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Tuesday, September 19th, 2017

Can American soil be brought back to life?

Author:     JENNY HOPKINSON
Source:     Politico
Publication Date:     09/13/2017 05:00 AM EDT
 Link: Can American soil be brought back to life?
Stephan:   Biodynamic gardeners and farmers have known for decades that the American industrial chemical monoculture agriculture model was a growing disaster. In the late 70s my friends Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins following up on their international best seller The Secret Life of Plants by writing a second book Secrets of the Soil. Ag schools and scientists at the Department of Agriculture pooh-poohed its central premise: the key to a healthful agriculture model was healthy soil. Almost four decades later the accuracy of Chris' and Peter's premise is being proved correct, and the smug complacency and the bankruptcy of  the ag establishment is being unmasked. Here's a just published story that lays out the central issues.

Illustration by Mike Byers/Politico

Four generations of Jonathan Cobb’s family tended the same farm in Rogers, Texas, growing row upon row of corn and cotton on 3,000 acres. But by 2011, Cobb wasn’t feeling nostalgic. Farming was becoming rote and joyless; the main change from one year to the next was intensively planting more and more acres of corn and soy, churning up the soil and using ever more chemical fertilizers and herbicides to try and turn a profit.

“I’d already had the difficult conversation with my dad that he would be the last generation on the farm,” Cobb said.

While looking for a new job, Cobb stopped into a local office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pick up some paperwork. That day, the staff was doing a training session on soil health. He stayed to watch and was struck by a demonstration showing a side-by-side comparison of healthy and unhealthy soils.

A clump of soil from a heavily tilled and cropped field was dropped into a wire mesh basket at the […]

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