Our dying soil
Soil is an important part of our planet. It provides us with food, water and air. But what if the soil were dying? The earth would be a very different place! In this blog post, we’ll talk about why our soil is dying and what we can do about it.
Modern-day industrial agriculture developed after WWII when bomb manufacturers switched to making fertilisers and bioweapons manufacturers (nerve agents eg) switched to making pesticides. Since then, the amount of farmland that is devastated by destructive farming practices can be seen from space. Topsoil loss can be easily measured from space as topsoil (that plants grow in) is usually rich in carbon, hence darker. Nasa’s satellites use a colour gradient to estimate the proportion of topsoil lost on land.
Everyone has heard of global warming, but there is an equally urgent problem facing humanity! That of unsustainable farming! While global warming mostly deals with fossil fuel (energy for machineries that run modern society), farming deals with food (energy for humans). Experts say there is only 60 years left of farmable soil on earth!
The main culprits for soil death are chemicals, loss of biodiversity and being exposed. Chemicals such as nitrogen fertilisers kill all soil microbiology, hence making the soil dead of life. Life sustains life in a food web, hence plants will not be able to grow. The loss of biodiversity means that soil microbiology can no longer rely on a variety of plants to lock up water and provide them with carbon and nutrients absorbed from the air by plants. Soil is also prone to being washed away when all vegetation is removed. Roots act like nets to bind the soil together, preventing landslides during heaving rain. When this top layer of soil that is most conducive to plant growth is washed away, plants will not be able to grow, leading to desertification and mass migration.
It seems that carbon is increasingly vilified due to how carbon dioxide and methane are the main culprits of global warming (around 90% of earth’s warming is due to these two gases). However, soil actually thrive with more carbon! That’s why healthy soil is black and plants don’t like growing in yellow soil. We need to recognise that we need to put carbon where it should be to stop global warming and tackle our food crisis! Carbon belongs in the ground and not in the air!
Moral reasons
Companies like Monsanto produces toxic herbicides with a chemical called glyphosate. And then sells GMO (genetically modified) crops to farmers so that crops are resistant to glyphosate and only weeds will be killed off with glyphosate spray. More than 80% of all GMO crop is modified to withstand higher levels of glyphosate. California officially labelled glyphosate as carcinogenic in 2017, but the US still has no plan to ban it or monitor its use. The EU in comparison, is only banning it at the end of 2022. Glyphosate residue is now found in most food we eat, especially grains such as wheat.
The following poster shows the lies that agribusinesses are spreading about glyphosate. Many of these claims are true, but isn’t healthy for the soil in the long-term, as the soil dies.
It is immoral to knowingly poison others, yet most countries still allow for glyphosate. Many other chemicals are used in industrial food production and many of their effects are not known on our health. What is known is that all these chemicals kill soil microbiology and lead to soil death and desertification, which eventually means starvation on a massive scale.
Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception -Carl Sagan
I am often reminded of the great filter theory of astrobiology, which states that humanity has not encountered any aliens even though scientists found many trillions of planets that are hospitable to life because most civilisation destroys themselves before they reach the level of technology capable of interstellar travel. With global warming, I can’t help to wonder if humanity will be the exception or the norm. I prefer the latter.
Economic reasons
Having healthy soil means one can grow good food in abundance forever. Soil wants to support life, it is what it has evolved to do. Yet we snuff out life in the soil and dump chemicals in it and wonder why the soil is damaged. Soil devoid of life and filled with chemicals can grow a lot of food that is lacking in nutrition for a while, and then no food forever afterwards. This is why civilisations like the Ancient Egyptians and the Indus Valley civilization have vanished. It makes economic sense to opt for sustainable production, rather than a short-lived boom (like a stock market crash).
Plants need six macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, sulfur, magnesium and many other micronutrients. Fighting with nature by removing all-natural microbiology that makes these nutrients available to the plants’ roots and then adding fertilisers to replenishing what was once free is illogical. A fistful of soil contains more microbes than there are stars in the galaxies, and humans haven’t figured out what most of them do! Humanity is too egomaniacal to think we can replicate this cosmic complexity with our lab-made fertiliser.
Up to half of all nitrogen fertiliser is washed into water bodies, causing damage to our natural environment. Nitrogen in water leads to eutrophication (algae bloom) and kills all aquatic life. Expensive filters at water treatment plants are needed to make them suitable for human consumption. With the current $30 billion subsidies for industrial food in the US per year, ecological losses are at $3 trillion per year.
With herbicides such as glyphosate mentioned earlier, weeds evolve to be superweeds. Nearly half of all US farm now has superweeds. Farmers in the US are also reporting that GMO corn is no longer resistant to pests. Nature evolves, but GMO industrially distributed seeds don’t. Farmers buy identical seeds from the big agribusinesses each year. These seeds aren’t collected on the farm at the end of the harvest, hence ever newer GMO crops that can withstand ever more herbicides are needed. Farmers having to buy seeds instead of saving seeds raise the price of food, which is now largely borne by food subsidies.
What you can do
Society is like an amoeba, it moves from the margins, not the centre. If marginal people can sustain a movement, the world would change.
What is heartening is that lawsuits have now set precedence all over the world to push governments into action. By arguing that global warming impedes human rights by making the condition for our survival more adverse, many lawsuits have been won around the world. If you aren’t interested in activism, you could buy organic food. Or easier still, you could grow some herbs on your window sill so you can buy less food grown destructively.
Documentaries on soil health
- Kiss the ground (on Netflix UK)
- The need to grow (free)
- Living the Change: Inspiring Stories for a Sustainable Future