Tag Archive for: Soil Health

Why Healthy Soil Means A Healthier Planet

Dirt, it turns out, has been underestimated. Healthy soil is perhaps the most essential part of a thriving ecosystem. In the face of climate change, farmers and scientists are working to better understand how soil supports a healthy planet. It turns out that without it, the rest of an ecosystem suffers.

Soil is composed of various materials, including sand, silt, stone and water. Depending on the geographic location, it can be sandy, dense, rocky or porous. Soil is a living thing and composed of millions of tiny organisms that help keep it healthy. Different types of insects, bacteria and fungi all work together to keep things in balance. Fungal networks, known as mycelium, play a vital role in helping dirt communicate with plant roots. In fact, the largest known organism in the world is a fungus that covers 4 square miles of forest in the Pacific Northwest.

Modern farming practices, land development and pollution are threatening the health of our planet.

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Excrementos de lombriz para revelar los niveles de carbono en el suelo

Zaragoza, 3 sep (EFE).- Un estudio internacional del Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología (IPE) analiza los niveles de carbono en el suelo a través de las deposiciones producidas por lombrices de tierra en el Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido (Huesca).

Como ha informado esta entidad dependiente del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), el investigador Juan José Jiménez ha liderado este proyecto que revela la edad y el origen de las deposiciones producidas por estos invertebrados.

Publicado en la revista PLoS one, el trabajo detalla, a través de la edad y el origen de los excrementos, los efectos sobre el suelo en la zona, lo que permitirá precisar los parámetros en modelos de acumulación de carbono en el suelo y emisiones de CO2.

Los oligoquetos (lombrices de tierra) juegan un importante papel en el suelo, como reveló Charles Darwin en su último libro sobre la formación del mantillo vegetal por la acción de las lombrices con observaciones sobre sus hábitos, publicado en 1881.

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David Montgomery: “Estamos cerca de una revolución basada en la salud del suelo”

En el marco del XXVIII Congreso de Aapresid, ‘siempre vivo, siempre verde’, el geólogo de la Universidad de Washington, David Montgomery, habló del rol de los suelos en la civilización y la importancia de su restauración en términos del futuro de la humanidad.

“Estamos cerca de una revolución basada en la salud del suelo; en un punto de cambio en la historia. Podemos convertir a la agricultura en actor de recuperación del suelo en lugar de degradador. La reconstrucción del suelo es una de las inversiones más grandes que puede hacer hoy la humanidad”, dijo.

“Se habla de la deforestación como causante principal de esta degradación, pero la realidad es que el arado contribuyó más que el hacha”, advirtió. A lo largo de la charla también explicó que la erosión y degradación del suelo jugó un rol critico en la caída de antiguas civilizaciones, desde la Europa neolítica hasta Roma.

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UMass Amherst Microbiologists Clarify Relationship Between Microbial Diversity and Soil Carbon Storage

AMHERST, Mass. – In what they believe is the first study of its kind, researchers led by postdoctoral researcher Luiz A. Domeignoz-Horta and senior author Kristen DeAngelis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report that shifts in the diversity of soil microbial communities can change the soil’s ability to sequester carbon, where it usually helps to regulate climate.

They also found that the positive effect of diversity on carbon use efficiency – which plays a central role in that storage – is neutralized in dry conditions. Carbon use efficiency refers to the carbon assimilated into microbial products vs carbon lost to the atmosphere as CO2 and contributing to climate warming, DeAngelis explains. Among other benefits, soil carbon makes soil healthy by holding water and helping plants grow.

She and colleagues addressed these questions because they point out, “empirical evidence for the response of soil carbon cycling to the combined effects of warming, drought and diversity loss is scarce.”

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Planet Watch: Regenerative Agriculture as One Answer to Planetary Crisis

Over the last few decades, modern industrialised agriculture has wrought havoc on natural systems. It has razed forests, decimated biodiversity, and has done immense damage to soils. Most individual farmers may just want to turn a profit to feed their families and pay off their mortgages, but collectively, if you look at what’s happening around the world, this form of agriculture is a major contributor to the ongoing degradation of our planet.

A primary impact of agriculture is soil degradation. Land-clearing, overgrazing, the impact of heavy farming equipment, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and irrigation, all contribute to soil degradation. This has resulted in the degradation of one-third of the world’s soils:

  • 30 per cent of the world’s cropland has been abandoned over the past 40 years due to degradation and desertification,
  • 52 per cent of the land used for agriculture is moderately to severely affected by soil degradation.
  • 12 million hectares of cropland are lost per year (23 hectares per minute)

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El polvo de roca aplicado a campos agrícolas podría ayudar a capturar 2B de toneladas de CO2

El polvo de roca que se extiende sobre los campos agrícolas del planeta puede ser una solución climática con el potencial de eliminar hasta dos mil millones de toneladas de dióxido de carbono (CO2) de la atmósfera, según investigadores británicos.

Eso es más que las industrias mundiales de aviación y transporte marítimo combinadas, o aproximadamente la mitad de las emisiones actuales de Europa. La investigación publicada la semana pasada en la revista Nature analiza cómo la técnica podría usarse en diferentes países, con optimismo sobre cómo algunos de los emisores de CO2 más altos del mundo, incluidos China, India y Brasil, son los más beneficiados en términos de eliminación de CO2.

El equipo de científicos, dirigido por David Beerling del Centro Leverhulme para la Mitigación del Cambio Climático de la Universidad de Sheffield, también incluyó expertos de instituciones en los Estados Unidos y Bélgica, entre ellos el líder mundial del clima James Hansen del Instituto de la Tierra en la Universidad de Columbia. Explican cómo la meteorización de rocas, como se conoce la técnica, también podría proporcionar un uso de economía circular para subproductos mineros y materiales de construcción reciclados.

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Sostenible no es suficiente

Los límites planetarios, específicamente los que tienen que ver con la pérdida de biodiversidad, el cambio climático y el ciclo de nitrógeno y fósforo, han sido excedidos. Ya no es posible refugiarnos en la narrativa inválida de la sostenibilidad.

En mi columna anterior (Sistema digestivo y suelo: la relación que aún no te han contado, disponible en vivirenelpoblado.com) hice un paralelo entre el suelo y el sistema digestivo, dos conceptos aparentemente distantes, pero que, ante la mirada circular, son más cercanos de lo que creemos. El suelo actúa como un sistema digestivo, donde microorganismos y hongos hacen que los nutrientes sean disponibles para las plantas. De la misma manera opera nuestro sistema digestivo: millones de microorganismos digieren y nos entregan nutrientes. La relación entre suelo y sistema digestivo parte de la salud de los microorganismos.

Según las Naciones Unidas, solo nos quedan 60 cosechas antes de que acabemos con el suelo. Sin suelo, no hay alimento.

Should No-Till Farming Be Adopted by All to Help the Earth?

Farmers around the world are looking for innovative methods to save water, reduce costs and produce higher yields. No-till farming is a popular practice to improve soil quality and reduce soil erosion. Instead of using a plow to disturb soil before planning, it employs a drill or alternative equipment to grow crops without breaking the ground.

Is no-till growing as great as it’s made out to be? Should it be adopted by all to help the Earth? The answer is yes and no. What it really comes down to is the type of no-till farming, and whether it is being used in collaboration with other environmental conservation practices.

In the United States, most no-till cultivation is conventional and uses a drill to plant monocultures like corn and soybeans. This method actually requires more herbicides than regular tillage.

However, there is another type of no-till farming that depends more on supporting the natural ecosystem and minimizing disruption to the soil. Regenerative agriculture is all about returning carbon to the ground instead of farming it out.

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Boost Biodiversity with Regenerative Agriculture

When you were growing up, how often did you have to clean your windshield? And how often do you have to do that now?

The universal answer is that remarkably few insects goo up our windshields today, even relative to a few decades ago.

The insect apocalypse is worldwide in scope, and is directly related to how we produce our food. One study estimates that we’ve lost 76 percent of insect biomass over the past 27 years. Two primary drivers of this staggering biodiversity loss are habitat loss associated with the industrialization of our food system, and the unintended consequences of agrichemical use. Reforming our food system gives us a powerful tool for combating this extensive biodiversity loss, and regenerative food systems can overcome many of the drivers of insect loss.

Ineffective Pest Control

Integrated pest management (IPM) was fighting a battle it could never win. In 1959, it became clear that our over-reliance on chemical pesticides was failing, and some scientists in California devised a systematic approach to pest management that could reduce chemical use and increase crop yield.

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Sustainable Agroecosystems: Cropping Using Regenerative Agricultural Principles

Over the last century, intensive farming practices have had significant negative consequences for the soil and surrounding ecosystems. By disrupting the natural function of these habitats, the valuable ecosystem services they provide are compromised and are the source of the multitude of environmental issues we face as a society. Natural systems make up a complex web of interconnecting functions, with nothing operating at full health if parts of the system are damaged. Thus, we must consider these systems as a whole, examining not only how each component functions, but how they all fit together and interact in the bigger picture.

Agricultural production practices need to be guided by policies that ensure regenerative cropping and grazing management protocols to ensure long-term sustainability and ecological resilience of agroecosystems. It is not sufficient to aim at sustainability alone as we have substantially degraded our agroecosystems with negative consequences over substantial areas of the world. We need to regenerate the soil and ecosystem function.

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