Tag Archive for: Soil Health

Why Supporting Regenerative Agriculture Is the Most Powerful Thing You Can Do for Your Health

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Healthy soil equals healthy people.

Author: Adrian White | Published: September 18, 2017

When we talk about sustainable farming practices, we tend to focus on its importance for the environment, for our food security, and our desire to put food on the table that’s not contaminated with pesticides. But there’s an important topic doesn’t get talked about often enough: how food sustainability is inextricably tied to our health.

Over the past decade, physicians have increasingly recognized the importance of good nutrition to human health. An article published last week in The Journal of the American College Of Nutrition noted that the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease is linked to long-term poor nutrition. Good nutrition, on the other hand, is one of the most powerful (and least expensive) forms of preventative healthcare you have at your disposal. A good diet can help prevent heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune and digestive disorders, and several types of cancers.

(Brag your love of gardening with the Organic Life 2018 Calendar, featuring gorgeous photographs, cooking tips and recipes, plus how to eat more—and waste less!—of what’s in season.)

And it turns out that the best food for you–the most nutritious food–is food that comes from a sustainable food system.

The foundation of a healthy diet is whole fruits and vegetables, which contain vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, and phytochemicals—and compounds only found in plants, like lycopene, that are essential to our health.

Many of the compounds essential to human health are destroyed when whole fruits, vegetables, and grains are processed into shelf-stable foods. To make for their lack of nutrition (especially vitamins), synthetic nutrients are added to processed foods. However, studies show that certain synthetic nutrients pale in comparison to natural ones—even those found in synthetic supplements (particularly vitamin E and vitamin D).

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Farmer Wants a Revolution: ‘How Is This Not Genocide?’

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Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food

Published: September 22, 2017

The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.

Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.

The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.

Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.

“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.

“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”

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A Better Farm Future Starts With the Soil

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Author: Alyssa Charney | Published: September 19, 2107

Within the next year Congress will reauthorize the massive amalgamation of legislation we commonly refer to as “the farm bill.” The farm bill, which is reauthorized every five years, has major implications for every part of our food and farm system and covers issues including but certainly not limited to: conservation, nutrition, local food, credit and finance, research and commodity subsidies.

Although healthy soil is one of the essential building blocks of agriculture, historically the issue has not been a major focus of the farm bill – as some farmers would say, soil has been treated like dirt. With extreme weather events on the rise and farmers and foresters feeling the effects of a changing climate, however, soil health is now at the forefront of our national conversation.Soil health is critical for agriculture and natural resource management because only healthy soil can effectively cycle nutrients and capture and store water, which sustains plant and crop life and helps to build resilient, productive agricultural systems. As our most significant package of food and farm legislation approaches expiration on September 30, 2018, many are asking: How can the farm bill support resilient farms, address natural resource concerns and increase productivity? A key part of the answer: promote soil health.

At the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, we’ve been working with our membership for 30 years to create and expand programs and policies that support soil health – an effort we’ll continue in the 2018 farm bill.

Conservation

Healthy soil depends on conservation management practices that invigorate its ability to cycle nutrients, capture and store water, and sequester carbon from the air. The farm bill authorizes several technical and financial assistance programs that support farmers and ranchers in these activities, including the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Together, these two programs serve as the heart of the USDA’s working lands conservation portfolio.

Through EQIP, participants can take the first step in soil health management by integrating practices such as cover crops, conservation cover, prescribed grazing, range planting and nutrient management. When farmers are ready to step up to even more advanced conservation systems, they can access CSP, which can be used to target soil health improvements, including diversified crop rotations and high-level rotational grazing, on a farmer’s entire operation.

The next farm bill should enhance the long-term funding base for both working lands programs and ensure an ongoing and growing focus on improving soil health. In addition, the farm bill should make sure that USDA has the authority and funding it needs to measure and report on program outcomes. This provides accountability for taxpayers and ensures USDA has the information it needs to modify and improve conservation programs to ensure that they are creating solutions to priority resource concerns, including soil health.

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Scenes from a Regenerative Revolution

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Author: Rajiv Sicora 

Jim Knopik has been farming longer than anyone in the room. When it’s his turn to address our impromptu gathering, he glances around the dinner table, briefly making eye contact with a few of the twenty so or folks here—many of whom he’s inspired or mentored over the years—then he launches right into it.

“I live west of Fullerton, Nebraska. I have since I was a year old. When I was a year old there were 49 residences within two miles of that place. Now there’s four. So I guess I see what the importance of community is because it’s been lost.”

Jim apologizes and leans forward in his chair, resting on his elbows, overcome. It’s a long moment. Everyone firmly but silently communicates their support. And for our three-member Leap delegation, it really hits home that this is not going to be an ordinary listening session.

On a research trip to the Omaha area, we’re meeting with a group of Nebraskans who champion a small-scale, sustainable approach to farming known as “regenerative agriculture,” to hear about their hopes and challenges going up against the corporate status quo. Nobody here who knows Jim has heard him talk like this before.

“Anyway,” he abruptly continues, “there’s a lot of good things that come from community, and that for the last 20 years I’ve been trying to bring back to ours.”

Go Big or Leave Home: Rural Farm Communities Are Dropping Off the Map

North Star, the village closest to where Jim grew up, simply no longer exists. “This is what’s happened all across rural parts of Nebraska,” says Al Davis, a rancher and former senator in the state’s unicameral legislature. He fears that in many of these places, people are wondering if “it’s time to just say, ‘we’re going to have to figure out what towns to save and which ones are going to go away.’ And that is very hard for me to have to deal with.”

How did we get here? “My grandfather said the day the horses left and the tractor came was the day we replaced community with competition,” says Del Ficke, a leader in the local regenerative movement who’s hosting this discussion in his dining room. With the rise of Big Ag, you no longer had “neighbors working collectively to get the job done.” Instead, farmers got close to their corporate “captors” and increasingly decided to go it alone, to buy that bigger tractor, “never to talk to the neighbors again.” It’s a form of agriculture that was never capable of providing a good life, or sustaining good places to live in, we hear over the course of the meeting—and it’s brought us the near-extinction of small farms, along with the small-town economies that once surrounded and supported them.

This ravaging of rural communities is caused by some of the same forces that are driving climate change and economic inequality: huge monopolies that dominate our political system, hell-bent on extracting maximum profits while poisoning the earth, the people, and their communities.

“This dysfunction in agriculture, I believe, is not only a mining of the land and the water and the resources,” says Kerry Hoffschneider, a journalist who works with Del. “They have finally come to mine the heart and the soul, and the heart and the soul of the farm family.”

A Conventional Crisis: The Absurd Violence of Industrial Agriculture

As with so many other sectors, U.S. agriculture has seen a relentless march towards “vertical integration,” with large corporations gobbling up more and more of the production and distribution process for their products. Farmers are left to contend with concentrated power at every turn. Perhaps best-known are the agribusiness giants like Monsanto that sell them seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, and technology; but just as insidious are the handful of big processors, meatpackers, and retailers that buy their food (while ruthlessly holding down prices), pack it in bulk, and ship it everywhere.

We hear more about how this squeeze works from Ben Gotschall, a no-nonsense veteran of the local resistance to Keystone XL. Davey Road Ranch, his regenerative operation in Raymond, is “fairly small,” home to some 30 cows and a modest tank that can hold about 150 gallons of milk. “We’ve never had a milk truck out here,” Ben says. “I grew up on a dairy farm where we did that back in the ’90s, and pretty much had to decide whether we were going to go corporate or get out of it.”

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The Great Nutrient Collapse

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The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.

Author: Helene Bottemiller Evich | Published: September 13, 2017

Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.

Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?

Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.

Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.

“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.

In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?

What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

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A Soil-to-Soil Vision for the Fashion Revolution

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Author: Fair World Project | Published: September 2017

[pdf-embedder url=”https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/a-soil-to-soil-vision-for-the-fashion-revolution.pdf”]
 
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Can American Soil Be Brought Back to Life?

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A new idea: If we revive the tiny creatures that make dirt healthy, we can bring back the great American topsoil. But farming culture — and government — aren’t making it easy.

Author: Jenny Hopkinson | Published: September 13, 2017

Four generations of Jonathan Cobb’s family tended the same farm in Rogers, Texas, growing row upon row of corn and cotton on 3,000 acres. But by 2011, Cobb wasn’t feeling nostalgic. Farming was becoming rote and joyless; the main change from one year to the next was intensively planting more and more acres of corn and soy, churning up the soil and using ever more chemical fertilizers and herbicides to try and turn a profit.

“I’d already had the difficult conversation with my dad that he would be the last generation on the farm,” Cobb said.

While looking for a new job, Cobb stopped into a local office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pick up some paperwork. That day, the staff was doing a training session on soil health. He stayed to watch and was struck by a demonstration showing a side-by-side comparison of healthy and unhealthy soils.

A clump of soil from a heavily tilled and cropped field was dropped into a wire mesh basket at the top of a glass cylinder filled with water. At the same time, a clump of soil from a pasture that grew a variety of plants and grasses and hadn’t been disturbed for years was dropped into another wire mesh basket in an identical glass cylinder. The tilled soil–similar to the dry, brown soil on Cobb’s farm—dissolved in water like dust. The soil from the pasture stayed together in a clump, keeping its structure and soaking up the water like a sponge. Cobb realized he wasn’t just seeing an agricultural scientist show off a chunk of soil: He was seeing a potential new philosophy of farming.

“By the end of that day I knew that I was supposed to stay on the farm and be part of that paradigm shift,” Cobb said. “It was that quick.”

The shift he’s talking about is a new trend in agriculture, one with implications from farm productivity to the environment to human health. For generations, soil has been treated almost as a backdrop — not much more than a medium for holding plants while fertilizer and herbicides help them grow. The result, over the years, has been poorer and drier topsoil that doesn’t hold on to nutrients or water. The impact of this degradation isn’t just on farmers, but extends to Americans’ health. Dust blowing off degraded fields leads to respiratory illness in rural areas; thousands of people are exposed to drinking water with levels of pesticides at levels that the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed to be of concern. The drinking water of more than 210 million Americans is polluted with nitrate, a key fertilizer chemical that has been linked to developmental problems in children and poses cancer risks in adults. And thanks to some modern farming techniques, soil degradation is releasing carbon—which becomes carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas—instead of holding on to it. In fact, the United Nations considers soil degradation one of the central threats to human health in the coming decades for those very reasons.

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New Study Shows Organic Farming Traps Carbon in Soil to Combat Climate Change

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Author: Lela Nargi | Published: September 11, 2017

When it comes to mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, keeping excess carbon out of the atmosphere is the prime target for improving the health of our planet. One of the best ways to do that is thought to be locking more of that carbon into the soil that grows our food.

The scientific community has been actively debating whether organic farming methods can provide a promising solution. A 2010 paper published in the journal Ambio found that research about increased carbon sequestration due to organic farming methods was inconclusive, while a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found increased carbon sequestration in organic farm soils—though a 2013 letter in the PNAS disputed those findings, arguing that there were no carbon sequestration benefits related to organic farming.

A new study from Northeastern University and nonprofit research organization The Organic Center (TOC), though, has reached a different conclusion: Soils from organic farms had 26 percent more potential for long-term carbon storage than soils from conventional farms, along with 13 percent more soil organic matter (SOM).

For the study, chemists Elham Ghabbour and Geoffrey Davies began by analyzing soil samples from over 700 conventional farms in 48 states. They made the alarming discovery that these samples contained little to no humic substances. Humic substances are one portion of soil organic matter, which is made up of decomposing plant and animal matter. Comprised of humin, humic acid, and fulvic acid, humic substances are a major component of healthy, fertile soil, giving it structure and water-holding ability, among other things. They’re built up slowly, over the course of many years, by living materials such as manure that are added to soil.

“They’re important because they’re one of the biggest places carbon can get stored,” said TOC’s Director of Science Programs, Jessica Shade, who is a co-author on the study. And storing carbon in soil provides what Shade calls a whole suite of benefits that are linked to soil health, including supporting beneficial organisms like worms; reducing erosion and compaction; and providing aeration, essential plant nutrients, and water retention.

After some consideration, Ghabbour and Davies hypothesized that the dearth of humic substances was due to the high-input practices inherent to conventional farming, such as tilling and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They worked with TOC to contact certified organic farmers and enlist them as “citizen scientists” in gathering soil samples from their own operations; in all, 659 organic soil samples were collected from 39 states.

“Because organic farms are regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and use certain practices” such as crop rotation, letting fields lie fallow, fertilizing with compost, and maintaining a buffer between organic and conventional crops, as well as adhering to a three-year waiting period before qualifying for certification, “this was a great control group for testing this hypothesis,” said Shade.

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Top Soil: A Catalyst for Better Health and Nutrition

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Author: Tobias Roberts | Published: August 23, 2017

WHERE WE STAND WITHOUT SOIL

Everything begins and ends with the soil. Unfortunately, close to 70% of it has been lost since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. Since the onset of the Green Revolution only half a decade ago, we´re getting rid of it faster than ever. Besides the ecocide that the loss of topsoil entails, it also is a major threat to our health. Most foods grown by industrial agricultural methods on depleted soil are nothing more than empty food carcasses filled with chemically supplied nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

Without healthy soil that includes dozens of other micronutrients as a result of the functioning soil food web, we´re simply not getting the nutrition we need, no matter how cosmetic our food supposedly looks.

THE LOSS OF OUR PLANET´S FERTILITY

It can be easy to be tricked into believing that we live in a world of abundance. Seeing the sheer magnitude of the corn harvest in Iowa, to name just one example, can make us feel like our food security is well provided for by combines, GPS-controlled tractors, and the thousands of other technologies of industrial agriculture. But below that seemingly abundant harvest, a serious problem is emerging. The Great Plains of the United States have been considered one of the most fertile areas of our earth. In some places, top soil reaches over 15 feet into the earth. But that apparently endless fertility has all but disappeared in recent years.

In 2014 alone, Iowa lost over 15 million tons of topsoil, mostly due to unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. That soil, along with the millions of pounds of chemical fertilizers and pesticides eventually make their way down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. The excess nitrates and pollution from this runoff has led to a hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico which is basically a dead area where no marine life can survive.

ECOLOGICAL DANGERS OF TOP SOIL LOSS

When the soil is gone, we as a species will be completely dependent on petroleum for creating chemical fertilizers give the plants we eat the nutrients they need to grow. The problem, of course, is that oil isn’t going to be around forever either. Peak oil is a moment in time when the maximum extraction of oil is reached, and some studies believe that we´re already reached that bleak milestone.

Our dependence on petroleum based agricultural inputs for fertility purposes, then, is simply unsustainable. Furthermore, without top soil to provide naturally occurring fertility, the use of chemical inputs is creating a host of ecological damages. Chemical fertilizers are almost all salt based leading to increased soil salinity. Though plants will grow with increased vigor initially, chemical fertilizers disrupt the natural soil cycle leading to eventual barrenness.

Top soil loss doesn’t only cause a serious challenge to our long term food security, but it also causes other serious ecological catastrophes. The run off of top soil increases pollution and sedimentation in our waterways causing serious population declines in certain species of fish. Also, lands without top soil are more prone to serious flooding and increased desertification. Already 10-20% of our planet´s drylands face desertification, and needless today, plants don´t grow well in deserts.

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World’s Soils Have Lost 133bn Tonnes of Carbon Since the Dawn of Agriculture

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Author: Daisy Dunne | Published: August 25, 2017

The world’s soils have lost a total of 133bn tonnes of carbon since humans first started farming the land around 12,000 years ago, new research suggests. And the rate of carbon loss has increased dramatically since the start of the industrial revolution.

The study, which maps where soil carbon has been lost and gained since 10,000BC, shows that crop production and cattle grazing have contributed almost equally to global losses.

Understanding how agriculture has altered soil carbon stocks is critical to finding ways to restore lost carbon to the ground, another scientist tells Carbon Brief, which could help to buffer the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.

Soil as a carbon sink

The top metre of the world’s soils contains three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, making it a major carbon sink alongside forests and oceans.

Soils play a key role in the carbon cycle by soaking up carbon from dead plant matter. Plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and pass carbon to the ground when dead roots and leaves decompose.

But human activity, in particular agriculture, can cause carbon to be released from the soil at a faster rate than it is replaced. This net release of carbon to the atmosphere contributes to global warming.

New research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (pdf), estimates the total amount of carbon that has been lost since humans first settled into agricultural life around 12,000 years ago.

The research finds that 133bn tonnes of carbon, or 8% of total global soil carbon stocks, may have been lost from the top two metres of the world’s soil since the dawn of agriculture. This figure is known as the total “soil carbon debt”.

Around two-thirds of lost carbon could have ended up in the atmosphere, while the rest may have been transported further afield before being deposited back into the soil.

And since the industrial revolution, the rate of soil carbon loss has increased, says lead author Dr Jonathan Sanderman, a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. He tells Carbon Brief:

“Considering humans have emitted about 450bn tonnes of carbon since the industrial revolution, soil carbon losses to the atmosphere may represent 10 to 20% of this number. But it has hard to calculate exactly how much of this has ended up in the atmosphere versus how much has been transported due to erosion.”

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