One of Earth’s Greatest Treasures Is The Soil
One of Earth’s greatest treasures is the soil, without it, we could not survive. Soil is the Mother of nearly all plant life, and ultimately all animal life on Earth. It is the interface between biology and geology, the living skin of our Planet.
A new documentary, “Dirt! The Movie,”1 brings to life the environmental, economic, social, and political impacts of soil. Sharing the Planet with humanity has all but placed soil on the “endangered species list,” due to greed, ignorance, and lack of respect for the Earth.
See here: http://itvs.org/films/dirt
Our very lives depend on the Top 5 centimeters of soil, which keeps our biosphere healthy and teeming with life. Soil is literally a matter of Life or Death; our life or death.
India calls its soil “Sacred Mother” because it’s the source of all fertility.
We have lost 33% of our topsoil over the last 100 yrs as a result of industrialized agriculture, mono-cropping, erosion, and deforestation. Each year, 100-M trees are turned into 20-M mail order catalogs and such throw away paper products.
Instead of being narrowly focused on growing food, we should be putting our efforts into building and restoring healthy soil. Not only is healthy soil necessary for nutritious food, but it has other important functions across the globe.
Soil cannot be taken for granted as it is not everywhere.
Most of the planet’s surface actually consists of solid rock, upon which most plants do not grow. Soil starts with a mineral source; weathered rock, glacial silt, river sediments, or sand, but it is not soil until organic matter is added.
This slow infusion of organic matter is why soils can take hundreds, or even thousands of years to develop. Unfortunately, toxic agricultural practices can destroy it in just a few years
Healthy soil is about 50% solids and 50% air and water.
Organic sources can be living or non-living. Old leaves, dead animals, and tiny living things all enrich the soil with its necessary carbon supply. Microbes must have a constant supply of organic matter or their numbers will decline.
As it is now, the world’s soils have lost 50 to 70% of their carbon, much of which is now in the atmosphere as CO2 (carbon dioxide). Soil houses thousands of organisms: bacteria, protozoa, fungi, nematodes, and arthropods all playing unique roles in the continual recycling of organic matter, most being smaller than the head of a pin.
Soil microorganisms are Key in making nutrients available to plants and are so diverse that 70 to 80% have yet to be identified. It’s estimated that one tablespoon of soil contains about 50-B microbes.
Fungi play a particularly important role too.
More than 90% of land plants are nourished by mycorrhizae, a symbiotic form of fungi that helps move nutrients from the soil into the roots of plants.
Soil microorganisms are critical to numerous processes, including releasing essential nutrients and carbon dioxide, nitrogen fixation, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, denitrification, immobilization, and mineralization.
Farmers across the globe are in crisis as a direct result of the current food system.
Monoculture is a setup for ecological disaster, especially when growing conditions are unfavorable, such as in times of drought. Industrial farming has created a massive need for nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides, and as soils are further compromised, the demand for these expensive chemicals increases.
As farmers go broke, their land is taken over by multinational agribusinesses that grow GMO monocrops.
According to the film, the target is 600-M farmers in India alone.
As a result, more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide over the past 20 yrs after being left in financial ruin, largely by Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds. An Indian farmer commits suicide every 30 mins, typically by drinking the pesticides he can no longer afford.
Families living on degraded lands become extremely poor and typically move to the city to search for jobs, which are not available. These families end up living in the slums. For the 1st time in human history, more people now live in cities than in the country. And in the developing world, almost 80% of city dwellers live in slums.
What come next are hunger riots, which are occurring around the world as food and clean water are in increasingly short supply.
Soil regeneration is Key to the health of future generations.
Your health is directly related to the quality of the food you eat, and the quality of your food depends on the health of the soil in which it’s grown. Regenerating soils and creating new fertile topsoil comes down to mimicking nature. Increasing the carbon content of your soil is a Key component of soil fertility, as it feeds microbes and helps retain moisture, so everything grows better, bio-charcoal (bio-Char) helps that to happen, and happen quickly.
Fortunately, amidst the squandered resources, there’s a food revolution taking place in America.
42-M American households are growing their own food at home, or in community gardens that represents 35% of all of the households in the US, a 17% increase in 5 years.
Millennials (ages 18 to 34) are the fastest growing population segment of food growers, and an increasing number are households with children. There are many ways you can contribute to sustainability, and of course home gardening is an excellent place to start, but there are others as well.
Below are a few suggestions, as follows;
1. Support CSAs, farmers markets, and local farmers who use organic, sustainable farming practices. Local Harvest, Eat Well Guide, and Food Routes are organizations that can help you find sustainably grown food in your area.
2. Avoid tilling your soil. Tilling is probably one of the most destructive aspects of modern-day industrial agriculture, as it disrupts and destroys important soil biology. One farmer was able to triple the amount of organic matter in his soil in 20 years by avoiding tilling.
3. Build your soil using wood chips and bio-Char, which will decrease your dependence on commercial fertilizers and compost products. These are an effective, cost-effective way to greatly improve the health of your soil and garden. You just lay down uncomposted wood chips on top of your garden, mix in the bio-Char, and whatever is available locally, typically a combination of leaves, twigs, and branches. The elements break down gradually and are digested and re-digested by a wide variety of soil organisms, which is exactly what happens in nature.
4. Turn your waste into compost. Composting is not as complicated as you might think. You can compost in any open space in your yard, in a shallow pit, in a large bin, or in a small worm bin that takes less than 2 sq ft of space.
5. Save your seeds. More than 93% of the variety in our food seeds has been lost, as large multi-national corporations have swallowed up smaller seed suppliers. Saving your own seeds, as well as obtaining seeds from seed swaps and exchanges, can help preserve what precious diversity remains.
6. Plant trees, trees remove air pollution, so the more we have, the better our air quality will be. Some 46 to 58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year, which equates to 36 football fields every minute.
7. Consider building a Green roof or a Green wall. You can even grow your food on your roof. Green roofs consist of soil and living plants, and they retain most of the water that falls on them, there is almost no runoff. They also protect your roof from Sun damage, and roofs last up to 5X longer, and they clean the air too. Read more about building green roots at Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.
Healthy soil sustains healthy life, Stay healthy.
HeffX-LTN
Paul Ebeling
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