Soil Fertility is Health, Part 2: 1945 to 2020

Photo Credit: Jan Kroon, Creative Commons

The end of the Second World War was a watershed time. The devastation was tallied, the millions of dead were counted, and the gargantuan tasks of reconciliation, reconstruction, and recovery were contemplated and initiated. Two Englishmen saw the end of hostilities as an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up. Guy Theodore Wrench wrote 'Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, A History of Humanity, Agriculture and the Soil' in 1946, following 'The Wheel of Health' from 1938. Following 'An Agricultural Testament' from 1940, Sir Albert Howard penned his seminal treatise 'The Soil and Health, A Study of Organic Agriculture' in 1947.

Looking forward in the aftermath of World War 2, Guy Wrench shared his vision: "Beyond the murk and rubble of this terrible war; beyond the last, bleak resting places of millions of heroic men and women; beyond the razed homes and shattered towns of 'the quiet people'; beyond the scorched acres and barren fields; beyond the famines and their reign of death; beyond all this horrible orgy of destruction, appears the vista of the living earth as the source of the reconstruction of mankind.

At the gateway to this reconstructed future stands a sentinel, awaiting the only password it will accept:

THE SOIL. "

Sir Albert Howard also viewed the end of war as a time of great promise. "The Earth's green carpet is the sole source of the food consumed by livestock and mankind. It also furnishes many of the raw materials needed by our factories. The consequences of abusing one of our greatest possessions is disease. This is the punishment meted out by Mother Earth for adopting methods of agriculture which are not in accordance with Nature's law of return. We can begin to reverse this adverse verdict and transform disease into health by the proper use of the green carpet - by the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human wastes."

It is said to take ten thousand years to build up one inch of soil, and therefore forty thousand years to build the four inches required to grow crops successfully. Industrially ('conventionally') worked soils erode more than one hundred times faster than they form. In the post-war years, instead of painstakingly building and restoring soil, our Anthropocene 'civilization' has busily implemented destructive practises at an astonishing and accelerating scale. Within the last hundred years, and, especially after World War Two, industrial agriculture began a fierce assault on soil fertility as massive-scale, chemicalized farming has sucked away vitality and diversity, returning only poison to the soil across vast swathes of Sir Albert Howard's 'green carpet'. 

What is soil? In 'The Soil and Health' Sir Albert Howard writes:"The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life. The living fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, invisibly present in the soil complex, are known as the soil population. This population of millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes of course, pursue their own lives. They come into being, grow, work, and die: they sometimes fight each other, win victories, or perish; for they are divided into groups and families fitted to exist under all sorts of conditions.... This lively and exciting life of the soil is the first thing that sets in motion the great Wheel of Life. Not without truth have poets and priests paid worship to 'Mother Earth', the source of our being".

So, how tragic it is, for Guy Wrench and Sir Albert Howard's observations and hopes for humanity based on the health of the soil to have become so trampled upon and buried underfoot  by this seemingly relentless onward march of industrial, chemical agriculture in the seventy years since the end of World War Two in 1945. The trend has been away from Nature's cornucopia and towards a man-made (synthetic) system of a concoction of chemicals that pump up resistant plants and poison the soil simultaneously. Nutrients derived from crops have been decimated while empty weight has soared. In a world where monetization is measured by the pound, ton, looks and uniformity, overall revenues have soared, controlled by huge corporations at the expense of the farmer and farm-labourers. This has been simultaneously a savage war against complex soil fertility and nutrient benefit.

Industrial-scale chemical monoculture agriculture in practise

Massive applications of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, agrochemical fertilizers, together with genetic engineering of crops have led to an ecocide. DDT, Atrazine, Glyphosate, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals in the sewage of the civic waste system are proven to deplete and toxify soils, human, animal, and plant health. Some are known carcinogens. The ecological benefits of permaculture and organic farming have been diluted by hydroponics (mis-represented as being organic), indoor soilless farming, and the production of laboratory-formulated artificial foods like GE apples, sugar beets, corn, soy, rice. Today, over fifty percent of American crops contain GMOs and roughly seventy percent of processed foods contain at least one genetically modified ingredient. The misnomered 'Green Revolution' instigated by the agronomist Norman Burlaug and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation sought to 'feed the world' by eradicating hunger, using genetic modification of crops abetted by chemical fertilizer to achieve this goal. Meantime, Earl Butz, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford, admonished small-scale farmers, urging them to "get big or get out". He encouraged them to farm "fencerow to fencerow", thereby celebrating commodity crop monoculture, enlarging fields, obliterating landbreaks, thereby exacerbating wind erosion, and destroying biodiversity. It was all about the yield at the expense of quality, sustainability, and overall health.

Because of soil depletion, crops grown before World War Two were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties that predominate today. Modern intensive agricultural methods have stripped vast amounts of nutrients from the soil in which crops grow. Sadly, each successive generation of chemically-grown, pest-resistant vegetable becomes less nutritious. A study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal, found that in twenty vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one. "The key to healthier produce is healthier soil", notes Scientific American. Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of thirteen major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines - protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin. He concludes: "Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly, but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” The 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report concludes that globally, cropland soils have lost 20-60% of their original organic carbon content. North American farmland has lost about half of its natural endowment of soil carbon. On top of those losses, modern agriculture consumes a lot of fossil fuels to pull plows and manufacture the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that farmers rely on to coax large harvests from degraded soils.

Small-scale organic regenerative farming in practise

Climate change is the most challenging environmental issue of our times. Stabilizing the climate will require removing carbon from the atmosphere. And it is eminently feasible to reverse the chemical course, regenerate soil organic matter and reduce farmers’ need for oil-based fuel and chemical fertilizers made with fossil fuels. In doing so, more carbon is stored away in the soil and the amount that is released into the air in the process of growing food is reduced. Organic farming, regenerative farming, biodynamic farming, permaculture utilize time-honoured (millennia old) methods at a smaller scale. They are focused on building and maintaining soil fertility, building and maintaining human and animal health based on the cycle of life and holistic ways. These progressive forms of farming have built on traditional, long-established ways, boldly taking on the task of preserving the fertility of soils, understanding that this is the key to health - for humans, for animals, for plants, for eco-systems, for our home and living planet. Farmers who plant mixtures of flowering cover crops (buckwheat, peas, sweet clover, vetch, mustard, etc.) benefit pollinators. These and green manures like barley, rye, alfalfa, fava beans, radish, winter wheat also protect the soil by keeping it covered over the dormant season. As it decomposes or is plowed under, the abundant cover crop residue improves the soil's structure and biological activity, while releasing nutrients to the following cash crop. It also captures carbon, fixes nitrogen, suppresses weeds, aids in water retention and infiltration, penetrates compacted soils, prevents erosion, provides grazing and habitat for beneficial and pollinating insects. "Agriculture is perfectly poised to play a major role in the solution to the climate crisis," concludes Bilal Sarwari, membership and communications manager of the National Young Farmers Coalition. "By helping young farmers gain access to land, everyone can help play a role."

Rudolf Steiner, the visionary behind biodynamics, said of soil: "That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things." Bill Mollison, who promulgated permaculture, wrote: "There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience." Eliot Coleman, the modern-day mentor of many organic farmers, wrote: "The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it.” 

Dr. Zach Bush recently summed up the vital importance to health of the soil beneath our feet: "In the 20th century we created this extraordinary story of 'pharmacy'. What an incredible hero narrative has been told of these chemicals that we have extracted from oil, plants, and the microbiome that we then manipulate to create altered, unnatural, and thus patentable, technology for monetization. 

The strategy is based on monetizing nature by manipulating her ancient design in an effort to control her. To double down on the financial opportunity, the same companies would come to own our chemical food system, with glyphosate always at the foundation of it – these chemicals block the ability of the microbiome and the plants that we consume to produce the medicines they once contained.  

A monopoly on nutrients and the medicine in our food has been built....The truth is, and always will be, that there exists an intrinsic ability for all of us to heal. It is the same intrinsic capacity that allowed us to begin life within the context of the vast life on this planet.

The intelligence of nature is within us, and beneath our feet.  If we would step back and let her work her magic we would find grounded health."

Soil Fertility is Health, Part 1: 10,000 BC to 1945

The end of the Second World War was a watershed time. The devastation was tallied, the millions of dead were counted, and the gargantuan tasks of reconciliation, reconstruction, and recovery were contemplated and initiated. Two Englishmen saw the end of hostilities as an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up. Guy Theodore Wrench wrote 'Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, A History of Humanity, Agriculture and the Soil' in 1946, following 'The Wheel of Health' from 1938. Following 'An Agricultural Testament' from 1940, Sir Albert Howard penned his seminal treatise 'The Soil and Health, A Study of Organic Agriculture' in 1947.

Chinese farming, practised continuously for two thousand years

Looking back, Sir Albert Howard remarked that China: "... is indeed the classic example of a nation which has conserved the fertility of its soil. Other nations have done the same, but none over so long a period or on so vast an area. Is it legitimate to interpret the history of the nation by the way in which they have made use of the land which chance or their own valour assigned to them?" 

Guy Wrench refers to a golden age for agriculture (over a thousand years ago) as described in 1904 by S. Scott in his 'History of the Moorish Empire in Spain': "... the most complex, the most scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man. Its principles were derived from the extreme Orient, from the plains of Mesopotamia, and from the valley of the Nile - those gardens of the ancient world where, centuries before the dawn of modern history, the cultivation of the earth had been carried to a state of extraordinary excellence."

For more than twenty thousand years, trees and greenery largely girded the Earth. In their wake, they left the perfect peaty rich humus to support the panoply of plants multiplying by wind dispersal, cross-fertilization, pollination by synergistic insects. Vegetation grew wildly, profusely, of Nature's accord. Then, some ten thousand years ago, mankind began to effect enhanced, concentrated, controlled growth by trans-planting, seed-saving, and complementary soil building. Food was provided in predictable, plannable fashion, and so nomadic hunter-gatherers became farmers settled in small communities. For forty six consecutive centuries, the Chinese have grown crops in the same soil by continuously using fertility to grow food and returning fertility to the soil in what Guy Wrench calls 'The Wheel of Life'. Adhering to the rule of return, plants were grown and harvested here and elsewhere, with their cast-offs returned at the end of every growing season to the soil to replenish for the next cycle of growing and harvesting. Cultivation was concentrated in pockets of fertility, fields of plenty, according to the annual cycle of seasons. Animals like goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, cows, pigs were domesticated to provide food for all and manure for the land.

Civilizations sprouted in China, Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Americas. As these empires expanded, pressures on the soil grew, as did a burgeoning population. With trade came tools and travel by horse, mule, camel, and llama over vast distances, across civilizations. With exchange came the spreading of ideas and religions, cultures and traditions. With empires came money, power, control and the move away from sound traditional maintenance of soil and fertility. The rule of return became overlooked, and empires were shaken by volatility. Ecological adversity, wars and conquest in multiple forms would tip an empire over the edge into collapse or oblivion. Land stewardship was snatched from indigenous peoples and tribes by conquering invaders, colonizers claiming ownership. Traditional methods of nurturing the soil were buried as fast profit, efficiency of production, and maximum rate of return became paramount. The crucial measure of Nature's rule of return was abandoned, with the result that soils deteriorated, lands were rendered infertile, and further pressures placed on maintaining sustenance, law and order.

Great civilizations were built, then after a few centuries of fabulous wealth, prosperity, trade and expansion (built mostly on the backs of slaves), they imploded and collapsed, top-heavy and unable to sustain their growing populace. They ignored the soil at their peril. Lord Ernle wrote in 1912 in his 'English Farming, Past and Present': "In Roman Italy, after the Punic Wars, the deterioration in fertility of the soil led to the substitution of family-owned farming with large estates, the *latifundia*, and large landowners. In Tudor England the same substitution of *latifundia* for small family farming also took place. In post-Punic Italy, acquisitive men seized the lands of weakened farmers with complete disregard of the law". And so it is that in England, agricultural methods generally followed the Roman way.

Long before Tudor times, the Conqueror, William of Normandy (1066 and all that) had already transformed the farming landscape by confirming the subordinate position of the English farmers by giving them foreign conquerors as their lords. Land became the property of the King, who rewarded his followers and bound their interests to his through gifts of land. Guy Wrench writes: "In addition to farming by the manor system, the most educated section of the population - the monks of the Church - contributed to the farming culture of the nation the benefits of their devotion, learning, and art... To their practical farming, the monks brought the help of the classic writers of Rome - Cato, Varro, Columella and others - whose works in Latin they were able to read. They were *cultured* farmers, to whom the spiritual side of creation appealed with special significance... It was they who built roads and bridges, and opened their monasteries as places of temporary rest and hospitality to all travellers, rich or poor; they who drained marshes, reclaimed wastes, and improved livestock. It was they who sustained a soil-based civilization by giving it the vision of religion, the art of the temple, and the culture of studentship. They also defended, as far as they could, the independence of the peasants, and supported them in their efforts to rise out of serfdom." The grand edifice of communal farming came crashing down with the advent of the new money economy. The acquisitive new aristocracy of Tudor England was attracted by the price that British wool fetched on the Continent: "It was this opportunity for more wealth that made them seize the land of the small farmers and monasteries, and with the expenditure of their capital turn it into sheep farms (the enclosures).... From that time onwards, the proletariat and poverty became familiar parts of English society." The Industrial Revolution hastened the hollowing-out of William Blake's "England's green and pleasant Land", as able-bodied men, women, and children were conscripted and sent flocking to "those dark Satanic mills".

In the early nineteenth century, great herds of buffalo, more appropriately called American bison, roamed the Great Plains. Then over 50 million buffalo existed (perhaps as many of 75 million). Numbers decreased by 1872 to 7 million. The decimation of the great buffalo herds heralded the transition of the extensive grasslands into agricultural production. The fertile soil of the prairie itself eventually disappeared as the plow opened up the land to erosion. Severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the wind erosion caused The Dust Bowl, which came in three waves of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930.

With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, newly-mechanized farming methods had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. This rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland. During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – travelled across the country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.

Sir Albert Howard writes: "The net result of a century's mismanagement in the United States was summed up in 1937 as either the complete or partial destruction of the fertility of over 250 million acres, i.e. 61 per cent of the total area under drops: three-fifths of the original agricultural capital of his great country has been forfeited in less than a century."

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the future of farming was contested. Sir Albert Howard and the Organic movement advocated an approach based purely on the natural health of the soil.However, they faced a fearsome, powerful opponent - chemical agriculture as sanctioned by large corporations and governments held in their thrall. Like those mustard gases left over in 1918 after the First World War, what use could they put all those munitions to in 1945? When the nitrogen was no longer needed for bombs, what were they going to do with all this capacity? Their answer was, use the nitrogen-rich ammonia for fertilizing the nation's crops.

Keep Your Eyes On The Road Ahead

We are collectively complicit in electing governments and sanctioning corporate behemoths that are assaulting Nature with such vehemence, such violence, such force, such wilfulness that whole ecosystems are suffering and even dying off. Rainforests, oceans, rivers, glaciers, minerals, soils, the air we breathe, the water we drink are being packaged, poisoned, and picked off, never to return to their pure, pristine, natural state or volume. We watch on as Nature is abused.

Now, under cover of COVID-19, as the people cower and keep apart compliantly in thrall to the daily infection toll, corporations race to harvest the pickings with impunity, pumping up the fossil fuels to float the boats, fly the planes, and drive the cars. They even have the gall to suck up the bail-out funds glad-handed by governments, deepening monetary and ecological debt and exarcerbating human misery by cheating the general public.

We close our eyes to the rape and pillage, distracted by our immediate precarity. We fear a virus that is, nonetheless, well on the wane in most countries. We have come a long way by flattening the curve and seeing deaths from the virus slow to a trickle, doing as mandated by our governments. Sensible stratified risk management responding to data and not outlandish modelling projections should be de rigueur, rather than the insatiable get-rich schemes foisted on us by merciless pharmaceutical leeches. They divide and conquer us with smoke-and-mirror obfuscation and demonization of common-sense rationales.

And so.... the wildfires burn, the hurricanes and cyclones intensify, the oceans heat up, the floods and droughts become more extreme, the temperatures become unbearable, unable to support life, the soils become sterile, poisoned with toxins, biodiversity crashes, and our bodies struggle to adapt to an unnatural diet of GMOs, glyphosate, synthetic additives, antibiotics, steroids, endocrine-disrupting substances. Paralysed, we fret and fluster over an orange monster and a novel virus and novel vaccine to counter with, fiddling as Rome burns, arguing back and forth and flip-flopping over appropriate measures. We mask our faces and look away as if we dare not look at the carnage as we keep our distance from our fellow human beings.

We must focus our undivided attention on a road ahead that must lead to full restoration and whole recovery of the patient; ourselves, family, friends, all humans, plants, the eco-systems that in their true essence sustain us. This is the only way to save the world we have inflicted so much damage upon, particularly in the last hundred years or so of accelerated overshoot when we had the tools to have known better. We have the knowledge and the technology. Where is the vision and courage to use them to build a future that sustains us all? 

Kudos to all those who are using every fibre of their being, sometimes to their last breath on this planet, to help bring it about. They are everywhere in small pockets dotted around the world, planting and saving seeds, nurturing soils, growing food, and helping others to eat, drink, play, sing, dance, create, write, vote, and get involved with acting on our innate intuition that our current political system is broken and needs fixing. May a new generation of fierce young doers rise up in a spirit of renaissance. And may fierce, bold women and wise elders continue to lead the way.

Shhhh!

Open your mind to what you don't know, instead of regurgitating what you think you know.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass:

"Ignorance makes it all too easy to jump to conclusions about what we don't understand."

The Mark of a Civil Society

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man's death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom 

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

(John Donne, 1624)

The mark of a civil society is how it responds to existential crisis. And there is no question that we find ourselves collectively challenged in an unprecedented way.

Here, in Canada, where I live, life as we know it has been transformed in recent days. And now, in most countries of the world, the same situation applies, with self-isolation, social distancing, closure of public spaces and private social venues the norm. How surreal this must be for most people, particularly urbanites and participants in large organizations. Our world is suddenly condensed within the walls of our abodes and shelters. Fresh air and provisioning are reserved for occasional forays to the outside world beyond our home and family compounds. Some of us are more fortunate than others with the level and quality of space and comfort we enjoy. How strange to witness the silencing of human-derived sound; how odd to see deserted meeting places. How long can we stand this enforced new reality without losing our marbles and coming into brute competition for food and sustenance, for very survival?

We have many long-latent measures in our toolkit to guide us in this. The main thing to realize and confirm every single day is the unambiguous truth that we are all in this together. In sticking together  in our resolve to get beyond the tunnel we find ourselves darkened by, and out into the bright fresh air of a new day bathed in sunshine, light, warmth that only we living ones can. With common resilience, most of us will get to complete this journey; some we will lose along the way, but we will fight tooth and nail to keep them alongside us for as long as possible. We will not abandon them, for this is the mark of a civil society.

Already, stresses are beginning to show. Most nations are stepping up to the plate in mutual solidarity by taking the long view. The priority is to help all levels of society, especially those less able and equipped to fend for themselves, like the elderly, the poor, the marginalized, the health-compromised, the virus-infected. Some nations have been negligent, unfocused, slow to adapt to the clear unfolding crisis, meaning the collective affliction will be greater and longer. Some nations are already seeing the light of day as their infection curve flattens and begins to drop off. They have done this precisely by coming together, working all-out together, in common cause. The nations that will suffer most are those that drift and veer away from the vision of the common good. Already, irresponsible libertarian, morally superior exceptionalism is rearing its ugly head as national leaders of an authoritarian, self-indulgent, narcissistic bent are beginning to play their sacrificial card. Already, the socially disadvantaged, age- and health-compromised are beginning to be thrown under the bus, judged to be expendable, sacrificable by a callous, negligent 'leadership'. This is absolutely not the mark of a civil society. Shame on these leaders, ministers and thinkers who cannot see beyond their own vanity to empathize with the crisis engulfing the citizens they claim to represent. 

What is imperative is that we all, personally and collectively, follow sensible guidelines to distance and, eventually, overcome this unleashed virus and help all those around us (both as extended family and community) every step of the way towards the light at the end of the tunnel. Our current physical isolation is a surreal temporary exception to the norm, to be endured in good heart. This has enabled us to connect more on spiritual and psychical levels. For no man is an island...

Dichotomy

There is a tragic human dichotomy now playing out at flashpoints of the climate emergency, one between those personally traumatized by the calamity playing out, and those far removed who continue to preach Business As Usual, as if actual events are hyped-up conspiracies, mere figments of radical imaginations. The former are experiencing a living hell, losing house, home, land, possessions both material and mental, pets, animals, livelihoods, and even lives; the latter shutter themselves in their privileged enclaves and make blithe pronouncements from their ivory towers.