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Wednesday, April 5th, 2017

Healthy soil is the real key to feeding the world

Author:     David R. Montgomery
Source:     The Conversation
Publication Date:     April 3, 2017 8.45pm EDT
 Link: Healthy soil is the real key to feeding the world
Stephan:   In 1989, two friends of mine, Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, who had written the 1970s mega-bestseller, The Secret Life of Plants, followed it with Secrets of the Soil. Their basic argument in the second book, which they had learned doing the research for the first, was that all wellness based agriculture starts with the soil. They presented an argument that the chemical industrial mono-culture would ultimately implode precisely because the soil was seen mostly as just a medium in which plants grew, and its condition was of only secondary importance. We can now see that Tompkins, Bird, Rudolf Steiner, Alan Chadwick, Hugh Lovell, and others were correct and the chemical companies were wrong. Here is the latest from a professor at University of Washington.

One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.

When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils. In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.

Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil. […]

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4 Comments

  1. John Wilson on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 4:32 am

    Stephan, Thanks for posting this. As a former student of Alan Chadwick and an organic farmer, I have learned much about soil and its place in restoring the planet. It cannot be overstated, just how central and significant is the role of soil. Carbon sequestration, nutrient density, water holding and purifying , and more. Thanks

  2. Mark R on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 5:46 am

    Yup ?

  3. Carolyn Koch on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 8:26 am

    Ditto

  4. Rev. Dean on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 3:01 pm

    My Grandpa always said you have good soil if you can stick your hand down into it and pull up a bunch worms. Worms only live in healthy soil. I know how true that is now that I grow organically and sustainably and have great food on my plate at every meal, and my worms are very happy, too.