Soil quality. It doesn’t quite evoke the same alarm that climate change or rainforest destruction does, but our diminishing soil quality (and increasing salinity) is at the heart of sustainable agriculture and provides insight to many of our most pressing environmental and public health problems. It’s one of many “structural failures” our food system, which was basically built in the 1940’s, is currently facing.
This morning we heard from two legends of sustainable agriculture - Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, both visionaries and reformers for the movement, discussing how the fate of our food system depends on a vibrate, healthy soil system.
And it’s not just about the important task of reducing the amount of toxins in the soil (and consequently, what’s in our food, air, water supply, clothing), but equally about human health and the greater environment. In Iowa, a state that is perhaps one of the worst perpetrators of intensive mono-cropping (corn), many Iowan’s can’t even drink out of local water supplies. The entire region was subject to serious erosion issues and massive flooding last year, remember? And the cause? Declining soil quality marked by the lack of perennial plants and nutrients that keep the soil in place when saturated. Besides flooding, stripped soil doesn’t support plants and trees and the result is intensifying wind, water runoff, and increasing particulate matter in the air.
If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. Soil has no technological substitute (and thus, no deep-pocketed lobbyists trolling Capitol Hill), a fact that unites us, for better or worse, to the fate of our food system and to the quality of our soil.
Crop rotation, composting, legume covering, field resting, (all tenants of organic farming) are ways to preserve and maintain soil through a process called soil building.
Today we sit at a crossroads, genetically modify crops are being piloted everywhere as a way to continue farming in ways that have proven to be destructive to the biosphere and to our health, or advocate for a system of organic, small scale, diversified farming that uses natural processes to sustain our system for the long haul.
More on Genetically Modified Crops to come- it’s an issue growing exponentially in importance and I can’t tell you how fast legislation is being passed (or not passed), and how aggressively testing is being done in our own backyards.
Say it!