Category Archives: #worldorganicnews

367: Living the Natural Life

This is the ChangeUnderground, Jon Moore reporting!

Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!

We begin this week with a quote from Bill Mollison:

Quote:

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple. — Bill Mollison

End Quote

This quote is at the top of our first post for this week: Maintaining the Ways of Our Ancestors from Neolithic Lifestyle Rx.

This post is an excoriating attack on the mainstream. The work, debt, consume, repeat mainstream. Now it’s unlikely that people living that life would be reading the blog quoted but we live in hope. The solutions suggested though are worth a look.

Quote:

We can provide for our own needs, on our own terms.

We can reject the industrial food distribution network that threatens to collapse our global ecology, and instead eat seasonally from the land which immediately surrounds us.

We can reject the profit and status driven mindset that divides us, in favor of an ethic that puts health and wellness first while emphasizing family bonds and community interconnectedness as the pillars of true wealth.

We can reject the polarizing and ultimately distracting political charades of our era and embrace just doing something, anything productive, right now.

End Quote.

That last sentence: We can reject the polarizing and ultimately distracting political charades of our era and embrace just doing something, anything productive, right now.

Put me in mind of another one of my favourite Mollison quotes:

Quote:

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.” 

End Quote

The more we move from consumption to production, the better we and this world will be.

The rest of the post and it is a good serious length, you can read at the link in the show notes. I would recommend it.

We now come to a post from AncientFoods entitled Ancient farmers transformed Amazon and left an enduring legacy on the rainforest.

I think it possible to underestimate the effect we humans have had in the planet. We’ve been altering ecosystems for far longer than the fossil fuel fueled free for all since the Second world War.

From the post,

Quote:

Ancient communities transformed the Amazon thousands of years ago, farming in a way which has had a lasting impact on the rainforest, a major new study* shows.

Farmers had a more profound effect on the supposedly “untouched” rainforest than previously thought, introducing crops to new areas, boosting the number of edible tree species and using fire to improve the nutrient content of soil, experts have found.

End Quote.

This is not dissimilar to the affect the indigenous peoples  of Australia had upon that continent. The key element which, from my reading, stands out from Amazonia, to the antipodes, to Africa is the use of fire as part of a landscape management toolkit. The european farming mindset sees fire as damaging. Think barn burnings and lack of winter feed for stock. That fire, when properly used can be beneficial to both the landscape and the humans and other animals living on it, takes some mindset shift to accept. When I say beneficial to the landscape, I mean it alters the landscape but in a way that appears to do very little ecological damage. It alters the balance between trees and understory to favour grasses and herbs over shrubs. Thus reducing the fuel load for wildfires. Given the northern Summer this year, it might be worth having a think about this landscape management tool.

Anyway, I think we need to realise that most landscapes outside of Antarctic have been modified by human activity. Some for the good some not so. So we need to think deeply before we alter any ecosystem fully aware that not matter how deeply we have considered this change, there will be unintended consequences that we will need to adapt to.

Our next post is from the blog Pacific Livelihoods Research Group entitled 4th World Congress on Agroforestry 

Quote:

The Pacific Livelihood Research Group’s Professor George Curry is on the scientific committee of the World Congress on Agroforestry to be held in Montpellier, France between 20-25 May 2019.

The overall objective of the Congress is to contribute to the progress of agroforestry science and practice in order to bridge the science-policy gap.

More than 1000 delegates and leading keynote speakers from all over the world will make this gathering a unique experience.

End Quote

This looks like a wonderful Congress. I’ve tentatively added it to my diary for next year. Agroforestry is, to my way of thinking, a variation on the Permaculture system. Indeed I heard a podcast some five odd years ago where an academic stated he calls what he does agroforestry because if he called it what it really is, Permaculture, he’d be drummed out of the Academy. Whatever works is how I see the world so agroforestry is a word I can work with. 

Now to post that shows the difficulty some farmers have to face from the blog Middle East Affairs entitled Yemen: Beekeepers are exposed to many air strikes during the war.

Quote:

SANAA – Yemen’s beekeepers risk air strikes and land mines as they traverse the country’s valleys, transporting their hives on pick-up trucks to produce some of the world’s finest honey.

The impoverished Arab state, known for its Sidr honey made from the jujube tree, has endured three years of war that have pushed it to the verge of famine and shattered the economy.

End Quote.

Droughts come and go, floods too but airstrikes are, thankfully, not many of us have to work with that safety issue. Let’s some time thinking about the efforts required to follow your profession under those conditions.

From further in the post:

“Before the war…we produced large quantities of honey. [But now] honey farmers who move their private farms at night sometimes get hit by mistake,” said Faris al-Howry, who owns one of the main honey stores in the capital Sanaa.

“It’s happened with two or three farmers we know where their farms were bombed [in air strikes].”

End Quote.

In this centenary year of the Great War’s ending let’s all make efforts to bring a more peaceful world.

And on that sobering note I’ll draw this episode to a conclusion. 

Remember: Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!

366: It’s Alive!!!

This is the ChangeUnderground.

Jon Moore reporting!

This week begins with a piece from Iowa Learning Farms entitled: It’s alive! Scientists get closer to identifying what lives in our soil.

The importance of soil life cannot be overstated. That we know so little about this complex web of life is not surprising. Soil science has focused upon the most easily measured properties of soil, its chemistry and the physics involved in compaction, ploughing and so forth. Continue reading →

365: Weeds!

This is the ChangeUnderground, Jon Moore reporting!

Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!

And they got me to thinking about my own journey to my current understanding of the little buggers and how they don’t bother me anymore.

My first ever garden as a child was a small one metre square attempt at growing wheat from my Irish neighbour’s chook feed. Continue reading →

364: The Past, Present & Future

I’m your host, Jon Moore

Decarbonise the Air, Recarbonise the Soil!

The Pleistocene

Our species, Homo sapiens, came into existence during the period known as the Pleistocene, the Ice Ages. The Pleistocene lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to around 12,000 years ago. In that time many other species of humans evolved too. Since I finished my degree in archaeology back in ’95 the situation has become far more convoluted. There was a nice neat chronology: The Australopithecines, of which there were many but out of this lineage came Homo habilisHomo erectus and then Homo sapiens. And Neaderthals were slotted in somewhere.

Continue reading →

363: Chaos Gardening Part II

Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!

This week we continue our exploration of the “Chaos Garden” idea. We finished last episode with some quotes from Dr Christine Jones on the importance of photosynthesis. 

Today we explore the suggestions Dr Jones makes to enable photosynthesis to operate at its maximal effect.

  1. Green is good – and yearlong green is even better.
  2. Microbes matter!! 
  3. Diversity is not dispensable!!! 
  4. Limit chemical use 
  5. Animal integration 

Continue reading →

361: Chaos Gardening Part I

Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!

The great philosophical battles over time were reduced to two teams in the seminal spy show of the 1960s: Get Smart. Control and Kaos were the two options. Much industrial farming and chemically based gardening can be thought of as part of the Control team. After all, we have several millennia of holy books declaring humanity’s need to bring order and structure to chaotic Nature. That these books arose in the cultural context of West Asia, known nowadays as the Middle East, it should not be a surprise that this approach should be at the bedrock of “Western” farming. Nature is considered corrupt in some way, less than perfect.  Continue reading →

S9E9 Regenerative Ag The 4 Principles

This is The ChangeUnderground

I’m your host, Jon Moore

Decarbonise the Air, Recarbonise the Soil!

Welcome to episode 9 of season 9: The Fundamentals of Regen Ag

We’ve looked at the benefits of regen ag over the past eight episodes with brief references to the “How To” aspects of the practice. In the episode we’ll delve into the practice as well as the theory of Regen Ag.

What is Regenerative Agriculture?

Regen Ag is a methodology that works with Nature rather attempting to force natural systems into an industrial framework. It is based upon observation of nature and assumes we will never have full knowledge of what’s going on. To compensate for this, to some extent, we have the evidence from 3.7 billion years of the evolution of life. A testing ground for best practice on a blue planet at the edge of the milky way. 

The deepest learnings available from observing this testing ground can be summarised in the following four principles:

  1. No bare soil
  2. Plants and animals coevolved to benefit each other
  3. No synthetic chemicals
  4. Complexity results in stability

From these develop the “on the ground” practices specific to each locale. Clearly a tropical mountainous sloping piece of land with thin to minimal topsoil will require a different approach to a temperate riverside area with 50 metres of topsoil depth.

Let’s have a look at what goes wrong when we breach the principles.

  1. No bare soil
    1. When soils are plant free they are exposed to wind, water and sunlight/heat. This leads to a loss of the topsoil, wind and water erosion, and the direct heating of the sun kills the soil biota. These two effects have the secondary effect of discharging CO2 from the soil as the living biota dies off. These biota are what provide food for the plant life. To replace these, chemical ag adds, well, it adds chemicals, further disrupting the soil chemistry and any remaining soil biota.
    2. Bare soil encourages the arrival of pioneer species. These are characterised by having broad leaves, they cover a large area of soil per plant, they usually have deep taproots for bringing nutrients from subsoil levels to the topsoil and massive numbers of seeds. These evolved to colonise and prepare areas from which glaciers have retreated or landslips have occurred. They have short life cycles to build up organic matter on and in the top spoil as they cycle through their generations.
    3. Keep the soil covered with either a mulch, fallen leaves, straw, hay etc or with a living mulch, clover, cover crop or a cash crop.
  2. Plants and animals coevolved to benefit each other
    1. Modern chemical and medication based ag tends to separate plants from animals. Monocultures of plant species, 10,000 acres of wheat, corn or soy as an example which are then harvested and trucked to CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) to be fed to the stock warehouse like machine parts. The wastes from the animals are either trucked back to the monocultural fields or more usually dumped in piles near the CAFO to pollute groundwater, creeks, rivers and streams.
    2. Ruminants, cows, goats, sheep and their like evolved to be in tight mobs continually moving across grassland/treed savannahs. The stock consumes the feed, defecates and moves on. This has the effect of hitting the grasses, herbs and legumes hard for a short time before allowing them to regrow for a long period of time. This releases nutrients to soil biota, allowing these to multiply and draw carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil as solid carbon molecules. In effect to decarbonise the air and recarbonise the soil.
    3. The more species of ruminants and monogastric species, pigs, horses, people that interact across the landscape the more stable it becomes. The multitude of vegetative species, growing, being trampled, consumed and manured leads to a deeper more open soil structure better able to allow the infiltration of water from rainfall events. The groundcover of the vegetation reduces evaporation of surface water, cools the topsoil and provides a mix of nutrients for the grazers/browsers in a virtuous cycle of reinforcing balance. 
    4. Birds tend to follow the ruminants and monogastric species, consuming food sources related to the manures and spreading them across the surface of the soils where they are better and more quickly incorporated into the soil, thereby feeding more soil biota. These soil biota tend to be either bacteria and fungi. The balance between the two varying across time with changes in grazing pressure and rainfall throughout the year.
  3. No synthetic chemicals
    1. Given the 3.7 billion years of evolution for life on this planet, it is not surprising that soil biota are distressed, destroyed and disrupted by chemical additives. Be they fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides or fungicides, they are, in evolutionary terms, novel compounds for the soils and their biota to deal with. They do have short term growth benefits on selected crop species but this comes with a Faustian deal. For every year of chemical farming 1% of the topsoil is lost. Converting from chemical to regenerative ag actually regrows topsoils, reversing the damage but maybe never returning soils to the same condition they were prior to agriculture. In colonised landscapes, say here in Australia, cattle and sheep dung will and does have a different effect on soil biota to the many species of marsupial that called our soils home prior to 1788. This holds true across all the “New World” colonised soils.
  4. Complexity results in stability
    1. Within a mechanical system, the lower number of moving parts, the more likely the system is to remain stable and to be easily serviced. Think of the difference between a push rod operated side valve single piston engine of the 1930s and a dual overhead cam, 16 valve four cylinder engine of today with electronic controls, emissions monitoring and fuel injectors. The earlier version is a much simpler thing for a person to maintain, the latter requires a workshop with access to hardware and software and a mechanic with much more complex skills than a feeler gauge and an adjusting tool to set the tappets. There are fuel and efficiency gains with the complexity but the system is inherently more unstable due to the layers of technology piled on top of each other and the vehicle with up to date tech can become a listening device and a data vacuum.
    2. Thinking of the bare soil example above, a simple biological system of broadleaf species on nearly bare soil could be wiped away with an adverse rainfall event before the plants had time to establish themselves. The arc of recovery from bare soil to steppe or forest is one of increasing diversity, interconnectedness and complexity of systems. Thinking of the landslip and the Eurasian Steppe, an adverse rainfall event on the steppe could lead to localised flash flooding but the ground cover and the soil would remain mostly intact. On the bare soil, more erosion and loss of nutrients would be the result.
    3. Once we account for the fauna in the system, the cycling of nutrients, the life cycles of the plants and of the soil biota and well as the animals we have a dynamic system in equilibrium across time. Number of animals may rise and fall in response to predation or rainfall variations and vegetative mass will vary with grazing pressures but the system will and in the case of places like the Serengeti and the Eurasian Steppe, has been stable since the end of the Pleistocene and through much of the Holocene until the Industrial Revolution. We can recreate these stable, highly complex, wildly alive ecosystems and they will sustain us, if we let them do their thing.

Conclusion: A Path to Sustainable Agriculture

So long as we keep the four principles:

  1. No bare soil
  2. Plants and animals coevolved to benefit each other
  3. No synthetic chemicals
  4. Complexity results in stability

At the forefront of our decision making processes, we can and indeed must decarbonise the air and recarbonise the soil.

I’ll be back next week with episode 10 in season 9, a look to the future.

Bonus Episode: Bird Flu and Sick Cows

This is The ChangeUnderground

I’m your host, Jon Moore

Decarbonise the Air, Recarbonise the Soil!

Quote:

On March 16, cows on a Texas dairy farm began showing symptoms of a mysterious illness now known to be H5N1 bird flu. Their symptoms were nondescript, but their milk production dramatically dropped and turned thick and creamy yellow. The next day, cats on the farm that had consumed some of the raw milk from the sick cows also became ill. While the cows would go on to largely recover, the cats weren’t so lucky. They developed depressed mental states, stiff body movements, loss of coordination, circling, copious discharge from their eyes and noses, and blindness. By March 20, over half of the farm’s 24 or so cats died from the flu.

End Quote

Continue reading →

S9 E8 The Economics of Regenerative Agriculture

Growing Profitably: The Economics of Regenerative Agriculture

This is The ChangeUnderground

I’m your host, Jon Moore

Decarbonise the Air, Recarbonise the Soil!

Welcome to episode 8 of season 9: The Economics of Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative agriculture continues to gain momentum as a sustainable and environmentally positive approach to farming. While its environmental benefits are well-documented, there’s often a question mark surrounding the economics of regenerative agriculture. Can it be profitable? In this blog post, we’ll explore the economics of regenerative agriculture, examining how it can not only benefit the environment but also boost farmers’ profits. Continue reading →

S9E7: The End of Synthetic Chemicals

This is The ChangeUnderground

I’m your host, Jon Moore

Decarbonise the Air, Recarbonise the Soil!

Welcome to episode 7 of season 9: The End of Synthetic Chemicals

The widespread use of synthetic chemicals in conventional agriculture raises environmental concerns and sparked a growing interest in sustainable and environmentally friendly farming practices. Regenerative agriculture, with its emphasis on restoring and enhancing ecosystem health, is an obvioius alternative to chemical-intensive farming. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the regenerative agriculture practices that aim to ditch chemicals for the betterment of the environment, soil and our food system.

Why Ditch Chemicals?

Continue reading →