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Even the bedrock has a contribution to make to the plants growing on the surface — essential trace minerals — but cannot do so if the topsoil is destroyed.
When I first read the headline of the article in Smithsonian Magazine — “The Nation’s Corn Belt Has Lost a Third of Its Topsoil” — I didn’t find it particularly alarming. Given the rate of loss I documented in Brace for Impact 12 years ago, I thought we’d be much worse off than that by now. If the average topsoil cover is six inches, and we still have four inches left, we’re not doing so badly.
But that’s not what this new study meant to say, at all. Using satellite technology, it examined the soil breadbasket — the once-rich farmland that stretches from Ohio to Nebraska and produces 75 percent of the corn grown in this country — in unprecedented detail. It concluded, not that the region had lost one third of the depth of its topsoil, but that 35 percent of the land area of the region had lost all of its topsoil and was barren.
Just another “Holy shit!” moment among way too many experienced in recent years.
Industrial agriculture is one of the most destructive of all human practices. It refuses to treat topsoil as a precious, living organism, and instead treats it like dirt; plowing it, drenching it with toxic chemicals, never letting it rest. The result is dead dirt, blowing in the wind, washing out to sea, incapable of nurturing a plant. (I once had a wheat farmer tell me that if he did not inject anhydrous ammonia into the ground before he seeded it, the seeds would never germinate, just lie there and rot.)
Using a plow to improve the productivity of the land is like using a guillotine to treat a headache; it works, but at great cost. Skinning the protective vegetation from the living organism has much the same effect as skinning a live animal; it severs millions of microscopic capillaries among roots, fungi and microbes that when undisturbed transfer water, nutrients, and even information horizontally among surface plants and vertically between the surface and bedrock.
The farmer gazes on his freshly plowed field with satisfaction because it’s now going to be easy to insert the seeds he wants to grow. Typically he is unaware that, exposed to sun and wind and water, the soil is drying out, its living inhabitants are dying by the millions, and increasingly it is being washed away by battering raindrops and blown away by swirling winds.
His remedy is to apply synthetic fertilizer, or manure, thinking that this is a practice that heals the earth. It doesn’t. It provides nutrients to the growing plants, albeit not nearly as many as they need to be healthy. The spurious science that says all a plant needs is nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium is equivalent to feeding a human only meat and potatoes. It’s a good deal more complicated than that.
Moreover, farmers almost always apply far more fertilizer than the plants can possibly take up, on the time-honored theory that if a little is good, a lot is great. For decades, the excess nutrients have been washing off the fields (along with the topsoil) to over-stimulate algae growth in streams, lakes, rivers, and off the mouths of all the estuaries of the world — the resulting “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi is the size of Rhode Island.
Soil scientists, environmentalists and government agencies have known all this for many decades now. Myriad government programs and public relations campaigns have been launched promoting no-till agriculture, low-impact agriculture, stream protection, watershed management, regenerative agriculture, you name it. Yet according to the Smithsonian article the great majority of farmers in the Corn Belt practice “traditional” agriculture: plow, drench, seed, spray, spray, spray, harvest, repeat. Until it’s all gone.
Gabe Brown and David Brandt have the answers. I have heard of them and I’m in the UK. They are US farmers, I repeat farmers. They do regenerative farming, every farmer can, new soil from sub soil. No ploughing, no synthetic fertilisers, no pesticides. Cover crops, direct seeding, rotational grazing, not rocket science, and that’s the biggest problem, no beny’s for the big industrial Ag corporations. Plus a generation of old farmers who know little else than what the Ag Corp sales man tells them. Question, when was the last time you met a young farmer in the US? Not just the soil dying in the US, the farmers are as well. No soil, no farmers and a dust bowl climate, where are you going to go and what you going to eat?
You are dead on. But I have actually met many young farmers in the US — there is a vibrant sub-culture of young people practicing permaculture, regenerative ag, food forests, whatever you prefer to call it. But as exhilarating as it is to see them flourishing, they are flourishing in 20 to 50-acre units while the industrial guys are trashing 50,000 acre holdings. No contest. After the crash, of course, the established regenerative farmers will be the only ones still on the board….
Thank you Tom for this very good news about young farmers in the US.
The small farms are the future, they are thinking intensive, low capital cost in land and equipment and most importantly allow lots of people to farm. They are more labour intensive, but funny thing is farm people do like doing good productive work.
In the UK we are in flux, out of the EUs common Agricultural policy which heavily favoured big Ag, and which was a significant factor in the pro Brexit vote in rural areas. The government is saying some nice things about future farm policy, but meanwhile is signing up to any free trade deal passed under its nose, so I would not bet the farm as it were on farming getting better in the UK.
I ‘farm’ 4.5 acres, half coppice woodland, half vegetables and orchard, the orchard featuring walnuts, a crop many people in the UK don’t believe can be grown here. I’m increasingly using food forest techniques, very useful. It was reading on permaculture that I got started 25 years ago. I’m so small though that DEFRA cease sending me forms many years ago. None of what I do got subsidies under the EUs common Ag policy, so the paperwork was pointless from both sides. Will wait to see what happens.
“They do regenerative farming, every farmer can, new soil from sub soil. No ploughing, no synthetic fertilisers, no pesticides. Cover crops, direct seeding, rotational grazing, not rocket science, and that’s the biggest problem …”
Yep. Every time someone correctly points out that industrial farming kills soil there is someone that pipes up with the above true but simplistic mythology. There are 7.5 billion people on the planet. To feed them, the green revolution happened ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution ). If that revolution had not happened, there would not be more than 5 billion people – the excess would have starved to death. Its the definition of overshoot after all.
So great, keep your garden (which can be defined as anything less than 100 acres), as I do, the old hard way. Keep your soil healthy. But do not insult me by saying that that methodology will feed the teaming billions that are already getting hungry again.
I have never claimed that regenerative farming can “feed the teeming billions,” but it can feed the people who live on the farm without recourse to oceans of diesel fuel and toxic chemicals. What needs to happen is not the continued growth of the teeming billions, but a reduction of the population to below the planet’s carrying capacity, which since we have steadfastly refused to consider this option will be accomplished brutally by the inevitable crash of industrial civilization. BTW the so-called “Green” Revolution was never green, it was the fossil fuel/synthetic fertilizer/toxic chemical revolution that is bring the crash on a little faster than before.
You seem to have your understanding of ecology a little backwards. The green revolution did not happen to feed the 7.5 billion, population grew to use the food just as bacteria will when introduced to a Petri dish. If you would like a clear understanding of Overshoot I encourage you to read Willian Catton’s prescient 1980 book by that name. You may also consider researching the productivity of assorted alternative farming methods, you may be surprised. It would take way more people working the land, much more intelligently and diversely, but there’s no telling how much it might have produced had we followed perhaps the Rodales in the 1930s instead of big chemical in the 50s. The tragedy would only have been a lack of people to take those great jobs in cubicle farms:-) I expect you are correct though in that it is probably too late to avoid disaster and yet we should do all we can, if only to hang on to the best methods for the future.
There was a high chance of fmine in India,which was narrowly averted by Norman Borlaug’s grain selections,which only gave high yields with high levels of nutrient (particularly nitrogen ) availability. So the green revolution did prevent that famine. Borlaug knew that Paul Ehrlich’s
warnings about population limits were correct,and indeed noted in his Nobel prize acceptance speech that humanity could not rely on technology
to avoid population limits forever.
The current ‘Bubble’ human population can only be supported with the ‘fixed’ nitrogen supplied by the Haber-Bosch process. Vaclav Smil,in his book on that process, ” Enriching the Earth”,estimates that the maximum
human population that could be supported on the land area currently used for food production ,without the fixed nitrogen supplied by the H.-B. process,to be about three billion.
I haven’t been to wikipedia article,so some of that info would be there.
I have also heard one billion or two billion for that estimate. Four billion, basically the population of 1974, would be really, really pushing it.
Fascinating subject, though old news for some of us. When various folks warn of the shrinking number of harvests left before the soil is exhausted and the concomitant loss of habitat for humans (and other animals), this is what they’re talking about.
Let me reinforce this paragraph: Using a plow to improve the productivity of the land is like using a guillotine to treat a headache; it works, but at great cost. Skinning the protective vegetation from the living organism has much the same effect as skinning a live animal; it severs millions of microscopic capillaries among roots, fungi and microbes that when undisturbed transfer water, nutrients, and even information horizontally among surface plants and vertically between the surface and bedrock.
Paul Stamets has argued that we still only barely understand the role fungi in particular play in healthy soil ecology, and indeed, that fungi (plural) might just be a giant superorganism (fungus, singular) distributed across many acres and/or hectares at a time. He’s optimistic that with better understanding fungi can be used to promote soil health and restimulate growth to feed those teeming billions (expected to crest 8 billion in 2023). I’m far less optimistic of engineering a rescue from impending famine.
Mycelium running: how mushrooms can help save the world(Paul Stamets)
“Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how. The basic science goes like this: Microscopic cells called “mycelium”–the fruit of which are mushrooms–recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What Stamets has discovered is that we can capitalize on mycelium’s digestive power and target it to decompose toxic wastes and pollutants (mycoremediation), catch and reduce silt from streambeds and pathogens from agricultural watersheds (mycofiltration), control insect populations (mycopesticides), and generally enhance the health of our forests and gardens (mycoforestry and myco-gardening). In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find chapters detailing each of these four exciting branches of what Stamets has coined “mycorestoration,” as well as chapters on the medicinal and nutritional properties of mushrooms, inoculation methods, log and stump culture, and species selection for various environmental purposes. Heavily referenced and beautifully illustrated, this book is destined to be a classic reference for bemushroomed generations to come.”
https://b-ok.cc/book/1178681/69d8d1
Wow. This is one of those rare posts in the “doomosphere” that really drives it home that the end of “normalcy” is just over the horizon, if not a lot closer. In recent years, I have been eating a lot healthier than when I was a badly socially-maladjusted and dysfunctional twenty- or thirty-something. But since about seventeen years ago, regardless of how I was eating, I’ve always known I was basically eating fossil fuels transmogrified through various processes into human sustenance. And I’ve known that, to a fairly great extent, this misnamed “Green Revolution” has had a lot to do with how we can add another billion people to the world’s population every 12-13 since 1961. The upshot of this is that we have doubled the world population from four billion in 1974 to eight billion just shy of fifty years later in 2023. My own earliest consistent memories go back to 1973, so this is within my living memory.
For a cogent analysis of how we got to this point (with a lot of discussion on how difficult it is to get farmers to stop using much more fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides than they really need), I recommend the book Against the Grain by Richard Manning.
While the enlightened farmers who are trying to rebuild soil certainly won’t be able to feed eight billion people, I’m still glad there are those who are charting a way forward so that there is at least a possibility that this planet in the twenty-second century will be something other than a mass-graveyard orbiting around Sol.