Tag Archive for: Soil Health

Superwheat Kernza Could Save Our Soil and Feed Us Well

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Author: Larissa Zimberoff 

Kernza’s arrival has been a long time coming. The new grain variety from the Land Institute is derived from an ancient form of intermediate wheatgrass, a perennial that is actually a distant relative of wheat. And there’s a widespread team of researchers hoping their work will pave the way for an entirely new form of food.

In development for well over a decade, Kernza is now being grown in test plots around the world, and a host of scientists, food retailers, bakers, and distillers are collaborating to help bring it to consumers.

Kernza is perennial, meaning it can be grown year-round, with roots that live on in the ground through winter. Corn, wheat, and most of the other grains we eat, on the other hand, are annual crops, which must be replanted anew every year, and require seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides for each planting. But Kernza’s most important difference–and the reason so many people have been waiting for its arrival–is the way it interacts with the soil.

Because its root system is dense, growing down into the earth up to 10 feet, Kernza can respond to shifts in soil and temperature quickly, taking in water, nitrogen, and phosphorous. Annual wheat doesn’t live long enough to develop thick roots, and requires soil tilling before each planting. But Kernza’s roots hold soil in place, preventing erosion. This is especially crucial in the farm belt, where rain washes significant quantities of soil and dissolved nitrogen into waterways, and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 10 million acres of Iowa farmland lost dangerous amounts of soil in 2007.

That’s not all. Kernza also “builds soil quality and takes CO2 out of the atmosphere, which may help with mitigating climate change,” says Land Institute scientist Lee DeHaan, the driving force behind Kernza.

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A Boon for Soil, and for the Environment

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Author: Beth Gardiner

When Gabe Brown and his wife bought their farm near Bismarck, North Dakota, from her parents in 1991, testing found the soil badly depleted, its carbon down to just a quarter of levels once considered natural in the area.

Today the Brown farm and ranch is home to a diverse and thriving mix of plants and animals. And carbon, the building block of the rich humus that gives soil its density and nutrients, has more than tripled. That is a boon not just for the farm’s productivity and its bottom line, but also for the global climate.

Agriculture is often cast as an environmental villain, its pesticides tainting water, its hunger for land driving deforestation. Worldwide, it is responsible for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, though, a growing number of experts, environmentalists and farmers themselves see their fields as a powerful weapon in the fight to slow climate change, their very soil a potentially vast repository for the carbon that is warming the atmosphere. Critically for an industry that must produce an ever-larger bounty to feed a growing global population, restoring lost carbon to the soil also increases its ability to support crops and withstand drought.

“Everyone talks about sustainable,” Mr. Brown said. “Why do we want to sustain a degraded resource? We need to be regenerative, we need to take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the cycle, where it belongs.”

Since people began farming, the world’s cultivated soils have lost 50 percent to 70 percent of their natural carbon, said Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at the Ohio State University. That number is even higher in parts of south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, he added.

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Soil is the Solution

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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 mircroorganisms 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 tthankshat destroys 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.

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Interview: Researcher, Author Eric Toensmeier Explores Practical, Effective Carbon Farming Strategies

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While this interview was being prepared a story surfaced on public radio about a couple of enterprising Americans who are taking advantage of changing policy to open a factory in Cuba. Their product? Tractors! The whole idea, the story helpfully explained, was to introduce “21st century farming” to the beleaguered island. By making it easier to tear up the soil. Clearly there is some distance to go before an accurate idea of 21st century farming penetrates the mainstream. It will take people like Eric Toensmeier. His new book, The Carbon Farming Solution, carries enough heft, range and detail to clear away forests of confusion. If the notion of leaving carbon in the soil is going to take its place next to that of leaving oil in the ground, this one-volume encyclopedia on the subject is exactly the kind of deeply informed work that’s required. Reached at his home in western Massachusetts, Toensmeier was exhilarated over finishing a project years in the making, and more than happy to talk about it.

This interview appears in the May 2016 issue of Acres U.S.A.

ACRES U.S.A. Carbon farming was unknown even a few years ago, and it is still obscure for many people who are otherwise well-informed. Could you establish the basic premise for us?

ERIC TOENSMEIER. Sure. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is there because of burning fossil fuels and also because of the degradation of land. Whether it’s forests being cleared or prairie being plowed or a badly grazed pasture, when those ecosystems are degraded, carbon that was stored in soil and in biomass bonds with oxygen and heads up into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. There are practices that can bring it back. They all use photosynthesis, which takes carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into sugars in the plant; then those sugars are converted into various other things such as lignins. Some of them end up in the plant itself, and some of them end up in the soil. Some get there quickly through root exudates, and some end up in the soil more slowly through decomposition. Some of them are off-gassed to go back up into the atmosphere. We can pull down a bunch of that excess atmospheric carbon and store it in the soil and in perennial biomass. The amount that is possible is quite hopeful and could be just about enough to do the job if it’s coupled with a drastic reduction in emissions. It’s not enough to do the job on its own.

ACRES U.S.A. If carbon storage via agriculture is essential to an overall climate strategy, how do you lay it out to a skeptic who doesn’t believe farms can play a big part?

TOENSMEIER. That’s a really important question. We’re not going to stop climate change, but we can’t get it to a manageable level without farmers, and here’s why. Even if we stopped all emissions today — all deforestation, all fossil fuel burning — there’s already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s partly because carbon dioxide takes a couple decades to kick in. We’re already in for a lot more warming than we can tell from what we’ve emitted. We can pull it back down, and to do that we have to stop emissions, but we also have to sequester carbon. Neither one works on its own. There’s not enough land available for reforestation to do all the sequestration we need with land leftover for agriculture. So agriculture itself has to be part of the solution. What’s cool is that almost all of these agricultural solutions weren’t invented for climate change mitigation — they were invented because they make farms work better. They make farms more resilient. They make farms more productive. They’re good ideas anyway! There are plenty of tradeoffs and drawbacks, but as far as I can see it’s quite a good news story.

KEEP READING IN ECO FARMING DAILY BY ACRES U.S.A. MAGAZINE

Dirt First

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Author: Kristin Ohlson

Rick Haney, gangly and garrulous, paces in front of a congregation of government conservationists, working the room for laughs before he gets to the hard data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture soil scientist points to an aerial photograph of research plots outside his facility in Temple , Texas. “Our drones took this shot,” he says, then shakes his head. “Kidding. We don’t have any drones.”

Forty sets of shoulders jerk in amusement. Paranoia about the federal government is acute in Texas, and Haney’s audience—field educators from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), part of a corps of around six thousand that works directly with farmers nationwide—hail from around the state. They’re used to suspicious scowls from farmers, who are as skeptical of the feds as they are of the outsiders who dwell on the downsides of agriculture. For the most part, the people in this room are both: feds and outsiders.

But what if those downsides—unsustainable farming practices—are also bad for a farmer’s bottom line? It’s the question Haney loves to raise during training sessions like this one, which the NRCS (today’s iteration of the Dust Bowl–era Soil Conservation Service) convenes around the country as part of a soil health campaign launched in 2012. Haney is a star at these events because he brings the imprimatur of science to something many innovative farmers have already discovered: despite what the million-dollar marketing campaigns of agrichemical companies say, farmers can use less fertilizer without reducing yields, saving both money and landscapes.

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

In nature, of course, plants grow like mad without added synthetic fertilizer, thanks to a multimillion-year-old partnership with soil microorganisms. Plants pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and create a carbon syrup. About 60 percent of this fuels the plant’s growth, with the remaining exuded through the roots to soil microorganisms, which trade mineral nutrients they’ve liberated from rocks, sand, silt, and clay—in other words, fertilizer—for their share of the carbon bounty. Haney insists that ag scientists are remiss if they don’t pay more attention to this natural partnership.

“I’ve had scientific colleagues tell me they raised 300 bushels of corn [per acre] with an application of fertilizer, and I ask how the control plots, the ones without the fertilizer, did,” Haney says. “They tell me 220 bushels of corn. How is that not the story? How is raising 220 bushels of corn without fertilizer not the story?” If the natural processes at work in even the tired soil of a test plot can produce 220 bushels of corn, he argues, the yields of farmers consciously building soil health can be much higher.

KEEP READING IN ORION MAGAZINE

A pilgrimage towards a nonviolent relationship with soil

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I have just returned from a soil pilgrimage undertaken to celebrate the International Year of Soil and renew our commitment to a non-violent relationship with the earth, the soil and our society. On October 2, we started the pilgrimage from Bapu Kutir at Sevagram Ashram, Maharashtra. My fellow pilgrims were those who have contributed over half-a-century of their lives to build the organic movement — Andre Leu, president of International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM), Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) of the United States, and Will Allen, a professor and long-time organic farmer.

At Mahatma Gandhi’s hut, we took a pledge to stop the violence to the soil through chemical fertilisers and poisons and promote organic farming as ahimsa kheti. We dedicated ourselves to a transition from a violent, chemical, industrial agriculture that is destroying soil fertility and trapping farmers in debt through high-cost seeds and chemicals.

Vidarbha, for example, has emerged as the epicentre of debt-induced farmers’ suicides. It is also the region with the highest acreage of genetically modified organism (GMO) Bt cotton. Fields of non-Bt, native cotton — which is totally pest and weed-free — gives more yields than Bt cotton.

The Bt fields are being doused in pesticides because of pest outbreaks, since Bt is failing as a tool to control pests. Bt cotton fields are also being sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup, a known carcinogen to control weeds.

There is no regulation of the poisons being used. Most of the GMO cotton seed is being blended and labelled for sale as vegetable oil. We are being fed GMO cotton seed oil, even though GMOs are not allowed in food in India. And while toxic oils spread without regulation, the new food safety rules have shut down the ghani (virgin oil press) that sold healthy and safe oils like flax, groundnut, sesame and mustard.

The oilcake is being fed to our cows. Those who kill others in the name of cow protection are silent on the fight against the toxic giants who are poisoning our “gau mata”.

The pilgrimage concluded at the Agriculture College, Indore, which started as Albert Howard’s institute on organic farming that contributed to the famous Indore process of composting.

Mahatma Gandhi came to know of the Indore process when he visited London to attend the Round Table Conference. Gandhi and Howard have shown that we can have a peaceful and respectful relationship with the soil and with each other.

Howard was sent to India in 1905 by the British Empire to introduce chemical farming. When he arrived, he found the soils were fertile and there were no pests in the fields. He decided to make the Indian peasant his professor and wrote the book An Agricultural Testament, known as the bible of organic farming.

Organic farming is the original example of “Make in India”. Howard’s book helped spread the organic movement to the US through the Rodale Institute and to the UK through the Soil Association, finding its way to far corners of the world.

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The soil pilgrimage was our expression of gratitude to sources of organic farming in India — our fertile and generous land and Mother Earth that have sustained us for millennia.

Ecological and regenerative agriculture is based on recycling organic matter, and hence recycling nutrients. It is based on the Law of Return — giving nutrients back to the soil. As Howard wrote in The Soil and Health: “Taking without giving is a robbery of the soil and a banditry; a particularly mean form of banditry, because it involves the robbing of future generations which are not here to defend themselves.”

In taking care of the soil, we also produce more food on less land. Fertile soils are the sustainable answer to food and nutrition security. Organic agriculture is the only real answer to climate change.

The air pollution that has built up in the atmosphere is roughly 400 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide today. This is the reason for the greenhouse effect and climate chaos, including temperature rise. To cap the rise of temperature at two degrees centigrade, we need to reduce the carbon build up in the air to 350 ppm.

There is a need to reduce emissions and phase out fossil fuels, but it also requires reducing the stocks of excess carbon from the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil where it belongs. Here, organic, regenerative agriculture offers us the way out.

In the process, it also addresses food insecurity and hunger, reverses desertification, creates livelihood security by creating ecological security, and, therefore, creates the path to peace.

Above all, it allows a transition from the violent paradigm, structures and systems of capitalist patriarchy to the non-violent paradigm, structures and systems based on ahimsa, which include the well being of all.

Organic farming is the answer to drought and climate change. It is also a peace solution. If we do not respect the soil and our cultural diversity and if we do not collectively recommit ourselves to ahimsa, we can rapidly disintegrate as a civilisation.

For me, organic agriculture is the dharma that sows the seeds of peace and prosperity for all. It helps us break out of the vicious cycle of violence and degeneration, and create virtuous cycles based on non-violence and regeneration.

Just as humus in soil binds soil particles and prevents soil erosion, it also binds the society and prevents violence and social disintegration. Since humus provides food, livelihood, water and climate security, it also contributes to peace. Just as wet straw cannot be put on fire by a matchstick, communities that are secure cannot be put on fire by violent elements feeding on insecurity created by an economic model that is killing swadeshi and is only designed for global economic powers to extract what they want.

In taking care of the soil, we reclaim our humanity. Our future is inseparable from the future of the earth. It is no accident that the word human has its roots in humus — soil in Latin. And Adam, the first human in Abrahamanic traditions, is derived from Adamus, soil in Hebrew.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” We must never forget that ahimsa must be the basis of our relationship with the earth and each other.

The writer is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust.

The Soil Solution: Regenerative Farming

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Author: Eli Wallace

When scientists and environmentalists talk climate change, doom and gloom is often the main topic. Scientific American reported last spring that the earth was essentially at or close to the “point of no return,” in terms of carbon emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in 2009 that unless drastic action was taken between 2015 and 2020, it would be too late to save the ice caps, let alone polar bears, coastal infrastructure and the temperate, predictable weather patterns we know and love.

So it’s not every day you hear an environmentalist declare we can actually reverse global warming. Steven Hoffman, managing director of the Boulder-based environmental marketing group Compass Natural and an avid environmentalist with ties to Regeneration International, visited the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21 Global Climate Summit) in Paris this year, where the reversal of global warming through soil regeneration was a major focus.

“People keep talking about reducing carbon emissions and getting to carbon neutral, but that’s not enough anymore,” Hoffman says. “We’re already heating, so we need to take the excess from the atmosphere. A lot of people want to make new technology that can help solve our previous technology problems.”

Hoffman says the conversation around carbon emissions usually centers on personal consumption and oil use, even though 50 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions comes from agriculture.

“Yes, we need to increase renewable energy, but that’s only half the equation. All of the carbon in the air used to be in the ground, and industrial-scale agriculture is responsible. If you ignore that, you’re missing the practical, easily applied solution that we can address immediately.”

That solution, regenerative farming, focuses on increasing organic matter in the soil, which would up the amount of carbon in the soil. “We could sequester more than 100 percent of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic-management practices,” reported the white paper “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” published by Rodale Institute, a nonprofit agricultural research group.

“Organic farming nurtures the living soil,” Hoffman explains. “Plants draw carbon from the air to their roots, where it’s sequestered in soil and used by microbes, worms and other organisms.”

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Investing In Soil Health Pays

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Author: Bill Spiegel 

Let’s begin with a pop quiz.

Two similar fields are on either side of a rural road in Any County, USA. One field has been conventionally farmed for years, with two fall-tillage passes, followed by one in the spring prior to planting. The other field has been no-tilled for two decades. The farmer began planting diverse blends of cover crops four years ago and recently began grazing cattle on those cover crops. Which field will produce more grain?

The answer is, it depends. With normal rainfall and without adverse weather conditions, the odds are good that both fields will yield similarly.

In a year of weather extremes – too little or too much rain, high temperatures or low – odds are good that the no-till and cover-cropped field will produce more consistent yields.

The reason is resiliency. After all, that’s what soil health is all about.

The Trend

Farm trends come and go, but perhaps nothing has gathered momentum like the subject of soil health. The United Nations General Assembly even declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. Unlike most trends, though, soil health has staying power. That’s because farmers and landowners find that adopting sound soil health practices boosts soil biology and increases soil organic matter. This, in turn, improves the soil’s ability to consistently produce a crop regardless of weather extremes.

Mother Nature has built soil communities over thousands of years. Soil teems with life. A handful of soil contains more living creatures than the world has people.

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Farmland Could Help Combat Climate Change

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Author: Bobby Magill

The earth’s soil stores a lot of carbon from the atmosphere, and managing it with the climate in mind may be an important part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Climate-smart” soil management, primarily on land used for agriculture, can be part of an overall greenhouse gas reduction strategy that includes other efforts like carbon sequestration and reducing fossil fuel emissions, the paper’s authors said. Many scientists believe new efforts to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are needed to keep global warming to an internationally agreed-upon limit of 2°C (3.6°F).

“One way to do that is by locking up carbon in soils,” said study co-author Pete Smith, professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. “If we can do this, we can complement efforts in other sectors to stabilize the climate and deliver on the Paris agreement.”

About three times the carbon currently in the atmosphere is stored in the Earth’s soil—up to 2.4 trillion metric tons, or roughly 240 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels annually.

Much of that is locked up in land used for agriculture. Cropland soil stores atmospheric carbon in organic matter such as manure, roots, fallen leaves and and other pieces of decomposing plants. It doesn’t remain there permanently. It takes decades for the organic matter in the soil to decompose, and the carbon stored within is eventually emitted back into the atmosphere as gas. Soil is responsible for 37 percent of global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, according to the paper.

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Is Climate Change Putting World’s Microbiomes at Risk?

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Author: Jim Robbins

In 1994, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory moved soil from moist, high-altitude sites to warmer and drier places lower in altitude, and vice versa. In 2011, they returned to the sites and looked again at the soil microbes and found that they had done little to adapt functionally to their new home. That’s a bad sign, experts say, for a world convulsed by a changing climate.

“These microbes have somehow lost the capacity to adapt to the new conditions,” said Vanessa Bailey, one of the authors of the study, published this month in PLOS One. That not what scientists anticipated, and it “calls into question the resilience of the overall environment to climate change,” she said. “Soil is the major buffer for environmental changes, and the microbial community is the basis for that resilience.”

As snow and ice melt, it’s fairly straightforward to grasp what climate change means for the future of, say, polar bears in the Arctic or penguins in Antarctica. But it’s far more difficult to understand what is happening to the planetary microbiome in the earth’s crust and water, a quadrillion quadrillion microorganisms, according to Scientific American. Yet it is far more important, for microbes run the world. They are key players that perpetuate life on the planet, provide numerous ecosystem services, and serve as a major bulwark against environmental changes.

Researchers say that as the planet warms, essential diversity and function in the microbial world could be lost.

But they can also cause serious problems — as the world’s permafrost melts, microbes are turning once-frozen vegetation into greenhouse gases at a clip that is alarming scientists.

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