The Problems of Earth: The role of agriculture in the soil quality
By "the role of agriculture in the soil quality" we refer to the effect that the science, and art of cultivating plants and livestock significantly has on the ability of the soil to perform its essential functions.
Cropland spraying (irxp.com, 2018)
Soil is an important natural resource supporting plant, animal, and human populations and is a habitat for a diversity of species. Productive soils throughout the world are being degraded rapidly due to human activities. Declining soil quality over the past century has manifested itself in loss of agriculturally productive lands, forests, and wetlands due to overuse.
The quality of the soil is essential because it is the beginning of the quality of the food. That quality of food provides health quality. Therefore, if we grow croplands on poor soil, we will be feeding ourselves with poor food and we will have a poor health. Our health and the health of our planet are connected.
In every handful of healthy soil, there are more organisms than the number of people who’ve ever lived on planet Earth. In a healthy human body, you have more bacterial cells than you have human cells. However, there has been a common tend to sanitize everything that humans have to touch. But by doing so, we have collapsed the soil. Such as human bodies can handle punctual stress, but the cannot handle chronic stress, the same happens with the soil, until it does not function anymore. Since chemical agriculture ramped up worldwide in the 1970s, we have lost one third of the Earth’s topsoil.
A child learning the worms inhabiting the soil (Kiss the ground, 2020)
The overuse of soil caused less food-production. To try to change this situation, rather than reverse it, farmers started spraying with toxic chemicals and fertilizers their lands. As a result, all of the soils that are under chemical conventional agriculture, are almost completely devoid of microorganisms to keep this soil healthy. Spraying the soil with chemicals, kills the very microbes that we need to give us health, and pull the carbon from the atmosphere. The more chemicals you spray, the weaker the soil becomes, and the more chemicals you need to spray.
That vicious cycle was developed as a result of war. A german scientist named Fritz Haber invented the nitrogen fertilizer for increasing food production. His other scientific breakthrough was the creation of poisons: pesticides and the gas used in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. After the war, Americans took his poisons and rebranded them as pesticides for American farms. Since then, the quality of soil has been dropping. Not only the quality of soil, but also the quality of freshwater.
Airplane spraying pesticides (Sunshine hours, 2018)
Pesticides are so over-sprayed that they find their way to fresh water, and polluting our drinking water. For example, the most used chemical for spraying corn is glyphosate. Glyphosate is suspected to cause cancer and intoxication yet it is found in the drinking water of many American cities that are near by cropland. Glyphosate alters the microorganisms living in the gut, that may lead to disturbances that can create diseases. Despite being poison, pesticides are now being used at rates that would have been inconceivable.
Soil degradation causes desertification – the process in which land is turning to desert– and desertification increases the speed of the climate change. Healthy soil absorbs water and CO2, but damaged soil releases water and CO2, becoming dust. No plant is able to live in dust. Plants are essential for transpiration, and transpiration is essential to humidity, and humidity is essential for rain, and rain is essential for plants, and plants are essential for animals, and animals are essential for plants, and so on.
Desertification around the world (reddit, 2015)
Agriculture is based on deforestation, cutting down billions of trees you cause desertification and a change on the microclimate in several regions. Now, we have changed the microclimate of more than the half of the world’s land, changing the macro-climate. About two thirds of the world is desertifying.
Desertification pushes off their land 40 million people every year. By 2050, it is estimated that one billion people will be refugees of soil desertification. Poor land leads to poor people, poor people leads to social breakdown: massive migrations, no access to livelihood opportunities, no access to proper education, and ideal recruitment conditions for criminal organizations.
People trying to reverse desertification in Maghreb (Agriculture du Maghreb, 2020)
The way we are feeding ourselves is undermining the very ecology that we are dependent upon. Therefore, the long-term prognosis for our survival on this planet is very poor if we do not change this system.
More than 20 civilizations, in all regions of the world, have failed because of agriculture damaging the environment so it would not be able to meet the needs of the growing population.
According to the United Nations, the world’s remaining topsoil will be gone within 60 years. Meaning that unless we find a sustainable way to exploit our soils, we have 60 harvests left.
What is done and what to do?
Efficiency of resource use, substitution of inputs, and redesign of agroecosystems based on nature's model, provide viable alternatives in converting present agricultural monoculture systems that require scarce fossil fuels and imported fertilizers and chemicals to more resilient and sustainable options. As important as sustainable production, diverse agroecosystems provide invaluable ecosystem services such as clean air and water, local rainfall, capture and storage of CO2, cycling nutrients, and mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events in a changing climate. Natural systems have evolved to survive the test of time; farming systems with this same capacity are needed for the future.
Kiss the ground documentary official trailer* (2020)
Rethinking how we use our soil is essential for cooling down the climate. A year-to-year reduction in carbon in the upper atmosphere is not achieved by only switching to renewal energies or stop cars fueled by oil. There is an urgent need for sequestering the carbon that is already in the atmosphere, and sink it back into the soil. Once we achieve this drawdown, within 20 years, we have cooling. Healing our soils, heals our climate.
The largest agricultural science institution in Europe is INRA, in France. This institution has been studying the soil for over a hundred years. INRA recently developed a program called the Four for 1000 Initiative. Their goal is to increase the carbon content of soil by 0.4% annually by changing the way agriculture is done. That would sequester the same amount of carbon that humanity emits each year. Four for 1000 Initiative was signed by 30 countries from around the world during the United Nations climate summit in Paris in 2015, the COP 21. To achieve an agriculture that sequesters carbon requires a radical reduction in toxic pesticides and synthetic chemicals and fertilizers. However, the three largest contributors to CO2 and the three largest agricultural producers –China with 7,711 million tons, US with 5,425 million tons, and India with 1,602 million tons– were missing from the agreement. A few years later –following Trump policies– the US announced that it had pulled entirely out of the Paris Agreement.
The agriculture operation must be perceived as a living ecosystem. By diversifying, ranchers can harvest every month, the soil extension needed is much smaller, grow more food, and there is room for animals too. Not only wild animals but also cattle. This new system integrates cattle in the living ecosystem instead of being concentrated into feedlots, which produce a huge amount of greenhouse gases. In a grazing situation –such as the one we have in the Azores– greenhouse gases are sequestered. Suggesting that the problem is not the animal but where the animals are at, and the amount of animals produced.
Using livestock to revers desertification has an extremely low cost. Alan Savory is using cattle to regenerate plains in Zimbabwe. It is not an easy task, it needs careful planning and smart management. But it is worth it, and besides, if humans can design spaceships, we can design grazing plans and control charts. An other project similar to Savory’s is found in Half Moon Bay, California, where the Markegards have a regenerative ranch.
The fence of Alan Savory’s land (Agriculture de conservation, 2014)
If permaculture and agroforestry are so good for us and for the Earth, why is it that so few farmers and ranchers do it? Money? Not really: even with genetically altered seeds, chemical sprays, and government subsidies, most farmers struggle to make few euros per acre. Without the subsidies, they would not be making any money at all. Education and misinformation are the main factors. Once the farmers start to manage for soil health and see this economic benefits, they will not turn back.
Permaculture’s benefits are of over 100 euros per acre. Building a healthy farm ecosystem, is going resilient, having more benefits and virtually eliminate the subsidies, because they would not be necessary.
Next question you may have is: and if I do not live in the countryside? You can recycle. By recycling you not only give infinite lives to materials, but also you are fueling compost. By recycling food waste, you get compost to fertilize farmlands in a sustainable and natural way in return. San Francisco’s strategy is to incentive recycling and composting through its waste taxes. This model leaded San Francisco to become the most sustainable big city in the US in just a few years while growing the economy. This model is slowly being adopted in other places such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Port-au-Prince in Haiti, croplands in China, etc.
Compost being aerated (Laura Berman, 2021)
As individuals, the more we choose regenerative foods, the more the farmers will grow them. The goal is to eat and grow food that heals the planet. And the fancy way to articulate it is the regenerative diet. A plant based diet –not necessarily vegan–, with meat and fish that comes from pasture-raised, humanely-killed, slowly fished animals. Food –plant source or animal source– grown in regenerative farming is going to be much higher in nutrient density, as it is not crammed with chemicals, grew up in a healthy soil, and with divers source of nutrients. This is a crucial choice that all of us can make. What are we eating and what kind of farming systems are we supporting. Now we have a horizon that the 20s 30s generations can say “In my lifetime, we can achieve this.”
Food forest in Boston. (bostonfoodforest.org, 2019)
One of the most stunning examples of regeneration is Loess Plateau, in China. It was called the most eroded place on Earth. Filled with incredibly poor people. In 1994, a restoration program begun. In 2009, an area of 35,000 square km –14,000 square miles–, the size of Belgium, was regenerated. Vegetation was back, agriculture was back, and hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty.
Loess Plateau before –1994– and after –2009– recovery. (myrokan, 2017)
“We must harness the regenerative power of Earth itself.”– Woody Harrelson.
Maria Serra
SOURCES
Ding et al. (2021) Alleviating soil degradation caused by watermelon continuous cropping obstacle: Application of urban waste compost. Chemosphere (262), 128387. DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2020.128387
Herman, R.A. et al. (2019) Risk-Only Assessment of Genetically Engineered Crops Is Risky. Trends in Plant Science (24:1) pg. 58-68. DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2018.10.001
Kiss The Ground (2020) kissthegroundmovie.com
Lal, R. (2013) Vulnerability of Agroecosystems to Environmental Factors. Climate Vulnerability: Understanding and Addressing Threats to Essential Resources (4) pg. 109-116. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-384703-4.00414-7
Ngueyen, H., Morrison, J., Neven, D. (2019) Changing Food Systems: Implications for Food Security and Nutrition. Sustainable Food and Agriculture. pg. 153-168. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-812134-4.00009-1
Porazinska, D.L. & Wall, D.H. (2013) Soil Conservation. Encyclopedia of Biodiversity (2 ed) pg. 590-598. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-384719-5.00127-1
Porter, P. & Francis, C.A. (2017) Agroecology: Farming Systems with Nature as Guide. Encyclopedia of Applied Plant Sciences (3) (2 ed) pg. 9-12. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-394807-6.00239-2 ∫
Regeneration International (2019) Why Regenerative agriculture? regenerationinternational.org https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iknWWKZOUs
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