Uh oh. The folks at TED listed my website as this blog. The most neglected piece of all my social media.
I did promise myself I would write more now that I was done fretting over my talk. But I also promised myself I would write more last winter. And this spring.
Maybe this time I’ll break the pattern. But in the meantime, here is the written version of my talk. I will insert links one of these days, hopefully soon….
Centuries ago, Leonardo DaVinci said, “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.”
Today, more than ever before, we need to understand what’s happening beneath our feet.
Limited access to clean water, food production for an increasing population, and extreme weather conditions are all impending crises rooted in our treatment of the soil.
It’s not quite time to panic. But it is time to make some serious changes. It’s time to stop treating our soil like dirt.
Part of the problem is that a lot of us have a hard time differentiating between soil and dirt. So I brought some with me.
This is soil : a mix of sand, silt, and clay, maybe some gravel, air, water, humus, plus trillions of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms, beetles, all sorts of beings living beneath our feet.
This underground universe has its own complex ecosystem that we are just beginning to understand. All this life in the soil helps to break down plants and chemical compounds, feed roots, store and filter water, and sequester soil nutrients.
So that’s soil.
And this is dirt (I wipe my hands on a nice white clean shirt)
Dirt keeps Tide in business
Soil keeps good food on your plate
Dirt keeps you busy doing housework
Soil keeps you alive
Good, now we have that distinction established, let’s talk about soil.
Soil is formed over many many thousands of years, from rocks breaking down, plants decomposing, silt or volcanic ash blowing in, rivers depositing sediment, oceans and glaciers advancing and retreating.
But land is a limited resource, and soil is its fragile skin. So when we let soil wash away, or blow away, or compact it, or contaminate it, it doesn’t regenerate quickly. We are losing our soils, mining them, or just paving them over. And that’s a problem.
Because without healthy soils, we lose some of the natural processes we’ve relied on.
I want to tell you about three ways that soil plays a vital role in our lives.
Let’s start with water. Across the world, we are already fighting over clean water. We are fortunate to have abundant water in Alabama, but we’re still competing with Florida and Georgia and Tennessee over water rights.
In California, the drought is pitting cities and homeowners against farmers. And almost 800 million people on earth don’t have access to clean drinking water.
Healthy soils are the earth’s water filtration system. Everywhere that it rains, or snows, or floods, water can either soak into the soil or wash away into rivers and drains.
The compounds that infiltrate the soil with the water are broken down by soil life or held by soil minerals. The water slowly percolates through and goes into our groundwater, clean for our future use.
The water that is carried away as stream or storm water will carry, along with soil, unfiltered contaminants, pollutants from roads, fertilizers and pesticides from fields, into bigger water bodies. This is the cause of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and the algal bloom in Toledo, where agricultural runoff shut down an entire city’s drinking water supply this summer.
Our wetlands are the earth’s best water filter. But the global footprint of our wetlands shrank by over two thirds since 1997 – across the globe we lost more than 250 million acres of wetlands and floodplains. So now, when clean water is becoming a limited resource, we’ve lost our natural ability to filter it. Let’s take the soil and wetlands that are left and treat them with the respect they deserve.
Along with clean water, we need healthy soils to feed us. Vital role #2.
We all know that – right? But we need to feed a growing population, estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050, and they’re eating higher on the food chain – more meat, less rice and beans, which requires more resources per calorie. In the meantime, we lost over 1.7 billion tons of soil on cropland in the United States from erosion in 2007, and we’re doing better than some countries. Our nitrogen fertilizers are made from our limited petroleum base, and we are looking at a peak phosphorus crisis that few people have heard about. Our crop yields are higher, but their nutritional value is dropping. We treat our manure like toxic waste instead of fertilizer, and throw away almost as much food as we eat.
This is not a recipe for sustainability, We need to be looking at long term soil productivity.
I am lucky enough to work with farmers and scientists that are working to build soils that are deeper, richer, and better functioning so that they can produce more nutritious food per acre or hectare or square foot. It can be done, and we have seen the results.
On our farm, like a growing number, we are building healthy productive soils by tilling less, growing cover crops and planting into crop residues. We’re using inoculants like compost and worm castings and minimizing the use of chemicals to create the optimal habitat for the soil food web – everything from bacteria to birds. With our livestock, we are trying to mimic natural grazing systems.
It goes by many names: holistic management, organic farming, permaculture, management intensive grazing, no-till farming, and philosophies differ, but ultimately we are all working toward the same goal of growing more nutritious food.
Now if we manage soils properly, and improve their ability to filter water and produce nutritious food, our third vital role of soil falls right into place. Building healthy soils can help us mitigate climate change.
Because healthy soils are resilient; they can buffer the effects of extreme weather. They have more organic matter, are deeper and more porous, and have the ability to better manage water. Healthy soils are like a sponge. So if it doesn’t rain enough, they have the ability to hold more water. And if it is too wet, the soil allows the excess to drain through.
And then, at the atmospheric level, healthy soils store carbon. That soil carbon is the organic matter that we want in the soil, the same stuff that holds nutrients and water and feeds microbes. To put it simply, we have too much carbon in our atmosphere, and too little in our soil. So rather than inject excess atmospheric carbon deep into the earth, or find some way to blast it into space, let’s store it into the soil where we can use it.
Now, I hope you understand that soil is not a cure-all for these problems. But it is a key part of the solution.
So assuming that most of you are not farmers or caretakers of wetlands or environmental engineers, what can you do other than sit around and hope for the best?
As you probably know, proactive policies can make a big difference in getting us where we need to go. And the soil lobby is, well, not the biggest player in Washington. So we need more advocates for soils.
The big ship is starting to turn. The USDA is promoting healthy soils like never before. Researchers across the globe have more tools to understand how soil ecosystems operate and practices that build active and resilient soils. The United Nations designated 2015 as the International Year of Soils, which I’m sure will come with all kinds of fun activities.
And more and more people are growing their own food, whether it’s a plant on a windowsill, a garden in the backyard or empty lot, or even a small farm. They are letting their kids get dirty, get some soil on their hands and even in their mouths. They are discovering what soil can do if you treat it right. And you know what? They stop treating their soil like dirt!
Give it a try. Once you like soil, you might not even mind dirt so much.
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