On the Brink of a Food Crisis

As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation's economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature's economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.

"We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what's in the bank. If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won't much matter."

For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.

We need to reverse that destructive process, which means recognizing the need for fundamental changes in the way agriculture is practiced. That requires thinking beyond the next quarterly earnings report of the agribusiness corporations and beyond this fiscal year of the feds. We need farm bills -- laid out in five-year segments, with a view to the next 50 years -- that can be mileposts for moving agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy.

There much more to this article. Jackson correctly notes that "Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem -- we still have to deal with soil erosion." The chief prevention of erosion is...

Composting. Nature composted for millions of years before industrial agriculture came along and tore everything up. I think most people don't realize how destructive industrial agriculture is. It's big machine dig down too deeply into the soil, releasing massive amount of carbon. So much so that Jackson believes that half of the carbon in the atmosphere can be traced directly to this practice.

Compounding the issue of turning over the soil too deeply, to much, and too often is that the nutrients are lost. The land simply cannot recover. It loses its fertility quickly. industrial agriculture compensates by adding massive amounts of chemical fertilizer that leaches off quickly and does nothing to improve soil structure. Improving soil structure accomplishes at least two major goals: help the soil retain moisture and nutrients. Composting improves soil structure.

Due to its immense scale, industrial agriculture cannot compost. As soon as one crop is harvested, another is planted. The way it used to be worked extremely well: small farmers with a wide variety of farm animals and their excrement created the best compost. Very little work was involved: just the let animals roam across the fields. Grass fed beef is best when the cows are allowed to roam and munch on prairie. There's an incredibly complex, mobile ecosystem at work when cows are allowed to roam. They keep the soil fertile.

We got away from the small farm 50 years ago. The farther away we got, the fatter and unhealthier we became. The destruction of the soil by industrial agriculture is the destruction of us all.

Read the entire article here.