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Greening the desert using permaculture
Geoff Lawton | Saturday, 16th February 2013
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos/greening-desert-using-permaculture
You can discover your soil's biology
By Dan Murphy
See more at: http://www.grdc.com.au/Media-Centre/Ground-Cover-Supplements/Ground-Cover-Issue-96-Supplement-Soil-Biology-Initiative/You-can-discover-your-soils-biology#sthash.8BLdRhwH.dpuf
Peak Water, Peak Oil…Now, Peak Soil?
By Stephen Leahy
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/05/peak-water-peak-oilnow-peak-soil/#sthash.Z4g3ZrKe.YAG5M4pj.dpuf
Healthy soil looks dark, crumbly, and porous, and is home to worms and other organisms. It feels soft, moist, and friable, and allows plant roots to grow unimpeded. Credit: Colette Kessler, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
REYKJAVÍK, Iceland, May 31 2013 (IPS) - Soil is becoming endangered. This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík.
And a big part of reversing soil decline is carbon, the same element that is overheating the planet.
["Soils are like a bank account. You should only draw out what you put in." -- Rattan Lal of Ohio State University]
“Keeping and putting carbon in its rightful place” needs to be the mantra for humanity if we want to continue to eat, drink and combat global warming, concluded 200 researchers from more than 30 countries.
“There is no life without soil,” said Anne Glover, chief scientific advisor to the European Commission.
“While soil is invisible to most people it provides an estimated 1.5 to 13 trillion dollars in ecosystem services annually,” Glover said at the Soil Carbon Sequestration conference that ended this week.
The dirt beneath our feet is a nearly magical world filled with tiny, wondrous creatures. A mere handful of soil might contain a half million different species including ants, earthworms, fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Soil provides nearly all of our food – only one percent of our calories come from the oceans, she said.
Soil also gives life to all of the world’s plants that supply us with much of our oxygen, another important ecosystem service. Soil cleans water, keeps contaminants out of streams and lakes, and prevents flooding. Soil can also absorb huge amounts of carbon, second only to the oceans.
“It takes half a millennia to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it,” Glover said.
Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet’s arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world’s growing population will be impossible.
The world will likely need “60 percent more food calories in 2050 than in 2006?, according to a new paper released May 30 by the World Resources Institute. Reaching this goal while maintaining economic growth and environmental sustainability is one of the most important global challenges of our time, it concludes.
Urban development is a growing factor in loss of arable lands. One million city dwellers occupy 40,000 hectares of land on average, said Rattan Lal of Ohio State University.
Plowing, removal of crop residues after harvest, and overgrazing all leave soil naked and vulnerable to wind and rain, resulting in gradual, often unnoticed erosion of soil. This is like tire wear on your car – unless given the attention and respect it deserves, catastrophe is only a matter of time.
Erosion also puts carbon into the air where it contributes to climate change. But with good agricultural practices like using seed drills instead of plows, planting cover crops and leaving crop residues, soils can go from a carbon source to a carbon solution, he said.
“Soil can be a safe place where huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere could be sequestered,” Lal told IPS.
When a plant grows it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil. This carbon is mainly found in humus – the rich organic material from decay of plant material. Soil needs to contain just 1.5 percent carbon to be healthy and resilient – more capable of withstanding drought and other harsh conditions.
“Healthy soils equals healthy crops, healthy livestock and healthy people,” Lal said.
However, most soils suffer from 30 to 60 percent loss in soil carbon. “Soils are like a bank account. You should only draw out what you put in. Soils are badly overdrawn in most places.”
Farmers and pastoralists (ranchers) could do “miracles” in keeping carbon in the soil and helping to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and feed the world if they were properly supported, Lal said.
The world’s 3.4 billion ha of rangeland and pastures has the potential to sequester or absorb up to 10 percent of the annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production, estimates Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland.
Eliminating overgrazing and using other pasture management techniques will reduce the number of animals on the land in the short term but it is better for the long term health of grazing lands. While these practises can help with climate change, there many other good reasons to adopt them, Arnalds told IPS.
That view is echoed by many here since determining exactly how much carbon a farm field or pasture can absorb from the atmosphere is highly variable and difficult to determine.
Proper land management can help with climate change but in no way does it reduce the need to make major reductions in fossil fuel use, said Guðmundur Halldórsson, a research co-ordinator at the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland, co-host of the conference.
And using farmland or pastures as a ‘carbon sponges’ will lead to all sorts of problems, Halldórsson told IPS.
“The real key is adopt practices that enhance soil health to improve food productivity,” he said.
That approach is much more likely to help in improve local livelihoods, protect water resources, improve biodiversity, reduce erosion and help put carbon back into the ground where it belongs, he said.
“Iceland overexploited its lands, trying to squeeze more out of the land than it could handle. We call it ‘killing the milk cow’. We can no longer live off the land as we once did.”
Situated in the North Atlantic, the windy island was once mostly covered by forests, lush meadows and wetlands when the first settlers arrived nearly 1,000 years ago. By the late 1800s, 96 percent of the forest was gone and half the grasslands destroyed by overgrazing. Iceland became one the world’s poorest countries, its people starved and its landscape remains Europe’s largest desert.
Of necessity, Iceland pioneered techniques to halt land degradation and in restoration. And for more than 100 years the Soil Conservation Service has struggled but the gains are small and very slow in coming. Today at least half of the former forests and grasslands are mostly bare and subject to severe erosion by the strong winds.
“We’re still fighting overgrazing here,” Halldórsson said.
Iceland relies far less on agriculture now and the harsh lessons of poor land management of the past are irrelevant to the 90 percent of Icelanders who now live in urban areas.
“The public isn’t supporting land restoration. We’ve forgotten that land is the foundation of life,” Halldórsson said.
Dust Bowl Revisited
Janet Larsen
November 16, 2012
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2012/update109
Down and dirty: Is peak soil more pressing than peak oil?
Filmed as part of the 2011 Ideas Festival, Brisbane. Visiting the US 'Dust Bowl' in 1929, future President Roosevelt observed: "a nation that destroys its soils destroys itself". Vegetarianism and veganism are on the rise as ethical dietary choices. However, the undiscussed consequence of this trend is the increase of large-scale cereal agriculture and its effect on the Australian landscape and biodiversity. Deb Newell, founder of the Hunter Gatherer's Dinner Club, discusses the concept of peak soil and the benefits of consuming foods grown and raised in their natural locations. Deb is also featured in the May edition of the Griffith REVIEW.
Greening the Desert II: Greening the Middle East
http://vimeo.com/7658282
Dirt! The Movie [2009]
http://www.hulu.com/watch/191666/dirt-the-movie
Great Thesis!
Can We Restore the Prairie—And Still Support Ourselves?
Since ripping open the prairie for modern monocultures, we're losing soil and fertility. Agricultural pioneer Wes Jackson says there's another way.
by Wes Jackson
posted Nov 22, 2011
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/living-nets-in-a-new-prairie-sea
The Grass was the Country as the Water is the Sea.
—Willa Cather
Photo by Chris Sgaraglino.
Author Joseph Kinsey Howard describes a spring day in 1883 in North Dakota when John Christiansen, a Scandinavian farmer, looked up while plowing a field to discover an old Sioux watching him. Silently the Sioux watched as the prairie grass was turned under. The farmer stopped the team, leaned against the plow handles, pushed his black Stetson back on his head, and rolled a cigarette. He watched amusedly as the Sioux knelt, thrust his fingers into the furrow, measured its depth, fingered the sod and the buried grass. Eventually the Sioux straightened up and looked at the immigrant. “Wrong side up,” said the Sioux and went away.
Another writer in the mid-1930s described how his grandfather “broke prairie sod, driving five yoke of straining oxen, stopping every hour or so to hammer the iron ploughshare to a sharper edge. Some of the grass roots immemorial were as thick as his arm. ‘It was like plowing through a heavy woven doormat,’ grandfather said.”
To many of us today it seems tragic that our ancestors should have so totally blasphemed the grasslands with their moldboards. But who among us, in their time, would have done otherwise?
A piece of land that once featured a diverse ecosystem we call prairie is now covered with a single species population such as wheat, corn, or soybeans.
Nevertheless, it was one of the two or three worst atrocities committed by Americans, for with the cutting of the roots—a sound that reminded one of a zipper being opened or closed—a new way of life opened, which simultaneously closed, probably forever, a long line of ecosystems stretching back thirty million years.
Before the coming of the Europeans the prairie was a primitive wilderness, both beautiful and stern, a wilderness that had supported migrating water birds as well as bobolinks, prairie chickens, black-footed ferrets, and Native Americans. Never mind that the Europeans’ crops would far outyield the old prairie for human purposes, at least in the short run. What is important is that the Sioux knew it was wrong, and that his words became regionally famous for the wrong reason. The story was often repeated precisely because farmer Christiansen, and the others who passed it on, thought it was amusing. To their minds those words betrayed the ignorance of the poor Sioux. As far as the immigrant was concerned, “breaking the prairie” was his purpose in life.
Agriculture has changed the face of the land the world over. The old covering featured the top level of biological organization—the ecosystem. The new cover features the next level below, the population. For example, a piece of land that once featured a diverse ecosystem we call prairie is now covered with a single species population such as wheat, corn, or soybeans. A prairie is a polyculture. Our crops are usually grown in monocultures.
The next most obvious fact is that the prairie features perennial plants while agriculture features annuals. For the prairie, at least, the key to this last condition resides in the roots. Though the above-ground parts of the prairie’s perennials may die back each year, the roots are immortal. For whether those sun-cured leaves, passed over by the buffalo in the fall migration, go quickly in a lightning-started prairie fire or, as is more often the case, burn through the “slow, smokeless burning of decay,” the roots hold fast what they have earned from rock and subsoil. Whichever way the top parts burn, the perennial roots will soon catch and save most of the briefly free nutrients for a living future. And so an alliance of soil and perennial root, well adapted to the task of blotting up a drenching rain, reincarnates last year’s growth.
Modern agriculture coasts on the sunlight trapped by floras long extinct; we pump it, process it, transport it over the countryside as chemicals, and inject it into our wasting fields as chemotherapy.
Soil still runs to the sea in nature’s system, as in the beginning before land plants appeared, but gravity can’t compete with the holding power of the living net and the nutrient recharge managed by nosing roots of dalea, pasqueflower, and bluestem. Banks will slip. Rivers continue to cut, as they did before agriculture, before humans. The Missouri was called “Big Muddy” before the prairies were plowed, a matter of possible confusion to those untutored by the river. But it is essential to realize that the sediment load before agriculture could not have exceeded the soil being created by the normal lowering of the riverbed, and what was carved from the interior highlands. It is even more important to appreciate that the amount of soil from the prairie that wound up in the river could not have exceeded what the prairie plant roots were extracting from parent rock or subsoil.
Otherwise there would have been no soil over much of the watershed. What should concern us is the extra sediment load running in the river today—the fertility, the nutrients hard-earned by nature’s myriad life-forms, which broke them free of their rocky prisons over the course of millennia, bathed them with chemicals, and made them fit for that freedom known only in the biota. The solar energy cost of mining these nutrients with root pumps is characterized by a slow payback period, an
energy cost that only geologic time can justify.
Species diversity breeds dependable chemistry. This above-ground diversity has a multiple effect on the seldom-seen teeming diversity below. Bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates live out their lives reproducing by the power of sun-sponsored photons captured in the green molecular traps set above. If we could adjust our eyes to a power beyond that of the electron microscope, our minds would reel in a seemingly surrealistic universe of exchanging ions, where water molecules dominate and where colloidal clay plates are held in position by organic thread molecules important in a larger purpose, but regarded as just another meal by innumerable microscopic invertebrates. The action begins when roots decay and above ground residues break down, and the released nutrients begin their downward tumble through soil catacombs to start all over again. And we who stand above in thoughtful examination, all the while smelling and rolling fresh dirt between our fingers and thumbs, distill these myriads of action into one concept—soil health or balance—and leave it at that.
Traditional agriculture coasted on the accumulated principal and interest hard-earned by nature’s life-forms over those millions of years of adjustment to dryness, fire, and grinding ice.
Modern agriculture coasts on the sunlight trapped by floras long extinct; we pump it, process it, transport it over the countryside as chemicals, and inject it into our wasting fields as chemotherapy.
Is there any possible return to a system that is at once self-renewing like the prairie or forest and yet capable of supporting the current and expanding human population? I think there is.
Then we watch the fields respond with an unsurpassed vigor, and we feel well informed on the subject of agronomics. That we can feed billions is less a sign of nature’s renewable bounty and of our knowledge than a sign of her forgiveness and of our own discounting of the future. For how opposite could monoculture of annuals be from what nature prefers? Both the roots and the above-ground parts of annuals die every year; thus, throughout much of the calendar the mechanical grip on the soil must rely on death rather than life. Mechanical disturbance, powered by an ancient flora, imposed by a mined metal, may make weed control effective, but the farm far from weatherproof. In the course of it all, soil compacts, crumb structure declines, soil porosity decreases, and the wick effect for pulling moisture down diminishes.
Monoculture means a decline in the range of invertebrate and microbial forms. Microbial specialists with narrow enzyme systems make such specific demands that just any old crop won’t do. We do manage some diversity through crop rotation, but from the point of view of various microbes, it is probably a poor substitute for the greater diversity that was always there on the prairie. Monoculture means that botanical and hence chemical diversity above ground is also absent. This invites epidemics of pathogens or epidemics of grazing by insect populations, which in monocultures spend most of their energy reproducing, eating, and growing. Insects are better controlled if they are forced to spend a good portion of their energy budget buzzing around, hunting for the plants they evolved to eat among the many species in a polyculture.
Some of the activity of the virgin sod can be found in the human-managed fields, but plowing sharply reduced many of these soil qualities. Had too much been destroyed, of course, we would not have food today. But then who can say that our great-grandchildren will have it in 2080? It is hard to quantify exactly what happened when the heart of America was ripped open, but when the share made its zipper sound, the wisdom that the prairie had accumulated over millions of years was destroyed in favor of the simpler, human-directed system.
Where does all this leave us? Is there any possible return to a system that is at once self-renewing like the prairie or forest and yet capable of supporting the current and expanding human population? I think there is.
Much of our scientific knowledge and the narrow technical application of science has contributed to the modern agricultural problem. Nevertheless, because of advances in biology over the last half-century, I think we have the opportunity to develop a truly sustainable agriculture based on the polyculture of perennials. This would be an agriculture in which soil erosion is so small that it is detectable only by the most sophisticated equipment, an agriculture that is chemical-free or nearly so, and certainly an agriculture that is scarcely demanding of fossil fuel.
We are fortunate in this country to have a large and sophisticated biological research establishment and the know-how to develop high-yielding, seed-producing polycultures out of some of our wild species.
Conventional agriculture, which features annuals in monoculture, is nearly opposite to the original prairie or forest, which feature mixtures of perennials.
At The Land Institute, we are working on the development of mixed perennial grain crops. We are interested in simulating the old prairie or in building domestic prairies for the future. Conventional agriculture, which features annuals in monoculture, is nearly opposite to the original prairie or forest, which feature mixtures of perennials. If we could build domestic prairies we might be able one day to have high-yielding fields that are planted only once every twenty years or so. After the fields had been established, we would need only to harvest the crop, relying on species diversity to take care of insects, pathogens, and fertility.
This of course is not the entire answer to the total agricultural problem, much of which involves not only a different socioeconomic and political posture, but a religious dimension as well. But breeding new crops from native plants selected from nature’s abundance and simulating the presettlement botanical complexity of a region should make it easier for us to solve many agricultural problems.
As civilizations have flourished, many upland landscapes that supported them have died, and desert and mudflat wastelands have developed. But civilizations have passed on accumulated knowledge, and we can say without exaggeration that these wastelands are the price paid for the accumulated knowledge. In our century this knowledge has restorative potential. The goal to develop a truly sustainable food supply could start a trend exactly opposite to that which we have followed on the globe since we stepped onto the agricultural treadmill some ten millennia ago.
Aldo Leopold lamented that “no living man will see the long-grass prairie, where a sea of prairie flowers lapped at the stirrups of the pioneer.” Many share his lament, for what are left are prairie islands, far too small to be counted as a “sea.” Essentially all this vast region, a million square miles, was turned under to make our Corn Belt and Breadbasket. But now the grandchildren of pioneers have the opportunity to establish a new sea of perennial prairie flowers, the product of accumulated scientific knowledge, their own cleverness, and the wisdom of the prairie.
Our Soil and Water Needs a Safety Net Too
Posted by Craig Cox in Conservation, Lobbyists, Subsidies, Super Congress on September 21, 2011
http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2011/09/our-soil-and-water-needs-a-safety-net-too/
Soil - Our Good Earth
The future rests on the soil beneath our feet.
By Charles C. Mann
Photograph by Jim Richardson
Published: September 2008
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text/1
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."
The Progressive: Wendell Berry’s 10 “Authentic Reasons for Hope”
Joe Mohr
January 14th, 2011
http://www.wendmag.com/greenery/2011/01/the-progressive-wendell-berrys-10-authentic-reasons-for-hope/
Wendell Berry is a personal hero of mine. He is one of the leading voices in the world for proper land stewardship and conservation. As readers of Wend magazine (print and online) we cannot, in good conscience, travel the land without being stewards of the land. Therefore, we should take every opportunity to read Wendell’s words and learn from them. And why not here at Wend, after all you cannot spell Wendell without Wend!
The following excerpt is taken from the December and January issue of The Progressive in an article Wendell Berry wrote entitled, “The News From the Land.” Listed below are a short list of Wendell Berry’s “authentic reasons for hope.”
1. We can learn where we are. We can look around us and see. If we see, by many observable signs, that during our history here we have lost much that we once had, we will see also that much remains.
2. We all see, furthermore, that we are not helpless. Two great powers, if we align ourselves with them and use them, are in our favor. They are land health and conservation. Land health, Also Leopold wrote, “is the capacity of the land for self renewal.” And: “Conservation is our understanding and effort to preserve this capacity.”
3. Land health we have still with us. In most cases in our state we can prove this just by stopping a gulley. Leopold proved it by reforesting an exhausted farm. Wherever the ground is covered with perennial plants—and we can help with this—it is preserved from erosion, it conserves water, it offers year-round benefits to us and also to other creatures. It has healed. It is well. If the ground is covered by native perennials, it is even better.
4. There is hope in seeing what we need to do, and in doing it. A part of our necessary work in conservation, and there is hope in knowing that conservation is already going on. Conservation in various forms has been an established effort in the United States since at least the beginning of the last century. But it was going on well before that wherever the lans was being used frugally, skillfully, and with affection.
5. There would be hope in effective public leadership, if we had it. But ecological degredation is not …much of a political issue in the nation. And I don’t see help coming very soon from leaders in education. What I do see..is great hope in what I call leadership from the bottom. This is coming from individuals and local groups that, without official permission or support or knowledge, are seeing what needs to be done and doing it. Admirable work in sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, local economy, land preservation and restoration, and other kinds of conservation is being done all over the place by unofficial people.
6. Some larger more formal citizens’ organizations are also doing good work. They are worth contributing to, working for, and criticizing when they need it.
7. A number of hope-giving efforts that individual citizens can join are under way.
8. Some things are changing for the better, and there is hope in knowing this. Minds, lives even policies can change for the better. History gives us some reason to think that a whole culture can change for the better. That is what we are hoping and working for.
9. Too much of the talk and politics of conservation consists of slogans such as, “Think globally, act locally,” or even single words such as “green” or “sustainable” or “organic” that act like slogans. Such language finally does harm. It becomes useful, in fact, to land-abusing corporations. What gives hope is actual conversation, actual discourse, in which people say to one another in good faith fully and exactly what they know, and acknowledge honestly the limits of their knowledge.
10. Maybe the finest of all sources of hope are the people for whom the effort of conservation has ceased to be a separate activity, and has come to be at one with their ways of making their living…For them, land health is not something added to their economy, but is their economy’s basis and its result, indistinguishable from it.
Image credit: Robert Shetterly from the inspirational Americans Who Tell the Truth book.
Springtime Tips for Farmers in Stewardship Agreements
2011-05-03
http://www.stackyard.com/news/2011/05/environment/01_ne_stewardship.html
Washing Away the Fields of Iowa
Published: May 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/opinion/05thu2.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
To an untrained eye, the fields of Iowa have a reassuring solidity. You cannot tell that the state has lost half its topsoil in the past century. According to a new report from the Environmental Working Group, Iowa’s soil is washing away at rates far higher than anyone realized.
For Iowa — and other Corn Belt states facing similar problems — this means an increasing loss of fertility that has to be replaced chemically. It marks a failure of stewardship, since these soils will have to feed future generations. And every particle that washes away causes problems downstream, including sedimentation — which can increase the risk of flooding — and the alarming dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the result of runoff of the chemical fertilizers farmers apply to make up for lost fertility.
The Agriculture Department says that a “sustainable” rate of topsoil loss for most of Iowa is 5 tons per acre per year, and the actual average soil erosion is 5.2 tons. But using Iowa State University statistics and an aerial survey, the Environmental Working Group concluded that average annual soil loss in much of Iowa is double the federal government’s estimates. This pace of erosion is caused partly by an increasing number of intense storms. As the report says, it has been exacerbated by a fundamental bias in federal farm policy and supports. In the dozen years before 2009, Iowa received nearly $17 billion in subsidies that fostered high-intensity farming and less than $3 billion to support conservation. In the recent budget battles, conservation programs were the hardest-hit farm programs.
Meanwhile, the race to profit from high crop prices — especially corn for ethanol — and the sobering jump in the cost of rented land in Iowa means that there is an intense push to create greater yield on more acreage and less incentive than ever to practice sound soil conservation.
This is all the more tragic because the techniques for conserving soil are well understood. It requires planting buffer zones between fields and rivers and contour strips on sloping fields and planting regimes that keep crop cover on the soil by rotating between 3 and 4 crops, not just soybeans and corn. It also requires comprehensive conservation regulations and enforcement and, above all, facing the fact that erosion is not nature or bad farmers at work. It is the legacy of bad agricultural policy.
Visionary alternatives to boost food security
Paul Kanitra (Contributor)
Last Updated: Feb 8, 2011
Foreign land investments are controversial and must be approached with consideration to all stakeholders.
Deshakalyan Chowdhury / AFP
Food security is back on the agenda with a bang, but while countries with money but little land want to invest elsewhere, few efforts are as emotive as a global "land grab".
The political risk involved makes such deals fraught with difficulty. There is now considerable discussion concerning how to define stricter investment codes to curb possible abuses.
It is increasingly clear that overseas agrarian acquisitions are problematic. Usamah al Kurdi, the chairman of the founding committee for the Saudi agricultural investment company Agroinvest, says: "Everyone is getting philosophical about this issue."
Some investors, including Hassad Food, which is owned by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, have reassessed external land purchases. Nasser Mohamed al Hajr, the chairman of Hassad Food, says: "In many cases these deals are not win-win situations."
Food security mandates require a broad-based policy agenda but still must include an offshore farmland investment component.
Strategies with insufficient allocations to property ownership, long-term lease agreements or comparable exposures lack sustainability. Investments that offer long-term solutions contribute best to true food security.
Short-term initiatives have a place but furnish only stopgap solutions. A strategic food reserve is essential but affords only fleeting protection. These efforts are no more consequential to long-term food security than the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is to long-term US energy security.
One is an emergency fuel reserve, the other an emergency grain reserve. The purpose of both programmes is limited to the mitigation of temporary supply disruptions.
Conventional thinking cannot adequately address the complexities of the contentious land-grab issues. Foreign land investments are controversial and need to be approached with considerations to all involved.
Ethically conceived endeavours, grounded in economic sensibilities that interact with food security interests, need to be more thoroughly vetted.
Alternative strategies that offer indirect or economically equal exposure to farmland can provide security assurances.
Much more deliberation should be given to agricultural "impact investments" that can deliver such comforts. These pivotal investments can create a positive impact within the agricultural sphere. They render the potential of long-term sustainable solutions and a higher degree of farmland self-security.
Gulf states need to think outside the box to solve the farmland investment riddle. Surging world demand for farmland, with inelastic supply, is heightening land-grab anxieties. Development of a farmland futures contract could partially resolve this predicament.
A futures contract that could act as a legitimate alternative for physical farmland would open up what is now an illiquid asset class.
The instruments would democratise select farmland for investors, hedgers and speculators to trade in this valuable resource. Tradable futures would unlock opportunities similar to those that contracts now allow for other commodity markets.
Most investments can be bucketed into one of four asset classes; equity, debt, commodity and property. Only the property sector lacks a futures contract, despite past attempts to introduce commercial and residential instruments.
A contract on farmland would bring property's most strategic component to the exchange floor. The term "peak soil" would soon become as common as "peak oil".
A misconception of uniqueness and a perceived lack of defining homogeneous elements have limited considerations of a farmland contract.
But sufficient attributes do exist for the creation of standardised futures on select farmland. Exchange-traded instruments can be written to balance the needs and concerns of all interested parties.
Contracts on US farmland should target four marketplace necessities: providing a viable futures contract for hedging purposes; constructing a proxy farmland investment that will be used by a growing investor base; designing a contract that protects the small farmer from institutional exploitation; and creating a solution that results in winners on both sides by addressing frictions between investors and farmers.
Requirements needed for the design of homogeneous contracts best exist in the US. Success there would lead to extending the efforts elsewhere. An evolution similar to what took place after the introduction of fixed-income futures in the 1970s could well occur.
The first financial futures traded on US securities exchanges. Contracts broadened in scope domestically and eventually expanded globally.
Financial futures were perhaps the most innovative concept ever introduced to the futures industry. Equity futures of the 1980s were of equal significance. Conceptually new futures have been exceedingly rare for decades.
Les Rosenthal, a principal at Rosenthal Collins Group and a former chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade's financial instruments committee, says: "We need an infusion of bright new thoughts … we are getting stodgy."
For the time being, fossil fuels are considered our most essential natural resource. But the long-term picture for demand and value of oil looks suspect. The use of energy alternatives will ultimately drive down what now seems like unabated interest in this commodity. Alternative sources will progressively serve a larger share of the market. From minuscule beginnings, exponential growth will eventually overwhelm the marketplace with alternative sources of energy.
Farmland will prove to be of greater long-term strategic value than oil and gas. The importance of this commodity gains increasing recognition with each passing day. Euromoney magazine went so far in December 2008 as to title an article "Agriculture: Farmland is the New Gold".
A continuation of existing food security efforts is necessary for the foreseeable future. However, new alternative avenues need to be explored. Enterprising food security initiatives will uncover more possible solutions to the current dilemma.
Expanding exclusively into traditional agricultural investments lacks imagination at a time when vision is needed.
Paul Kanitra is an independent consultant focusing on farmland derivatives and alternative food security investments. He is based in the US state of Georgia
FOOD: Tackling the Oldest Environmental Problem: Agriculture and Its Impact on Soil
Wes Jackson
Published Dec 13, 2010
http://www.postcarbon.org/report/202246-food-tackling-the-oldest-environmental-problem
India losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil annually due to erosion: Govt
New Delhi, November 26, 2010
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/agriculture/article915245.ece
A farmer at his barren agricultural land near Bikaner. Photo: PTI
India is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of indiscreet and excess use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides over the years, Parliament was told today.
About one millimetre of top soil is being lost each year with a total loss of 5,334 million tonnes annually due to soil erosion, Minister of State for Agriculture K. V. Thomas said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.
The rate of loss is 16.4 tonnes per hectare every year, the minister said while quoting from a study conducted by Central Soil Water Conservation Research and Training Institute (CSWCRTI), Dehradun.
Experiments conducted by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) indicated that non-judicious and imbalanced use of inorganic fertilisers (NPK) over years may result in deterioration of soil fertility/nutrient deficiencies, Mr. Thomas said.
On whether wrong irrigation practices were also responsible for this, the minister said excessive use of irrigation water in canal command may lead to secondary salinisation, affecting, thereby, the soil and crop productivity.
Detailing about corrective steps taken by the government, he said in order to promote judicious use of chemical fertilisers the government is advocating soil test based balanced and Integrated Nutrient Management (INM).
INM relies on conjunctive use of both inorganic and organic sources of plant nutrients like Farm Yard Manure (FYM), compost, bio-fertilisers and green manuring.
The government has launched “National Project on Management of Soil Health & Fertility” during 2008-9 to promote soil test based judicious use of fertilisers for improving soil health and its productivity, Mr. Thomas added.
Besides location specific bio-engineering measures developed by the CSWCRTI Dehradun for controlling soil erosion vis-a-vis top soil, the government has launched several programmes during different plan periods including Integrated Wasteland Development Programme and National Watershed Development Programme for rain-fed areas, he said.
About the film - Dirt
DIRT! The Movie--directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow--takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility--from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.
The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, "dirt is very much alive." Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. "Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt."
DIRT! the Movie--narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis--brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.
DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: "When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked." But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.
"The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again."
What we've destroyed, we can heal.
http://www.dirtthemovie.org/pages/about-the-film
Since I've been reading the information you've been posting on this topic, on the other board, when I trim anything in my yard, I cut it down further and put it on the surface of any soil showing in my gardens. I need to get my hands on those red spiders that eat pill bugs, since mulch is their favorite environment. I've had passing thoughts about breeding them for sale for people who have a need to do things organically. I've only seen two in my yard this year. I need a breeding pair!
Lots of good reading!
Peak Soil - The Silent Global Crisis
By Stephen Leahy
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/peak_soil/
A harsh winter wind blew last night, and this morning the thin snow cover has turned into a rich chocolate brown. The dirt covering the snow comes from cornfields near my home that were ploughed following the harvest, a common practice in southern Ontario and in the corn-growing regions of the US Midwest.
A handful of this dirty snow melts quickly, leaving a thin, fine-grained wet mess. It doesn’t look like much, but the mucky sludge in my hand is the prerequisite for life on the planet.
“We are overlooking soil as the foundation of all life on Earth,” says Andres Arnalds, assistant director of the Icelandic Soil Conservation Service. Arnalds is an eloquent spokesperson for the unheralded emergency of soil erosion, a problem that is reducing global food production and water availability, and is responsible for an estimated 30 percent of the greenhouse gases emissions. “Land degradation and desertification may be regarded as the silent crisis of the world, a genuine threat to the future of humankind.”
Arnalds is dead serious when he calls soil erosion a crisis. Each year, some 38,000 square miles of land become severely degraded or turn into desert. About five billion acres of arable land have been stripped of their precious layer of topsoil and been abandoned since the first wheat and barley fields were planted 10,000 years ago. In the past 40 years alone, 30 percent of the planet’s arable land has become unproductive due to erosion, mainly in Asia and Africa. At current erosion rates, soils are being depleted faster than they are replenished, and nearly all of the remaining 11 billion acres of cropland and grazing land suffer from some degree of erosion.
Most of this erosion is simply due to plowing, removal of crop residues after harvest, and overgrazing, which leaves soil naked and vulnerable to wind and rain. It is akin to tire wear on your car — a gradual, unobserved process that has potentially catastrophic consequences if ignored for too long.
Arnalds has seen our perilous future crisis by looking into the past. Eleven hundred years ago, the first Icelandic settlers came to a cold island mostly covered by forests and lush meadows, and blessed with deep volcanic soils. In a pattern repeated around the world, settlers cleared the forests and put too many animals on the meadows, until 96 percent of the forest was gone and half the grasslands destroyed. By the 1800s, Iceland had become Europe’s largest desert; the people starved, and the once prosperous country became one of the world’s poorest. “Once soil is gone, you can’t get it back,” Arnalds says. “It’s a non-renewable resource.”
Nickel and Dimed to Death
No one knows how much food-producing land will be left by 2050, when another three billion people are expected to join the current global population of 6.5 billion. What we do know is that right now, 99 percent of human food calories come from the land. Global food production has kept pace with population growth thus far thanks chiefly to the extensive use of chemical fertilizers. But food production per acre of land is starting to decline, primarily due to loss of productive land and water shortages. The latter is often the result of soil erosion because soil and vegetation act as a sponge that holds and gradually releases water. And that soil erosion, in turn, is exacerbated by chemical farming practices that over time break down soil structure.
Add to these challenges climate change’s impact on soil erosion and the competition between growing food and producing biofuels, and it’s frightening to consider the challenge of feeding nine billion people when nearly one billion go hungry right now. Arnalds summarizes the challenge: More food will have to be produced within the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined. “Securing food in many places will become a crisis of rapidly growing proportions.”
Erosion largely goes unnoticed by farmers as it “nickels and dimes you to death,” says David Pimentel, an ecologist at Cornell University who has conducted extensive research on the subject. Even if there were no humans on the planet, soils would still erode. The soil formation from the weathering of rock and the breakdown of plants, however, would be faster than the erosion rate; it takes roughly 500 years to create one inch of soil. Once humans remove natural vegetation, soil is exposed to raindrops that easily dislodge it, washing soil particles into creeks, streams, rivers, and eventually into the ocean. One rainstorm will wash away .04 inches of soil. This may not seem like much, but over one acre of land that fraction of an inch adds up to tons of topsoil.
Wind also disrupts soil, and can transport dust huge distances. Dry and windy conditions blew nearly two inches of topsoil off Kansas farmlands during the winter of 1995–96. Contrary to common belief, the topsoil loss in Kansas didn’t end up being neatly deposited on farms in neighboring states. More than 60 percent ended up clogging ditches, streams, rivers, and lakes. That makes waterways more prone to flooding (further exacerbating erosion) and contaminates them with fertilizer and pesticide residues, Pimentel says.
Every rainy day or windy night steals a thin layer of soil from any exposed piece of ground until there is little left but sand and rock. “Iowa has some of the best and deepest soils in the world,” Pimentel says, “and they’ve lost nearly 50 percent in the last hundred years.”
Erosion’s potential threat to humanity remains largely ignored by the world community. When soil experts from around the world met in Selfoss, Iceland in August 2007, they concluded that an international treaty is needed to spur countries into taking action to protect their soils. The soil scientists proposed that, at the very least, soil ought to have its own year — “The International Year of Land Care” — to focus the world’s attention on soil stewardship.
But hold on a second. While politicians, CEOs, and autoworkers might not think much about soil, surely farmers, whose very existence depends on soil, don’t need a bunch of international lawyers and bureaucrats at the United Nations to tell them to protect their lands. After all, controlling erosion isn’t rocket science. By now it’s well known that agricultural practices such as protecting soil with cover crops when the land is not growing edible crops, keeping post-harvest plant residues on the land, and reducing overgrazing and forest clearance are some of the ways to protect soils.
“Farmers know their success depends on the soil, but they often have more immediate needs, such as feeding their families, paying school fees, or fleeing corrupt governments,” says Michael Stocking of the University of East Anglia in Britain, and one of the leading experts on agriculture in tropical countries. Most farmers face so many short-term challenges that it is difficult to invest in the long-term protection of the soil. Social and economic pressures force many farmers to “mine the soil” until the land is completely denuded and is turned into “badlands,” Stocking says.
Such badlands can be found in every country in the world, and are easy to spot. A more worrisome trend is the hidden danger of losing soil fertility on lands that appear healthy. “Fertility loss on good soils has a much bigger impact than further degradation of badlands,” Stocking says.
Healthy topsoil is a complex mixture of minerals, bacteria, fungi, microscopic invertebrates, and larger invertebrates such as ants and earthworms that break down nutrients and transfer them to the roots of plants. Degradation of soils diminishes this incredible below-ground biodiversity, reducing crop yield as well as soils’ ability to store and filter water and to regulate the global cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.
In the past 40 years alone, 30 percent of the planet’s arable land has become unproductive due to erosion. [Edwin Remsberg]
While some American farmers control erosion using low- or no-till techniques for planting, the majority are mining the soil, according to Craig Cox, executive director of the Soil and Water Conservation Society, headquartered in Iowa. “Soil conservation has taken a back seat to maximizing production,” Cox says.
As Cox drives the rural roads of Iowa, he sees fresh signs of erosion on the world’s best farmland. “It’s amazing to see the extent of erosion here, mainly because of the absence of basic soil conservation techniques,” he says. Those techniques — such as planting grasses along the edges of waterways and leaving crop residues on the soil — are some of the hard lessons learned during the dust bowl years of the 1930s. But those lessons have been forgotten — or ignored. Driven by the high costs of fertilizer and fuel, and currently lucrative crop prices, farmers are planting rows of corn right to the edge of stream banks, and sometimes in the streams themselves. “It’s amazing and discouraging to see,” Cox says.
Bad News Biofuels
It’s all the more discouraging because American farmers had reduced soil erosion by about 40 percent between 1985 and 1995, largely due to government policies like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). But CRP programs are now taking a back seat to the desire to cash in on the biofuel bonanza. Erosion is ignored while the US government provides billions of dollars in subsidies for biofuels. “Biofuels and climate change are real threats to America’s soil health,” Cox says.
Farmers are eagerly plowing up CRP lands, pastures, and highly erodible land to grow corn — 12 million additional acres of corn in 2007 alone — so they can profit from the ethanol boom. Ethanol is mainly made from corn, and the federal government hopes the US will be producing 35 billion gallons of the stuff by 2017. Reaching that goal would turn much of the US into a giant cornfield and has already doubled the price of corn in the past two years. Corn is particularly hard on the soil, requiring plenty of fertilizer, water, and pesticides. Cox says ethanol has sparked a “gold-rush mentality” among farmers who are mortgaging the future health of their soils for short-term profits. “There’s no question that the ethanol boom is increasing erosion.”
Not surprisingly, land prices and rents in the corn belt have jumped upward, creating additional pressure to “mine the soil to pay the mortage.” Farmland has been a popular investment for many years, and in some states, half of all farmland is rented. This reduces the incentives for soil conservation, since the farmer who works the field is not the permanent caretaker of the land. Ethanol-driven land degradation will not disappear even if the much-touted cellulosic ethanol technology is commercialized. The cellulosic process uses crop residues like corn stalks and wheat straw (rather than grains like corn or soy) to make ethanol. While cellulosic ethanol won’t directly use food as fuel, the loss of crop residues would further expose soils to erosion. And it would also reduce organic matter in soils, greatly diminishing their fertility, Cox says. “I’m very concerned there will be serious consequences for soils if cellulosic ethanol goes forward.”
Hard Rains of Climate Change
Strange new weather patterns linked to global climate change could further harm vulnerable soils. Increasing corn and soy production could expose soils to the hard rains that climate change is producing.
A number of studies have documented increased rainfall intensity in the US since 1970. In many regions, the amount of overall rainfall hasn’t changed, but the rain comes in shorter, more intense bursts, doubling the normal rates of erosion. This is particularly noticeable in the southern US, Cox says. A brand new computer climate model that uses data collected over the last decade reveals that soil scientists have substantially underestimated the amount of erosion from climate change’s hard rains. “It could be four times higher than we thought,” Cox says. And that rate appears to be accelerating as hard rains wash soil off the land, ruining streams and destroying aquatic habitat. The soil conservation techniques of yesterday may not be enough to keep soil healthy with climate change, he says. “There has been very little attention paid to the impact of climate change on soil conservation.”
“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
There are some 2,300 billion tons of carbon locked in the world’s soils, far more than the 790 billion tons currently in the atmosphere. Land degradation, including deforestation of farmland and desertification, may account for as much as 30 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas releases, according to studies by Rattan Lal of Ohio State University. Aside from removing the natural vegetation, plowing the soil releases organic carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Conventional agriculture methods have already reduced soil carbon by 30 and 60 percent in much of the US, says Don Reicosky, a research soil scientist with the US Department of Agriculture who is based in Morris, Minnesota. Carbon is a key ingredient for plant growth and crucial for soil fertility. For Reicosky, carbon is the primary driver of the entire living soil ecosystem: “Carbon does great things for the soil but it takes a generation to see the impacts.”
Farmers have only been able to escape the impacts of this massive loss of organic carbon thanks to cheap chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels. But that short-term solution is just making matters worse, according to a new study out of the University of Illinois. In examining crop records and soil samples from the Illinois Morrow Plots dating back 100 years, soil scientists were surprised to see corn yields falling on plots that had received the most chemical nitrogen fertilizers and crop residues. It turns out that even with additional crop residues, fertilized soils have much less soil carbon, likely resulting in higher releases of carbon into the atmosphere.
Keeping carbon in the soil may be one of the quickest ways to reduce global carbon emissions. And if that’s not enough reason to substitute carbon storage for crop yield as the ultimate goal of farming, then the improvements in soil fertility and declines in erosion that will give us a chance at feeding a crowded world ought to.
“Blaming the farmer for these problems is futile, since we’ve created the economic system they operate in,” says Fred Kirschenmann, a North Dakota organic farmer who works at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. That system forces farmers to produce as much as possible no matter what the cost, Kirschenmann says.
A Different Way of Farming
The Kirschenmann family broke out of that system in the late 1960s when Fred learned of organic farming around the same time that his father, a veteran grower, saw their farm’s soil quality deteriorating despite best efforts to protect it. Their primary objective was to rebuild the soil, and after years of trial and error, their 3,500 acres were certified as organic in 1976; they have never looked back. Today, about 1,000 acres are in native prairie and used for grazing livestock, and the rest is managed in a diversified operation with eight to nine crops each year in three different rotations. Being debt-free — a rare privilege in farming country — enabled the Kirschenmanns to take the economic risk of finding a way to farm that was environmentally sustainable.
While organic farmers eschew chemical fertilizers, they often use intensive tilling to eliminate weeds, which can break up soils. But most organic farmers are careful to maintain cover crops and add manures to keep the soil covered and well fed with organic matter. As a result, erosion is many times less than on conventional farms. And because organic soils are more fertile, they absorb more water deeper, further reducing erosion and allowing them to better withstand droughts. A USDA study using data collected between 1994 and 2005 confirmed that organic fields have much more living soil matter than those farmed by conventional methods that did not till the soil. Corn on the organic plots also produced 18 percent higher yields.
“Agriculture’s biggest problem is the health of soil; erosion is just a symptom,” Kirschenmann says. Overcoming that problem means fundamentally re-thinking our food production systems so that the first priority is to preserve the fertility and ecological health of the land. As to how this can be done, Kirschenmann refers to the writings of Sir Albert Howard, a British botanist who wrote in 1940 that farmers ought to farm as nature does in the forest. There should always be livestock and a multitude of plant varieties; all “wastes” should be returned to the soil so that growth and decay balance each other; great pains need to be taken to store rainfall. In such a system, Howard wrote, plants and animals protect themselves from disease.
That approach may seem quaint in our technology-driven industrial culture, but Kirschenmann points out that the cows on his farm no longer need visits from the vet. Soil considerations aside, Kirschenmann wonders why — if conventional agriculture is so effective — 62 percent of Iowa farm families have off-farm jobs.
“Our system is clearly dysfunctional, and in destroying soil, we are putting enormous burdens on future generations,” he says. “We need to start to be behave as members of the land community instead of continuing to act like conquerors.”
Stephen Leahy is a freelance environmental journalist who has written for many publications, including New Scientist and The Sunday Times (London), and is the science and environment correspondent for Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS), a wire service headquartered in Rome.
Peak oil, peak soil
Georgetown Public Policy Review
http://gppireview.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/peak-oil-peak-soil/
Peak Soil
Monday, 05 January 2009 12:17
David Montgomery Source: The New Internationalist
Oil is what most of us think of as a strategic resource, yet in the long run it is soil which is the more important. Even so, people's eyes tend to glaze over when talk turns to soil conservation, maybe because it's so much easier to see the immediate relevance of rising gas prices and climate change in these days of peak oil. So while public attitudes on climate change have shifted dramatically over the past few years, a crisis in global agriculture remains hidden: we are, and have long been, using up the supply of topsoil we rely on to grow our food.
Those of us living in modern cities can easily forget that without fertile soil we could not survive. Yet modern agricultural techniques are eroding the very soil on which food production depends. This ongoing soil loss means we face the problem of feeding a growing population from a shrinking land base. This should be troubling because even a casual reading of history shows that, under the right circumstances, climatic extremes, political turmoil or resource abuse can bring down a society. And in the century ahead we face all three, as shifting climate patterns and depleted oil supplies coincide with progressive loss of farmland.
We have, in effect, been 'mining' soil for much of human history. Indeed, the decline in fertility and loss of agricultural lands through wind and water erosion is a problem as old as agriculture itself. Civilizations from Babylon to Easter Island have proven only as durable as the fertility of their land. The Roman Empire left Eastern Mediterranean agriculture in a state from which it has yet to recover. But the problem of soil loss is not just ancient history. Exacerbated by modern industrial farming, global agricultural soil loss of about a millimetre per year outpaces soil formation by at least tenfold.
Over the past century, the effects of long-term soil erosion were masked by bringing new land under cultivation and by developing fertilizers, pesticides and crop varieties to compensate for declining soil productivity. However, such 'agrotech' fixes become progressively more difficult to maintain because crop yields decline exponentially as soil thins. While fertilizers can temporarily offset the effects of soil erosion, the long-term productivity of the land cannot be maintained in the face of the reduced organic matter and thinning of soil that characterize industrial agriculture. Replacing soil fertility with chemical fertilizers and genetically engineered crops can boost productivity in the short run, but a world stripped of its soil cannot, in the end, feed itself.
Feeding a doubled human population without further increasing crop yields would require doubling the area presently under cultivation. Such vast tracts of land could only be found in tropical forests and subtropical grasslands - like the Amazon and the Sahel. Experience shows that farming such marginal lands produces an initial return, but the land quickly becomes degraded and has to be abandoned - if the population has somewhere to go. With the land best suited for agriculture already under cultivation, expansion into marginal areas is not a long-term strategy.
Small and soil friendly
In contrast to the amount of arable land, which has varied widely through time and across civilizations, the amount of land needed to feed a person has systematically declined. Hunting and gathering societies used from 20 to 100 hectares per person; our current use of 1.5 billion hectares of cultivated land to feed roughly 6 billion people equates to about 0.25 hectares of cropland per person. And by 2050 the amount of available cropland is projected to drop to less than 0.1 hectare per person. So, simply keeping up will require major increases in crop yields.
Before 1950, increases in global food production came by either enlarging the area under cultivation or improved husbandry. Since 1950 most of the increase has come from mechanization and intensified use of chemical fertilizers. The 'green revolution' doubled food production and averted a food crisis through increased use of chemical fertilizers, massive investments in irrigation infrastructure in developing nations and the introduction of high-yield varieties of wheat and rice capable of producing two or three harvests a year. Subsequently, however, growth in crop yields has slowed and achieving further substantial increases through conventional means seems unlikely - since crops don't take up half the nitrogen in the fertilizers farmers apply today, adding even more won't help.
Perhaps genetic engineering could substantially increase crop yields - but only at the risk of releasing super-competitive species into agricultural and natural environments, with unknowable consequences. So far, the promise of greatly increased crop yields from genetic engineering remains unfulfilled. And it could prove catastrophic, should genetically modified genes that convey sterility cross to non-proprietary crops. Does it even make sense to design crops that can't reproduce?
So how do we move to sustainable agriculture and still feed the world? The answer lies in better adapting what we do to where we do it. To do this we need to restructure agricultural subsidies to favour small-scale organic farms, encourage soil-friendly farming methods such as no-tilling (see below) for larger industrial farms, and develop urban agriculture.
Public dialogue and media portrayals of organic farming tend to the simplistic, pitting those who consider modern industrial farming unsustainable against those who argue that organic methods are unethical when hunger plagues so many people. Representatives of agribusiness like to question the relevance of organic agriculture in feeding a 10-billion-person planet and instead promote agrochemicals and genetically modified crops as keys to food security. Yet many studies over the past decades have shown that crop yields under organic methods are comparable to those achieved through conventional methods. Indeed, some of the highest crop yields come from small-scale, labour-intensive organic farms.
Many currently profitable industrial farming methods would become uneconomic if their true costs were incorporated into market pricing. Direct financial subsidies and failure to include the costs of depleting soil fertility encourage practices that degrade the land. In the US, for example, the top 10 per cent of agricultural producers now receive 66 per cent of the more than $10 billion handed out in annual subsidies, and they use it to support large farms growing single crops, particularly wheat, corn and cotton. We need to curb the $300 billion in global agricultural subsidies - more than six times the world's annual development assistance budget - that encourage unsustainable industrial farming. Shifting public support to make organic agriculture more competitive is part of the answer.
No-till alternative
No-till agriculture also warrants greater public support, as it can effectively maintain crop yields and slow down soil loss, even on large, mechanized farms. Instead of using a plough to turn the soil and open the ground, no-till farmers push seeds into the ground through the organic matter left over from prior crops, minimizing direct disturbance of the soil. Although adoption of no-till methods is often accompanied by increased herbicide use, crop residue left at the ground surface acts as mulch, helping to retain moisture and retard erosion by as much as 90 per cent. With no-till practices currently being used on less than 10 per cent of global cropland, there is tremendous potential to expand them, and to research how to couple them better with organic methods.
Industrial agriculture will never provide a way out of hunger for the third of humanity that lives on less than two dollars a day. More innovative thinking is necessary, and on a global scale. If we are to feed those too poor to buy food, the naïve idea that all we need to do is produce cheap food must go. While food was still cheap there were still far too many hungry people on the planet. A different approach - one that might actually work - would be to promote the prosperity of small farms in the Global South so that subsistence farmers can feed themselves, generate an income and become stewards of the land. To do this they need access to enough land to grow a marketable surplus, and an agricultural support system that builds on indigenous agricultural knowledge and provides appropriate tools.
Finally, as oil and the cost of shipping food around the world become more expensive, it will become increasingly attractive to take food production to the people - into the cities. With 800 million people already involved, urban farming is not restricted to developing countries; by the late 1990s two-thirds of Moscow's families were engaged in urban agriculture. City agriculturalist Will Allen has been pioneering urban farming in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a way to provide healthy, affordable diets to low-income urban populations. He has come to realize that urban farms not only deliver fresh produce to city dwellers at a lower cost of transportation, but that they typically use far less water, fertilizer and oil, and can reduce urban waste disposal problems and costs.
Among soil scientists, concern over the world's fast-depleting soil is almost universal. Unfortunately, saving dirt just isn't a very sexy issue. However, time grows short and industrial agriculture is proving an expensive and increasingly risky dead end. We are left with a fundamental challenge: how do we merge traditional agricultural knowledge with modern understanding of soil ecology to promote and sustain intensive agriculture? Herein lies our real hope for feeding a hungry world.
***
David R Montgomery is the author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington.
Voices: Peak Soil: Does Civilization Have a Future?
http://www.earthmagazine.org/earth/article/32f-7da-4-f
First there was Peak Oil, the idea that there’s only so much oil out there and we may have reached or even passed a turning point in global oil production. In his 2007 book “Peak Everything,” author Richard Heinberg said it’s not just fossil fuels: Everything from population to food production to freshwater availability has its own point of no return.
© iStockphoto.com/northlightimages
So that must include Peak Soil. Of all the assorted peaks that loom over our future, Peak Soil has to be the most important. We are no longer hunter-gatherers. Cultivating the soil is the basis of the human food supply, and the very foundation of civilized society. Without it, civilization could not survive.
Agriculture is contingent on natural geological goods, such as soil, and services, including water, weathering and nutrient cycles. These cycles, together with the cycle of erosion, are responsible for the origin and development of soil in the first place. Paradoxically, they are also responsible for soil’s ultimate degradation and destruction. Unfortunately for farmers, agriculture has a tendency to reinforce the destructive aspects, especially erosion.
The inherent fertility of soil used to be an important factor in food production. Now it’s more or less irrelevant. Modern industrial agriculture now depends on the use of high inputs of nonrenewable resources, particularly oil, gas and fertilizer raw materials, to keep crops growing. Our future is so heavily mortgaged to the exploitation of such agricultural inputs that we have overshot the ability of the planet to support us in a sustainable way. The World Wildlife Fund estimates the overshoot at about 25 percent. In other words, modern society is living off global principal. Anybody with a bank account knows that living off principal rather than just the interest is an unsustainable option.
Farming has produced a scar ("anthrobleme") on the planet: We have imparted some measure of damage to about two-thirds of the world’s arable soils. But this didn’t start in modern times. The Neolithic Revolution — that is, the start of farming and our agricultural experiment with the biosphere — began just over 10,000 years ago. We have been degrading soils at an average rate of about 55,000 hectares per year ever since, according to research by David Pimentel, an agricultural ecologist at Cornell University. This rate of degradation appears to be between one and two orders of magnitude faster than the average rate at which soils form — a recipe for unsustainability. Thus, 10,000 years ago, there was more soil than there is now: Peak Soil happened at least 10 millennia ago.
Ward Chesworth, 2008
Agriculture is by its very nature destructive, and modern industrial agriculture acts like an army waging war on the soil. Even where careful techniques of husbandry are employed under the best of intentions, the inexorable path of a farmer’s digging is toward the degeneration and even the destruction of soil. It’s no more than the second law of thermodynamics in action. It is a system that has been flawed since the beginning.
In the 21st century we continue to slide down the nether slope of Peak Soil. By 2050, the planet may have another 3 billion or 4 billion people to support and the slope can only get steeper. Can we feed 10 billion or more? Probably, but only if we still have the help of oil and gas, which have allowed industrial agriculture to take over throughout most of the Western world. The problem is that by that time, we will likely have fallen so far down Peak Oil that it will cost more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. That’s not a system that will continue to work.
Obviously, if we are to sustain the type of human society we call civilized, two things will be required: a smaller human population and sustainable agriculture not dependent on fossil fuels.Sadly, I’m not optimistic about either of these things happening. Regarding the first requirement, there are strong social forces — popes and ayatollahs among them — that work to ensure we keep making babies. And if social strictures falter, our Darwinian hard-wiring to eat, survive and reproduce will probably kick in and keep our numbers unsustainably high.
As for the second requirement, we talk a good game, especially in academia, but the fact is that in spite of our big brains, a sustainable system of farming has eluded us for 10,000 years. The problem is, when the fashion is to couple sustainability with development, it will be impossible ever to achieve true sustainability. Nonetheless, sustainable agriculture would undoubtedly be a good thing, if we could find a way to achieve it.
Ecologist William Rees, inventor of the concept of the ecological footprint, has said that “sustainability is the greatest collective exercise the human race will ever have to undertake.” I’d say that it’s either the greatest collective exercise or the last forlorn hope.
Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America
by Alice Friedemann
10 April 2007
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=1
Peak soil: it’s like peak oil, only worse
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
http://peakgeneration.blogspot.com/2010/05/peak-soil-its-like-peak-oil-only-worse.html
“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/
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