Soil Degradation and Industrial Farming

Soil degradation and Industrial farming.

What has long since been apparent in our researches is that the husbandry of industrial farming is developing serious cracks and beginning to hit the wall.  I have isolated three problems.

1                    The big problem is chemical fertilizer solubility. It is either used or it quickly escapes out of reach and in time it ends up in the ocean producing dead zones.  The ready availability of surplus nitrogen also reduces available organic carbon and this progressively shrinks the soil base itself.  We are losing most of our soils through chemical erosion and not through mechanical erosion.  All the no tillage schemes in the world will not stop this.

2                    Because we are force feeding our crops, all the secondary nutrients are been also depleted several times faster than is normal.  At present no replacement strategy exists that I am aware of.

3                    We also rely on roundup to remove weeds in the soils. The active ingredients bind with nutrients and migrate with them into the water table with negative effects now indicated.

The problem of course is that we will have serious problems in simply going backwards, though there are good arguments in certain sectors to do just that.  The challenge is to repair the protocols for industrial farming.

I have ample evidence to believe it is possible to fully repair this system as it stands today.  The key is to simply freeze mobility of the nutrients and of the active ingredients of Roundup.  Doing that retains unused nutrients for the next crop.

This also means that secondary nutrients may be easily added to the mix and may include even sea salt minerals as a form of dressing.

The methodology is to bring the elemental carbon content of the soil up to around ten percent through the corn biochar protocol that I have posted on over the past three years.  The carbon grabs free ions and it could even be soaked in sea water to collect mineral ions though that needs to be worked on.

Dangerous free ions simply have no place left to go.

Once complete and maintained the soil provides a working bed that easily rebuilds itself through cover crops and minimal tillage.

Corn Biochar Protocol.

A corn crop is laid in and allowed to ripen.  The cobs are harvested and the stalks are then allowed to dry out over several weeks.  This works out to over ten tons per acre.  This is then gathered and subjected to low temperature pyrolysis (350 to 400 degrees).  This drives of the volatiles and reduces the bulk of the material to elemental carbon.  The mass is reduced by ninety percent or somewhat less.  The resultant biochar is reintroduced into the soil and adds about one percent or so of elemental carbon.  This is repeated over several years until soil carbon reaches about ten percent.