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."
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