Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Humans have spent eons changing the landscape, clearing forests, draining wetlands, and ploughing grasslands to grow food. And we are still doing this, in sensitive and ever-disappearing ecosystems.

With the advent of what I’m going to refer to as “chemical farming” (synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides) which began in the early 20th century, agriculture entered a period of industrialization, and crops became commodities. The goal, as with all extractive industries, is to always get more. In this case, the more being sought is higher yield.

The resource that makes this at all possible – soil – is not some sort of blank canvas medium that you can add ever-increasing amounts of various chemical substances to, isn’t how soil works. Of course you can make soil work this way, if you keep applying more chemicals.

As with all actions, there are consequences.

Soil degradation is a massive problem. The numbers are staggering. The UN has flagged 1this as a major issue, affecting agricultural output, food security, local economies, global economies, and commodity markets. A lot of this has to do with our land use practices – such as cultivation and so on –  but the solution to decreasing crop yield, and the loss of the resource in which you need to grow it? More chemicals.

The chemical industry and industrial farming industry claim that these chemical products are “feeding the world,” but ignore consequences. The practices of cultivating and fertilizing and spraying chemicals to millions of hectares of single-species crops (modified to not be damaged by the chemicals we invent) leads to is nothing short of a global catastrophe of environmental and land use malpractice. Big business, big omissions.

So where does this end? Clearly these are not sustainable trends. The amount of applied chemical fertilizers keeps increasing, along with the chemicals needed to maintain these monolithic monocultures. All of a sudden, in the span of a mere ~100 years, humans have dumped enormous amounts of invented chemicals as a solution to solve invented problems all over the world. It’s an astounding make-work project for something nature has figured out a long while ago.

There is clearly some fundamental misunderstanding of what soil is, and what it can do, or how plants grow, if we collectively believe that more chemicals are the answer to the degrading resource we grow them in. The same chemical industry that is intimately linked with the fossil carbon industry, perhaps isn’t the best route to understanding…biology.

One need only go for a walk in a forest to understand that chemicals are not necessary for sustaining life on this planet. What is in the forest soil that is not in our agricultural soil? Where is the forest magically getting nitrogen from, if not provided by a chemical company? Or grasslands, for that matter? How was the world green at all, before the invention of chemical fertilizers, approximately 100 years ago? How did plants even manage to evolve, one could wonder, without ever-increasing dividends to shareholders?

Life on this planet has been cycling nutrients and sequestering carbon and evolving in the most beautifully designed way for a very long time. The ecological processes which intertwine and drive the production of energy to on is nothing short of astounding….and it is human arrogance that arrives at a conclusion to simplify what plants do to just “NPK.”

The development and maintenance of these industries at the expense of the resource of our soil is not only unsustainable, it threatens our civilization. Soil is responsible for life as we know it.

Until we learn to see and understand the very resources that keep us alive as something to view through the lens of a living system instead of short-term extraction systems and always-increasing-profits, we risk a great deal…not just the health of ourselves and our communities, but the health of our global ecosystem, and our planet.

Maybe we can start by asking different kinds of questions. Why are we allowing it to blow away and wash away? Why do we need more chemicals, with new application technologies? What are we doing to feed and nurture soil, as a biological system?

Graham

thanks for reading