TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Healthy soil is the real key to feeding the world
Yes, it is already working and it is been driven by knowledge. Add into this the oncoming advent of a widely adopted working protocol to harvest dew as well and we have the central tool able to convert all land into optimized agriculture and natural growing bio mes as well. This can easily support a global population of 100 billion.
With Athmospheric water harvesting ( AWH ) it becomes plausible to operate multiple tree lines throughout all fields. This lifts deep nutrients onto the working top soil while supporting productive trees, fruit bushes and a duck supporting arrangement of small duck ponds. All while the field crops mature and are harvested in the intervening double swath strip between the tree lines. Throw in biochar as well and eventually fertilization will become unnecessary. .
Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington
Disclosure statement
David R. Montgomery does not work for, consult, own
shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would
benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations
beyond the academic appointment above.
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. This journey also
led me to question three pillars of conventional wisdom about today’s
industrialized agrochemical agriculture: that it feeds the world, is a
more efficient way to produce food and will be necessary to feed the
future.
Myth 1: Large-scale agriculture feeds the world today
According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. The FAO also estimates that almost three-quarters of all farms worldwide are smaller than one hectare – about 2.5 acres, or the size of a typical city block.
A Ugandan farmer transports bananas to market. Most food consumed in the developing world is grown on small family farms.Svetlana Edmeades/IFPRI/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Only about 1 percent of Americans are farmers today. Yet most of the
world’s farmers work the land to feed themselves and their families. So
while conventional industrialized agriculture feeds the developed world,
most of the world’s farmers work small family farms. A 2016
Environmental Working Group report found that almost 90 percent of U.S. agricultural exports went to developed countries with few hungry people.
Of course the world needs commercial agriculture, unless we all want
to live on and work our own farms. But are large industrial farms really
the best, let alone the only, way forward? This question leads us to a
second myth.
Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient
Many high-volume industrial processes exhibit efficiencies at large
scale that decrease inputs per unit of production. The more widgets you
make, the more efficiently you can make each one. But agriculture is
different. A 1989 National Research Council study concluded
that “well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less
synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of
production than conventional farms.”
And while mechanization can provide cost and labor efficiencies on
large farms, bigger farms do not necessarily produce more food.
According to a 1992 agricultural census report, small, diversified farms
produce more than twice as much food per acre than large farms do.
Even the World Bank
endorses small farms as the way to increase agricultural output in
developing nations where food security remains a pressing issue. While
large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or
wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of
food per hectare overall.
Myth 3: Conventional farming is necessary to feed the world
We’ve all heard proponents of conventional agriculture claim that
organic farming is a recipe for global starvation because it produces
lower yields. The most extensive yield comparison to date, a 2015 meta-analysis
of 115 studies, found that organic production averaged almost 20
percent less than conventionally grown crops, a finding similar to those
of prior studies. But the study went a step further, comparing crop yields on
conventional farms to those on organic farms where cover crops were
planted and crops were rotated to build soil health. These techniques
shrank the yield gap to below 10 percent.
Cover crops planted on wheat fields in The Dalles, Oregon.Garrett Duyck, NRCS/Flickr, CC BY-NDConsider too that about a quarter of all food produced worldwide is never eaten. Each year the United States alone throws out 133 billion pounds of food,
more than enough to feed the nearly 50 million Americans who regularly
face hunger. So even taken at face value, the oft-cited yield gap
between conventional and organic farming is smaller than the amount of
food we routinely throw away.
Building healthy soil
Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run.
Regenerative practices like those used on the farms and ranches I
visited show that we can readily improve soil fertility on both large
farms in the U.S. and on small subsistence farms in the tropics.
I no longer see debates about the future of agriculture as simply
conventional versus organic. In my view, we’ve oversimplified the
complexity of the land and underutilized the ingenuity of farmers. I now
see adopting farming practices that build soil health as the key to a
stable and resilient agriculture. And the farmers I visited had cracked
this code, adapting no-till methods, cover cropping and complex rotations to their particular soil, environmental and socioeconomic conditions.
Whether they were organic or still used some fertilizers and
pesticides, the farms I visited that adopted this transformational suite
of practices all reported harvests that consistently matched or
exceeded those from neighboring conventional farms after a short
transition period. Another message was as simple as it was clear:
Farmers who restored their soil used fewer inputs to produce higher yields, which translated into higher profits.
Soil building practices, like no-till and composting, can build soil organic matter and improve soil fertility (click to zoom).David Montgomery, Author provided
No matter how one looks at it, we can be certain that agriculture will soon face another revolution. For agriculture today runs on abundant, cheap oil for fuel and to make fertilizer – and our supply of cheap oil will not last forever. There are already enough people on the planet that we have less than a year’s supply of food for the global population on hand at any one time. This simple fact has critical implications for society.
So how do we speed the adoption of a more resilient agriculture? Creating demonstration farms would help, as would carrying out system-scale research to evaluate what works best to adapt specific practices to general principles in different settings.
We also need to reframe our agricultural policies and subsidies. It makes no sense to continue incentivizing conventional practices that degrade soil fertility. We must begin supporting and rewarding farmers who adopt regenerative practices.
Once we see through myths of modern agriculture, practices that build soil health become the lens through which to assess strategies for feeding us all over the long haul. Why am I so confident that regenerative farming practices can prove both productive and economical? The farmers I met showed me they already are.
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