The Soil Of A Nation: How To Save Our Soil
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.” —Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace
Humans, animals, and plants all rely on healthy soil when it comes to the food they eat and the environment they live in. But what happens when soil quality starts deteriorating? And what can we do to stop it?
In this excerpt from Small Farm Republic, farmer and lawyer John Klar explains the role that we have played in soil erosion and offers advice on how to reverse this destruction to ensure a bountiful future.
The following is an excerpt from Small Farm Republic by John Klar. It has been adapted for the web.
In contrast to climate alarmist claims that only novel technologies and all-powerful government can rescue humankind from the destruction of the world’s ecosystems (a destruction created by the industrial technologies of the last 170 years, aided and abetted by the federal government), no single shift could more quickly benefit the climate than regenerative agricultural practices and more localized food production. As the Chinese philosopher Confucius humbly remarked, “For all Man’s supposed accomplishments, his continued existence is completely dependent upon six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”1
A New Perspective On An Ancient Observation
That ancient observation is now imprinting itself forcefully on the world. The brief, destructive 100-year blip of industrialized agriculture has decimated soils and water, especially in the United States, the techno-leader of innovation. Soils are not mere lifeless substrates, to which may be added a mixture of supplements to explode endless productivity. This itself is a modern, reductionist perspective that erases from view the true centrality of soils in not just human food production, but the very chain of life.
One of America’s truly gifted teachers of environmental wisdom was conservationist and ecologist Aldo Leopold, whose 1949 book A Sand County Almanac advocated a land ethic that foreshadowed much of modern environmentalism. Leopold cautioned the world about the vital importance of healthy soils nearly 100 years ago.2 The marvels of modern technology created synthetic fertilizers, but the technological awareness at the time regarding soil microbes was somewhat less marvelous. Their use was understandable, as synthetic fertilizers offer plentiful short-term productivity gains, while costs such as water pollution from runoff, decreased nutrient content, deteriorating microbial activity, and soil erosion are long-term impacts that eventually compromise productivity but were not immediately apparent. Over time those costs have become clearer, as soil science has improved.3
The Science Behind Soil
Science has only recently begun to comprehend the delicate balance of the human microbiome. The same applies to the soil microbes that fuel the ecological circle of life. What is increasingly evident is that both of these balances become disrupted by chemical interference, including bursts of unnatural fertilizers in soil and chemicals in food that kill important bacteria in the human gut. The answer is found in marvels greater than human machines—in the cycle of photosynthesis, healthy herbivores, and in the vibrant microbial life of soil that nurtures all.4
There is great cause for hope in these soil discoveries. By learning how we are slowly killing ourselves and our planet with unnatural chemical augmentations (not carbon dioxide, a staple of the life cycle), we can take action to alter our perilous course. In awareness of our worsening plight, we simultaneously discover the natural remedy: dynamic, carefully stewarded microbial life. Science teaches us that there can be more than ten invisible tons of microbes on a single acre of well-tended earth.5
Synthetic Fertilizers: Dangerous For Soil & Plants
Spraying concentrated nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers (or herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides) on these microbes kills them outright or seismically disrupts their natural life balance. Perceiving the surface of the land as a writhing, roiling explosion of life helps humans understand why chemicals are bad and how feeding soils naturally is ben- eficial. The converse is already widely understood: to kill malicious unseen microbes, we spray them with Lysol or deadly chemicals. Reciprocally, if dangerous microbes are percolated in environments they prefer (such as with salmonella or e. coli hatched in confined, immunocompromised grain-fed animals), then they thrive. Americans must comprehend the 99 percent of health-protecting, life-creating bacteria as clearly as the 1 percent they fear.6
Burn-baby-burn Republicans in particular must embrace a humbler appreciation of the dire urgency to heed more soil-conscious farming voices. There is disagreement on whether carbon dioxide levels impact the climate; there is no questioning the foundational necessity of soil health, or that America is losing its topsoil at alarming rates.
Referring to industrially produced foods, Shiva warns that for “every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable topsoil.”7 Tom Philpott’s 2020 exposé Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It documents the alarming magnitude of soils already lost, claiming that at least half of the nation’s topsoil has leached away.8
Soil Erosion: A Worsening Problem
The problem of soil erosion is so severe and has worsened instead of improved for so many decades that America has essentially dumped much of its most fertile soils into rivers that carry it to the ocean—perhaps even raising sea levels, so great is the waste.9 The soil loss is on a huge scale. Some 92 million acres of land seeded to corn each year in the United States loses an average of 5.8 tons of topsoil per acre annually.10 Whether or not melting ice caps are bloating the world’s oceans, the technological marvels of a clumsy-minded humanity are steadily refilling them with the soils of the continents.
The only feasible path to displace synthetic fertilizer applications is the same as in Confucius’s time: spread manure liberally. Returning animals to the land converts manures that have become polluting liabilities into reinvested assets. Cows and other livestock offer humanity hope and are the chief saviors of the planet.11 Farming communities for millennia understood that which has eluded our techno-mystical, postmodern folly. Decoupling from that industrial flow of chemicals onto the land means also reducing the use of machinery run on fossil fuels. The resulting reduction in carbon dioxide emissions is then joined by the positive increase in CO2 sequestered in improving soils.12
Reduced tilling and “no-till” agriculture have increased in use, but often this is accompanied by heavier yet applications of chemical fertilizers to maintain productivity. The long-term problems of plowing up land and disrupting the soil’s “microbiome” are what have occupied Wes Jackson and the work of The Land Institute for many decades: “Till agriculture is a global disease. . . . Unless the disease is checked, the human race will wilt like any other crop.”13
The Impact of Soil On Food Production
Mismanagement of agricultural lands has destroyed productivity throughout history, and the result is usually gradual desertification as water is not efficiently retained by ever-thinner layers of anemic soil. The particularly aggressive ability of modern technological “innovations” to destroy soil was noted early on by British agrarian pioneer Albert Howard, who wrote: “In Great Britain itself real farming has already been given up except on the best lands. The loss of fertility all over the world is indicated by the growing men- ace of soil erosion.”14 What Howard referred to as “real farming” had already largely vanished in England a century ago. Remaining American pockets of rural agriculture must be celebrated and nurtured, rather than extinguished via corporate-regulatory fiat and ignorant anti-cow propaganda.
Another aspect of food production intimately connected to soil health is nutrient depletion. All animal life requires certain essential elements and minerals to survive, and there are only finite quantities of these in soils. Perpetually extracting vegetable products from land steadily saps these trace nutrients from soils, leading to depleted nutrient levels in industrial food harvests. This nutrient drainage is particularly severe in energy-intensive crops like soy and corn. The combined problems of soil loss and declining soil health caused by industrial methods create a vicious cycle of destruction in order to maintain yields. It is a Faustian bargain, swapping short-term material profits in exchange for eventual collapse.15
Soil degradation by chemical applications accelerates erosion, which facilitates more rapid water loss, shedding yet more nutrients and soil, and so on. The magnificent dark world of soil life essentially collapses. This is a product not only of the volume of chemical applications, tilling, or other disruptions, but their frequency. Much like chemical compromise of the human biome, over time this disrupts the soil’s microbial capacity to integrate even natural supplements.16
Many of America’s croplands have been under these strains for decades and are vulnerable to ever-more-rapid deterioration if industrial abuses of the land persist. The longer there is delay, the more disruptive (to prices, markets, and cultures) will be the transition. And the longer soils endure such abuse, the longer it takes to reclaim and rebuild them. One day it may be too late, repeating the Great Dust Bowl on a grand scale, irrevocably converting huge swaths of once-fertile farmland to unproductive desert.
Improving Soil Heath: Adopting Regenerative Practices
Conservatives must vocally advocate for policies to improve soil health. In doing so, they can confidently offer a nod to CO2 sequestration in soils as an additional justification for a full about-face in America’s agricultural landscape—literally and politically. CO2 in soils increases fertility and soil health. Conservatives can also see that organic versus conventional farming methods are not just about human health. They are also about soil health. Carbon sequestration in food-producing soils produces more food by nurturing the processes that help life flourish regardless of whether the “grounded” CO2 impacts climate change.
Regenerative soil practices are far and away the leader of the sequestration pack. Americans must better appreciate the primacy of soil health as the steward of carbon dioxide.17 In order to sequester carbon, soil must be vibrant with bacterial and other living activity. This also is the most sustain- able and productive way to make nutritious plants grow. Carbon is pivotal in the entire cycle and available without the help of Monsanto and others. This process thrives using manures and other natural soil augmentation, not factory-manufactured and industrially applied synthetic fertilizer “products.”18
This ancient, fascinating microbial cycle is all tightly woven together and works tirelessly without human technological interference. Working soils require continuous replenishment—a feeding of organic supplements. And when it comes to improving soil health with organic matter, the king of the pile is manure. This is especially true where replacing synthetic applications is desired. Poop is the preferred path. As David Montgomery writes in Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,“Manure that we currently treat as waste could, once again, meet as much as a third of global fertilizer needs.”19
Historically, humans recycled their own wastes as compost. It is popularly remembered that Native Americans planted fish heads and entrails in hills of corn. Modern man has created a supplemental augmentation that has failed miserably, and the best interim cure is the cow manure that will disappear if the ill-considered plan to eliminate meat from human diets takes effect. Until some genius scientist develops not synthetic meat (derived from soybeans raised in a toxic monoculture) but a proper, nature- fooling synthetic cow turd, there will be no relief from our steady societal self-destruction.20
Fighting Destruction of Family Farms
The economic and cultural destruction of family farms has been no accident, nor has it simply been a by-product of “progress.” On the contrary, as farmers who once dominated the nation’s countryside (and legislatures) were pushed out by ambitious, urban, white-collar “experts,” ever larger corporate actors have been able to manipulate tax laws, regulations, and subsidies to eradicate those small farms for the expansion of large-scale agricultural (and chemical-industrial) interests. Universities are largely funded by business interests who don’t value soil fertility. This has channeled research and development into exactly the wrong researching and developing.
In the greater battle, this Goliath has lost to the soil of David.21 The abuse of land and humans (and cows and other livestock) cannot endure without collapse.22 A forward-looking regenerative/local agricultural reversal does not propose to eliminate industrial farming, but calls to widely incentivize research and development for, and implementation of, regenerative practices capable of large-scale application. This is the opposite of the Green New Deal, which strives to transform the entire agricultural system abruptly but does not offer a single policy proposal as to how this impossible fantasy will be achieved. Will Republicans and Democrats credit American voters with the intellects to discern the difference?
There is no downside for conservatives to embrace regenerative, local, and organic farming practices. On the contrary, as David Montgomery shows, “increasing soil organic matter increases crop yields.”23 This also improves food security and nutrition, increases rather than depletes healthy soils, reduces fossil fuel use and tilling, augments water retention and conservation, and reduces pollution runoff. It also incorporates more carbon dioxide into the soil than all the renewable boondoggle fantasies combined, and then some.24
Looking Forward: How To Save Our Nation’s Soil
There is no more vital effort to improve America’s environmental future than restoring local agriculture.25 Understanding the persistent decline of small farms as a corporate-industrial conspiracy that threatens human and environmental health as well as national security and rural communities, it becomes clear why small farms can’t survive and will soon be extinct—the deck has been consistently stacked against them. Let American conservatives rejoice in taking the lead to solve this terrible loss to our nation and in seeking out like-minded Democrats! There is no need to switch political parties to join as allies in this common populist cause.
It is time for the US Congress and those within it who possess the character, insight, and mettle to challenge this industrial juggernaut and join together in a loud voice and say, “Listen to the farmers! They know more about food than federal ag committees co-opted by corporate boardrooms!”26 Our nation’s true warriors for a healthy future are not wearing suits in a courtroom on behalf of wildlife NGOs. They more likely wear blue jeans or Carhartts and a torn flannel shirt.
The return of animals (and humans) to the land in stewardship must be exalted above the lulling lies of the “renewable technology” sirens. Renewable energy technologies need not be abandoned, but they are being pursued in lieu of, and even priority over, food production and soil conservation. This is a threat to our nation.27
This is the quandary in which America has placed herself. The Green New Deal accelerates the release of carbon dioxide and dangerous toxins by subsidizing “renewable” manufacturing industries that use coal and other fossil fuels, while increasing agricultural impacts by converting human diets to industrial monocultures, which will increase the release of CO2 and the use of synthetic fertilizers. The fastest and easiest “truly green” way to replenish soils is a bovine “back-to-the-land movement”—a politics that advocates for and rewards regenerative and organic agricultural practices but also increases local production to reduce transportation impacts, regardless of whether the product is conventional or organic.
Notes
1. PhilipLymberyandIsabelOakenshott,Farmageddon:TheTrueCostofCheapMeat(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 341.
2. “Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upwards; death and decay return it to the soil. . . . It is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.” Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God: and Other Essays (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 268–69.
3. “True stewards of the land understand that more living organisms are in a double-handful of healthy soil than there are people on the face of the earth. . . . And this precious resource of mineral, decaying biomass, gasses, water, and critters is the only protective veil between humanity and starvation. . . . Utterly dependent on this most precious resource, we arro- gantly dismiss it as dirt.” Salatin, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer, 6, 7.
4. “The agricultural-chemical experiment results in ruined land, poisoned waters, and an array of debilitating health conditions. That leaves us with just one way to put nutrients and microbes back into the soil.” Josh Tickell, Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World (New York: Enliven Books, 2017),168–69.
5. “The organic fraction of the soil is a dynamic substance, constantly undergoing change. It con- sists of living organisms, including plant roots and bacteria, as well as dead plant residues and other wastes. The total weight of the living organisms in the top six inches of an acre of soil can range from 5,000 to as much as 20,000 pounds.” Gershuny and Smillie, The Soul of
Soil, 19.
6. “Soil is a placenta or matrix, a living organism which is larger than the life it supports, a tough elastic membrane which has given rise to many life forms and has watched the thousands of species from their first experiments at survival, many of them through millennia-long roar- ing successes and even dominion before their eventual decline and demise. . . . The human agricultural enterprise and all of civilization has depended upon fighting that succession. The human purpose has so dominated our thinking that those in high places are out of touch.” Jackson, Nature as Measure, 19.
7. Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 71.
8. “Agriculture . . . has emerged as a machine for sacrificing soil, at a time when farms need to be building soil to prepare for coming weather shocks.” Philpot, Perilous Bounty, 6.
9. “Soil erosion is already reported at record rates in many parts of the US, and topsoil is being depleted in temperate zones worldwide by an estimated 23 billion tons a year, an unprecedented toll.” Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, 36. See also Jackson, Nature as Measure, 29.
10. KurtLawton,“EconomicsofSoilLoss,”FarmProgress,March13,2017,http://www.farmprogress .com/soil-health/economics-of-soil-loss.
11. Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal (New York: Center Street, 2011), 32.
12. “Since the start of mechanized agriculture, North America’s tilled fields have lost more than 40 percent of their original soil organic matter. . . . Today, most croplands have been under conventional practices for long enough to have reduced soil organic matter by more than half. . . . It would take fundamental changes in agricultural practices to restore soil carbon to near-historic levels.” Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 224–25.
13. Jackson, Nature as Measure, 5.
14. Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (Naples, Italy: Albatross Publishers, 1940, 2018), 20.
15. “Topsoil degradation makes future harvests uncertain at best. . . . Although difficult to predict, it is reasonable to assume that as topsoil degrades, harvests may be negatively affected, which generally involves a ‘doubling down’ on things like synthetic fertilizer, which may accelerate this process.” Rodgers and Wolf, Sacred Cow, 128.
16. “If large amounts of nitrate fertilizer flood the soil system, the bacteria responsible for converting protein fragments into nitrates will be suppressed, in turn ‘backing up’ the whole organic decomposition process. . . . If this process is repeated year after year, the capacity of that soil to digest fresh organic matter will be seriously damaged.” Gershuny and Smillie, The Soul of Soil, 16.
17. “Soils contain more carbon than the combined amount in the atmosphere and all of the plant and animal life on earth. Most soil carbon is held in the top several feet, due to surficial inputs of organic matter and the carbon-rich exudates that shallow roots push out into the soil. This means that changes in the organic-matter content of topsoil can significantly impact the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and therefore global climate.” Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 224.
18. Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 223.
19. Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 195.
20. “The cycles that permit nutrients to flow from soil to plant are all interdependent, and proceed only with the help of the living organisms that constitute the soil community. Soil microorganisms are the essential link between mineral reserves and plant growth. Animals and people are also part of this community. Unless their wastes are returned to the soil—for the benefit of the organisms that live there—the whole life-supporting process will be undermined.” Gershuny and Smillie, The Soul of Soil, 37.
21. “Nature has provided in the forest an example which can be safely copied in transforming wastes into humus—the key to prosperity.” Howard, An Agricultural Testament, 223. There is no technological method to surpass this natural cycle.
22. “Over the past half-century, many farm animals have disappeared from fields and been confined in sheds, in an agricultural system that has become divorced from the land and separated from the so-called ‘nutrient cycle.’ The natural cycle in which sun and rain fed grass, which fed animals, whose manure enriched the soil, has been replaced by a new system dependent on fossil-fuel based synthetic fertilisers.” Lymbery and Oakenshift, Farmageddon, 341–42.
23. Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 226.
24. “Soil scientist Dr. Rattan Lal states, ‘A mere 2 percent increase in the carbon content of the planet’s soils would offset 100 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions going into the atmosphere. Remember that all tillage agriculture contributes to global warming—indeed, agriculture marks the beginning of it. Growing soil, combined with stopping fossil fuels, is our one and only hope—and it’s also not too late.’” Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2021), 454.
25. “If we continue to lose soil, if our soils and groundwater supplies continue to be polluted because of our single-vision focus on production, the day will come when few will care whether molecular biology ever existed as a discipline.” Jackson, Nature as Measure, 114, 136.
26. “What our farmers have had to learn with surprise and pain and to their cost, and what most politicians and businessmen have never learned: it is not the area of a country that makes its value, but its life, the depth and richness of its topsoil.” Wendell Berry, A Continuous Har- mony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 13.
27. “We might succeed on the energy front, but once soil has eroded, its restoration comes in geologic time, and no technological substitute will do. And in spite of our efforts so far, soil erosion and other landscape degradations are increasing globally.” Wes Jackson, Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2021), 102.
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