Rough calculations show that "the amount of carbon we can put into the soil is staggering," Woods says. Last year Cornell University soil scientist Johannes Lehmann estimated in Nature that simply converting residues from commercial forestry, fallow farm fields, and annual crops to charcoal could compensate for about a third of U.S. fossil-fuel emissions. Indeed, Lehmann and two colleagues have argued that humankind's use of fossil fuels worldwide could be wholly offset by storing carbon in terra preta nova.
Such hopes will not be easy to fulfill. Identifying the organisms associated with terra preta will be difficult. And nobody knows for sure how much carbon can be stored in soil—some studies suggest there may be a finite limit. But Woods believes that the odds of a payoff are good. "The world is going to hear a lot more about terra preta," he says.
Walking the roads on the farm hosting Wisconsin Farm Technology Days, it was easy for me to figure out what had worried Jethro Tull. Not Jethro Tull the 1970s rock band—Jethro Tull the agricultural reformer of the 18th century. Under my feet the prairie soil had been squashed by tractors and harvesters into a peculiar surface that felt like the poured-rubber flooring used around swimming pools. It was a modern version of a phenomenon noted by Tull: When farmers always plow in the same path, the ground becomes "trodden as hard as the Highway by the Cattle that draw the Harrows."
Tull knew the solution: Don't keep plowing in the same path. In fact, farmers are increasingly not using plows at all—a system called no-till farming. But their other machines continue to grow in size and weight. In Europe, soil compaction is thought to affect almost 130,000 square miles of farmland, and one expert suggests that the reduced harvests from compaction cost midwestern farmers in the U.S. $100 million in lost revenue every year.
The ultimate reason that compaction continues to afflict rich nations is the same reason that other forms of soil degradation afflict poor ones: Political and economic institutions are not set up to pay attention to soils. The Chinese officials who are rewarded for getting trees planted without concern about their survival are little different from the farmers in the Midwest who continue to use huge harvesters because they can't afford the labor to run several smaller machines.
Next to the compacted road on the Wisconsin farm was a demonstration of horse-drawn plowing. The earth curling up from the moldboard was dark, moist, refulgent—perfect midwestern topsoil. Photographer Jim Richardson got on his belly to capture it. He asked me to hunker down and hold a light. Soon we drew a small, puzzled crowd. Someone explained that we were looking at the soil. "What are they doing that for?" one woman asked loudly. In her voice I could hear the thought: MEGO.
When I told this story over the phone to David Montgomery, the University of Washington geologist, I could almost hear him shaking his head. "With eight billion people, we're going to have to start getting interested in soil," he said. "We're simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt."
“Soil is the connection to ourselves. … To be at home with the soil is truly the only way to be at home with ourselves, and therefore the only way we can be at peace with the environment and all of the earth species that are part of it. It is, literally, the common ground on which we all stand.”
— Fred Kirschenmann
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
http://www.fao.org/home/en/
