Soil Is the Solution: Saving the Earth

Soil Is the Solution

Saving the Earth

 

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By Dr. Mercola

It's easy to take soil for granted. That is, until you lose it. The dirt beneath your feet is arguably one of the most under-appreciated assets on the planet. Without it, life would largely cease to exist while, when at its prime, this "black gold" gives life.

In nature, plants thrive because of a symbiotic relationship with their surrounding environment, including microorganisms in the soil.

The rhizosphere is the area immediately around a plant's root. It contains microorganisms that thrive on chemicals released from the plant's roots. These chemicals, known as exudates, include carbohydrates, phytochemicals and other compounds.

In exchange for the exudates, the root microbiome supplies the plant with important metabolites for health, which, along with exposure to pests and pathogens, helps plants produce phytochemicals.

A well-fed root microbiome will also supply plants with ample nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) — the three ingredients that also make up most synthetic fertilizer (NPK).

Unfortunately, while nature's system results in handsome rewards, including more nutritious foods and less environmental pollution, modern-day farmers have largely become stuck in a cycle of dousing crops with synthetic chemicals that destroy the soil and, ultimately, the environment.

 

Why Synthetic Fertilizers Are Ruining the Planet

Synthetic fertilizers make sense in theory, and they do make plants grow bigger and faster. The problem is that the plants are not necessarily healthier. In fact, they miss out on the symbiotic relationship with their root microbiome.

Because they're being supplied with NPK, the plant no longer "wastes" energy producing exudates to feed its microbiome.

Therefore, it receives fewer metabolites for health in return. The end result is plants that look good on the outside but lack minerals, phytochemicals and defenses against pests and disease on the inside.

Further, as reported by Rick Haney, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) soil scientist, less than 50 percent of synthetic fertilizers applied to crops are used by the plants. Haney told Orion Magazine:¹

"Farmers are risk averse … They've borrowed a half million dollars for a crop that could die tomorrow. The last thing they want to worry about is whether they put on enough fertilizer. They always put on too much, just to be safe."

The excess fertlizer runs off into the environment, with disastrous effects. As fertilizer runs off of farms in agricultural states like Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri and others, it enters the Mississippi River, leading to an overabundance of nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorus, in the water.

This, in turn, leads to the development of algal blooms, which alter the food chain and deplete oxygen, leading to dead zones. One of the largest dead zones worldwide can be found in the Gulf of Mexico, beginning at the Mississippi River delta.² Fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico have been destroyed as a result.

Soil Health Campaign Educates Farmers How to Work With Nature

USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) convenes sessions around the U.S. in an effort to improve soil health and teach farmers how to use less fertilizer and produce the same, and in some cases better, yields. Haney told Orion Magazine:³

"Our entire agriculture industry is based on chemical inputs, but soil is not a chemistry set … It's a biological system. We've treated it like a chemistry set because the chemistry is easier to measure than the soil biology."

While standard soil tests measure chemical properties in the soil, Haney developed a test to measure soil biology. A rich microscopic community is what Haney is after. Only this can support the fascinatingly complex process of plant growth and, at the same time, naturally cut carbon emissions by fixing carbon in the soil.

It's estimated that one-third of the surplus carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stems from poor land-management processes that contribute to the loss of carbon, as carbon dioxide, from farmlands.⁴ Writing in Orion Magazine, Kristin Ohlson, author of "The Soil Will Save Us," explained:⁵

"When we admire good soil's dark chocolate-cake sponginess and sweet smell, we're admiring the handiwork of trillions of soil microorganisms over time.

They eat carbon and expire carbon dioxide, just as we do, but they also "fix" a percentage of that carbon in the soil. Barring disturbance, it stays there for a very long time.

… Photosynthesis is the only process that safely and inexpensively removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, allowing carbon that is a problem in the skies to become a boon for the land.

Based on this principle, one hundred governments and nonprofits launched the 4/1000 Initiative … calling for an increase of carbon in the world's soils by 0.4 percent per year.

This relatively small boost will not only radically improve soil fertility but also, the coalition claims, halt the annual rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide."

Three 'Game-Changing' Practices for Agriculture

Carbon farming is a simple premise that involves using agricultural methods that can naturally trap carbon dioxide in the ground (for decades, centuries or more) while also absorbing it from the air. 


The process, known as "carbon sequestration," could help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and:

Regenerate the soil	Limit agricultural water usage with no till and crop covers
Increase crop yields	Reduce the need for agricultural chemicals and additives, if not eliminate such need entirely in time
Reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels	Reduce air and water pollution by lessening the need for herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers

A recent study published in the journal Nature further revealed that by managing soils to reduce greenhouse gases, it could lead to a wealth of "side benefits," including healthier soils and ecosystems, less fertilizer runoff and less soil erosion.⁶

In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, Phil Robertson of Michigan State University explained three "game-changing" practices that could help make soils "net mitigating," meaning they capture more greenhouse gases than they emit.⁷

1.    No-till cultivation, in which crops are grown without plowing

2.    Advanced nitrogen fertilizer management, or applying only minimal amounts of fertilizer

3.    Cover crops

The latter strategy alone, cover crops, can virtually eliminate the need for irrigation when done right. The cover crops also act as insulation, so the soil doesn't get as hot or cold as it would if bare. This allows microbes to thrive longer.

Also, the soil biology heats up the soil, which can extend your overall growing season in colder areas, and it helps prevent soil erosion. In 2012, a Census of Agriculture report found just over 10 million acres of farmland (out of 390 million total) were being planted with cover crops, but its use is growing.

In an annual survey of farmers taken in 2014, farmers reported planting double the mean acreage in cover crops reported in 2010.⁸ Farmers who adopt the technique have reported better soil texture, less erosion, and increased crop yields.

Planting Winter Cover Crops May Make Farmers Money

This is key, because convincing most farmers to change their practices solely for environmental reasons isn't an easy proposition, especially if it also involves increased costs to the farmer. Robertson recommends using conservation payments, which have been in place for decades, to pay farmers to adopt more sustainable agricultural practices.

Some farmers also change their ways after seeing the success of their neighbors' farms. Farmer Doug Anson, who along with his family plants cover crops on 13,000 of their 20,000 acres of Indiana farmland, told The New York Times:⁹

"In the part of a field where we had planted cover crops, we were getting 20 to 25 bushels of corn more per acre than in places where no cover crops had been planted … That showed me it made financial sense to do this."

A research project that's been ongoing for two decades in Michigan, comparing crop plots using four different farming methods, has also shown promise for cover crops. The fields that received small amounts of fertilizer and were planted with winter cover crops had yields similar to conventional fields with far less nitrogen leaching.¹⁰

The U.S. government has even set up a small subsidy system to help farmers offset the costs of cover crops and other regenerative practices, but one major hurdle to cover crops becoming mainstream involves absentee land owners.

Many farmers grow crops on land they do not own but rather lease; they therefore have little incentive to want to improve soil quality on land they do not own. Landowners could, however, offer incentives to farmers to use regenerative practices that would, in turn, increase the value of their land.¹¹

Farmers and Landowners Can Get Paid for 'Carbon Credits'

Conventional farmers have much to gain from trying out carbon-sequestration practices like planting cover crops, applying compost and not tilling; they can accumulate, and be paid for, carbon credits.

Farmers can even use the USDA's COMET-Farm online tool to find out their approximate carbon footprint, as well as experiment to see which land-management practices sequester the most carbon on their farm.¹² How does it work? Modern Farmer explained:¹³

"Land-based carbon sequestration is measured in metric tons per hectare (2.5 acres); one metric ton earns one carbon credit, making the math easy. In California — the only state in the US with a full-fledged cap-and-trade program — the current value of a carbon credit is around $12 to $13. (Farmers in other states, by the way, are eligible to earn credits through the California carbon market.)

Alberta, which has the most robust carbon market in Canada and rewards several agricultural practices with carbon credits, raised the price of carbon credits from $15 to $20 on January 1, 2016; in 2017, the price will go up to $30 per credit."

Unfortunately, the way the system is currently set up, farmers already using beneficial conservation practices are not eligible for carbon credits. Only those switching land from conventional agriculture to soil-conservation practices may receive credits, with the exception of spreading compost over grazed grasslands, which are used to raise grass-fed beef and other pastured animal products.

This recently approved carbon credit "protocol" was largely the result of the Marin Carbon Project, which found a single 1/2-inch dusting of compost on rangeland can boost the soil's carbon storage for at least 30 years.

If you're a farmer interested in receiving carbon credits, you'll need to sign up with a carbon credit registry such as the Climate Action Reserve, the American Carbon Registry, or and the Verified Carbon Standard. An inspector will visit your farm regularly to ensure you've carried out the protocols correctly.¹⁴

Regenerating Our Soil Is the Solution

It's clear that paying attention to our soils is crucial to our health and future. Fortunately, change is occurring both on large and small scales. The USDA's NRCS has become very committed to understanding and teaching about natural soil health and regenerative agriculture

Not only will regenerating our soils lead to improved food production, it will also address a majority of resource concerns, such as water. When you add carbon back into the soil, such as by adding mulch or cover crops, the carbon feeds mycorrhizal fungi that eventually produce glomalin, which may be even better than humic acid at retaining water. This means you naturally limit your irrigation needs and make your garden or fields more resilient during droughts.

Considering data suggesting we may lose all commercial topsoil, globally, in the next 60 years if we keep going at the current rate, such changes cannot move fast enough. The NRCS website is an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning more about soil health, including farmers wanting to change their system.

At present, about 10 percent of U.S. farmers have started incorporating practices to address soil health. Only about 2 percent have transitioned to full-on regenerative land management, however. On an individual level, you can get involved by growing some of your own food using these regenerative principles on a small scale.

From Dr Mercola @ http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/05/10/soil-regeneration-conservation-practices.aspx

For more information about soil see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/soil

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Down to Earth Disaster: We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it

Down to Earth Disaster

We’re treating soil like dirt.

It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it

                                                                 

'While it now seems that ploughing of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil, there are plenty of means of farming without it.' Photograph: Lester Lefkowitz/Corbis

by George Monbiot 

War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve

Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were miraculously fixed, we’re finished if we don’t address an issue considered so marginal and irrelevant that you can go for months without seeing it in a newspaper.

It’s literally and – it seems – metaphorically, beneath us. To judge by its absence from the media, most journalists consider it unworthy of consideration. But all human life depends on it. We knew this long ago, but somehow it has been forgotten. As a Sanskrit text written in about 1500BC noted: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”

The issue hasn’t changed, but we have. Landowners around the world are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction so intense that, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world on average has just 60 more years of growing crops. Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that so quickly strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers Weekly reports, we have “only 100 harvests left”.

Landowners around the world are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction

To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6m hectares (14.8m acres) of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12m hectares a year are lost through soil degradation. We wreck it, then move on, trashing rainforests and other precious habitats as we go. Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters, making them available to plants. That handful the Vedic master showed his disciples contains more micro-organisms than all the people who have ever lived on Earth. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt.

The techniques that were supposed to feed the world threaten us with starvation. A paper just published in the journal Anthropocene analyses the undisturbed sediments in an 11th-century French lake. It reveals that the intensification of farming over the past century has increased the rate of soil erosion sixtyfold.

Another paper, by researchers in the UK, shows that soil in allotments – the small patches in towns and cities that people cultivate by hand – contains a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more nitrogen. This is one of the reasons why allotment holders produce between four and 11 times more food per hectare than do farmers.

Whenever I mention this issue, people ask: “But surely farmers have an interest in looking after their soil?” They do, and there are many excellent cultivators who seek to keep their soil on the land. There are also some terrible farmers, often absentees, who allow contractors to rip their fields to shreds for the sake of a quick profit. Even the good ones are hampered by an economic and political system that could scarcely be better designed to frustrate them.

This is the International Year of Soils, but you wouldn’t know it. In January, the Westminster government published a new set of soil standards, marginally better than those they replaced, but wholly unmatched to the scale of the problem. There are no penalities for compromising our survival except a partial withholding of public subsidies. Yet even this pathetic guidance is considered intolerable by the National Farmers’ Union, which greeted them with bitter complaints. Sometimes the NFU seems to me to exist to champion bad practice and block any possibility of positive change.

Few sights are as gruesome as the glee with which the NFU celebrated the death last year of the European soil framework directive, the only measure with the potential to arrest our soil-erosion crisis. The NFU, supported by successive British governments, fought for eight years to destroy it, then crowed like a shedful of cockerels when it won. Looking back on this episode, we will see it as a parable of our times.

Soon after that, the business minister, Matthew Hancock, announced that he was putting “business in charge of driving reform”: trade associations would be able “to review enforcement of regulation in their sectors.” The NFU was one the first two bodies granted this privilege. Hancock explained that this “is all part of our unambiguously pro-business agenda to increase the financial security of the British people.” But it doesn’t increase our security, financial or otherwise. It undermines it.

The government’s deregulation bill, which has now almost completed its passage through parliament, will force regulators – including those charged with protecting the fabric of the land – to “have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth”. But short-term growth at the expense of public protection compromises long-term survival. This “unambiguously pro-business agenda” is deregulating us to death.

There’s no longer even an appetite for studying the problem. Just one university – Aberdeen – now offers a degree in soil science. All the rest have been closed down.

This is what topples civilisations. War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything goes with it.

Now, globalisation ensures that this disaster is reproduced everywhere. In its early stages, globalisation enhances resilience: people are no longer dependent on the vagaries of local production. But as it proceeds, spreading the same destructive processes to all corners of the Earth, it undermines resilience, as it threatens to bring down systems everywhere.

Short-term growth at the expense of public protection compromises long-term survival

Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison. What appear to be great crises are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady trickling away of our subsistence.

The avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all. Our insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and water, but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only by people who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are therefore unaware of the contingency of existence.

It’s not as if we are short of solutions. While it now seems that ploughing of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil, there are plenty of means of farming without it. Independently, in several parts of the world, farmers have been experimenting with zero-tillage (also known as conservation agriculture), often with extraordinary results.

There are dozens of ways of doing it: we need never see bare soil again. But in the UK, as in most rich nations, we have scarcely begun to experiment with the technique, despite the best efforts of the magazine Practical Farm Ideas.

Even better are some of the methods that fall under the heading of permaculture – working with complex natural systems rather than seeking to simplify or replace them. Pioneers such as Sepp Holzer and Geoff Lawton have achieved remarkable yields of fruit and vegetables in places that seemed unfarmable: 1,100m above sea level in the Austrian alps, for example, or in the salt-shrivelled Jordanian desert.

But, though every year our government spends £450m on agricultural research and development – much of it on techniques that wreck our soils – there is no mention of permaculture either on the websites of the two main funding bodies (NERC and BBSRC) or in any other department.

The macho commitment to destructive short-termism appears to resist all evidence and all logic. Never mind life on Earth; we’ll plough on regardless.

 

How we ended up paying farmers to flood our homes

 

 

The UK government let the farming lobby rip up the rulebook on soil protection – and now we are suffering the consequences

It has the force of a parable. Along the road from High Ham to Burrowbridge, which skirts Lake Paterson (formerly known as the Somerset Levels), you can see field after field of harvested maize. In some places the crop lines run straight down the hill and into the water. When it rains, the water and soil flash off into the lake. Seldom are cause and effect so visible.

That's what I saw on Tuesday. On Friday, I travelled to the source of the Thames. Within 300 metres of the stone that marked it were ploughed fields, overhanging the catchment, left bare through the winter and compacted by heavy machinery. Muddy water sluiced down the roads. A few score miles downstream it will reappear in people's living rooms. You can see the same thing happening across the Thames watershed: 184 miles of idiocy, perfectly calibrated to cause disaster.

Two realities, perennially denied or ignored by members of this government, now seep under their doors. In September the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, assured us that climate change "is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting". If two months of severe weather almost sends the country into meltdown, who knows what four degrees of global warming will do?

The second issue, once it trickles into national consciousness, is just as politically potent: the government's bonfire of regulations.

'Mud pours straight off this field near the source of the Thames. Tomorrow it will end up in people's houses.'  Photograph: George Monbiot

Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers' Union. Who could have guessed that he would recommend "an entirely new approach to and culture of regulation … Government must trust industry"? The task force's demands, embraced by Paterson, now look as stupid as Gordon Brown's speech to an audience of bankers in 2004: "In budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers."

Six weeks before the floods arrived, a scientific journal called Soil Use and Management published a paper warning that disaster was brewing. Surface water run-off in south-west England, where the Somerset Levels are situated, was reaching a critical point. Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.

Farmers have been ploughing land that was previously untilled and switching from spring to winter sowing, leaving the soil bare during the rainy season. Worst of all is the shift towards growing maize, whose cultivated area in this country has risen from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 since 1970.

In three quarters of the maize fields in the south-west, the soil structure has broken down to the extent that they now contribute to flooding. In many of these fields, soil, fertilisers and pesticides are sloshing away with the water. And nothing of substance, the paper warned, is being done to stop it. Dated: December 2013.

Maize is being grown in Britain not to feed people, but to feed livestock and, increasingly, the biofuel business. This false solution to climate change will make the impacts of climate change much worse, by reducing the land's capacity to hold water.

The previous government also saw it coming. In 2005 it published a devastating catalogue of the impacts of these changes in land use. As well as the loss of fertility from the land and the poisoning of watercourses, it warned, "increased run-off and sediment deposition can also increase flood hazard in rivers". Maize, it warned, is a particular problem because the soil stays bare before and after the crop is harvested, without the stubble or weeds required to bind it. "Wherever possible," it urged, "avoid growing forage maize on high and very high erosion risk areas."

The Labour government turned this advice into conditions attached to farm subsidies. Ground cover crops should be sown under the maize and the land should be ploughed, then resown with winter cover plants within 10 days of harvesting, to prevent water from sheeting off. So why isn't this happening in Somerset?

Because the current government dropped the conditions. Sorry, not just dropped them. It issued – wait for it – a specific exemption for maize cultivation from all soil conservation measures.

As the water runs off the land, it takes the silt with it. Photograph: George Monbiot

It's hard to get your head round this. The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.

When soil enters a river we call it silt. A few hundred metres from where the soil is running down the hills, a banner over the River Parrett shouts: "Stop the flooding, dredge the rivers." Angry locals assail ministers and officials with this demand. While in almost all circumstances, dredging causes more problems than it solves, and though, as even Owen Paterson admits, "increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not have prevented the recent widespread flooding", there's an argument here for a small amount of dredging at strategic points.

But to do it while the soil is washing off the fields is like trying to empty the bath while the taps are running.

This satellite image, taken on 16 February, shows where our soil goes once it's washed off our fields. Photograph: Dundee Satellite Receiving Station

So why did government policy change? I've tried asking the environment department: they're as much use as a paper sandbag. But I've found a clue. The farm regulation task force demanded a specific change: all soil protection rules attached to farm subsidies should become voluntary. They should be downgraded from a legal condition to an "advisory feature". Even if farmers do nothing to protect their soil, they should still be eligible for public money.

You might have entertained the naive belief that in handing out billions to wealthy landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless whining from the National Farmers' Union. But so successfully has policy been captured in this country that Defra – which used to stand for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – now means Doing Everything Farmers' Representatives Ask. We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.

Yes, it's a parable all right, a parable of human folly, of the kind that used to end with 300 cubits of gopher wood and a journey to the mountains of Ararat. Antediluvian? You bet it is.

From The Guardian @ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life and http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/17/farmers-uk-flood-maize-soil-protection

For more information about soil see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/soil

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