The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson.

4/5 rating. 234 pages.

Book #47 of 2022. Read December 14, 2022.

This was a fascinating (no, but really) book about the importance of soil to the world’s future.

Soil is one of those things that we all inherently know is important for farming and food, but this book really brought home that importance, and even more, explained the best ways to ensure healthy soil. Using no-till practices in farming and gardening keeps the mycorrhizal fungi and other microorganisms important to the plants alive and healthy. It also means that some of the carbon in the soil is not being lost. Cover crops greatly reduce erosion, help the soil both take in water, and use it efficiently during heavy rain. These crops can also break up the hard soil with their roots. I think the most surprising idea was the usefulness of animals in breaking up the soil. Using rotating areas, cattle (and other grazers) can be let on an area for a short time, then moved on. Their hooves and natural fertilizer are perfect for helping out the soil.

The most promising part of the book is that soil can be improved greatly!! “He rattled off an impressive list of ills that healthy soil can cure. It not only keeps water in the soil, but also allows the microbes to gnaw away pollutants as this corralled water slowly drips into streams and aquifers. That water storage mitigates flooding and wildfire, and the soil aggregates themselves prevent both water and wind erosion. That means fewer particulates dirtying up the air, so healthy soil brings cleaner air, too. Plus, healthy soil is highly productive soil. ‘This is an opportunity for farmers,’ Collins declared to the crowd. ‘We know how to build topsoil. We can fix land, not just preserve the degraded landscape that’s already in place.’”

I now go by fields that are left without cover crops and wonder how much better their yields and soil would be if they knew about all of the data in this book.

If you are interested in gardening or farming, I think this book is important to read to understand the benefits and wide array of ways to help improve one of our best opportunities for a better future: the soil.

Quotes:

“In fact, up until the 1950s most of the excess carbon dioxide in the air resulted from the ways humans used their land and forests.”

“No other natural process steadily removes such vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as photosynthesis, and no human scheme to remove it can do so on such a vast scale with any guarantee of safety or without great expense.”

“land misuse accounts for 30 percent of the carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.”

“Imagine how many microorganisms are in a cup of healthy soil. More than all the humans who have ever lived.”

“In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing that changing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide might explain earth’s cycle of ice ages and temperate periods, and noted that humans might have an influence on this concentration through the burning of coal. British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar built upon this idea in 1938, pointing out the links among fossil fuel combustion, rising CO2 levels, and rises in world temperature.”

“Many of us have dewy-eyed notions that people living before the 200 years of the modern industrial era lived in harmony with the land and left a lighter footprint than we do. However, research shows over and over that this was not the case. Their cumulative effect was lighter than ours because there were relatively few of them, but “their personal footprint per person as measured by the land use metric was actually much higher” says scientist William Ruddiman, PhD, author of Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate.”

“Of the total global deforestation that’s taken place over the millennia, 75 percent occurred before 1850.”

“Early humans were so hard on the land that they created huge deserts in areas where humans have lived the longest, Savory says. These include the Sahara, a China-size desert in northern Africa, and the Tihama in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Savory likes to point out that in the 5th century BC, Herodotus described Libya as having rich soils and an abundance of springs to feed its large population. Now, Libya is largely desert.”

“In areas where people were managing the animals, whether cattle on ranches or elephants in game reserves where they were protected from predators, the land was poor and the grass sparse. Savory realized that animals in their natural state had a positive effect on brittle landscapes. In fact, it seemed that either removing them from the land or changing their ancient behaviors caused the degradation.”

‘When cattle or other grazers bite and pull at the grass, the plants struggle to regrow their leaves. They suck carbon sugars back up from their roots and root hairs, causing some of them to die and leave behind a web of carbon to decompose in the soil. As the grasses rebuild their stalks and leaves, they ramp up their production of carbon sugars again, shooting some back down to their root system for new growth. ‘When you graze and then let the plants recover, they pulse carbon and moisture into the soil,’ Savory explained.”

“By its very nature, conventional cropping is a far greater assault on the environment than herding animals. Plowing rips apart the crucial underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and shatters the soil aggregates that hold water and gases in the soil. After these aggregates break down, the soil particles pack tightly against one another—this is called soil compaction—and the land can’t capture and hold the water from either irrigation or rain. In fact, a recent study showed that nearly half of the rise in sea level comes from water that runs off agricultural lands.”

“Even after tilling, soil microorganisms will still be in the soil, but they aren’t likely to provide these varied nutrients to the plants once the chemical fertilizers are applied.”

“Brown embarked upon an extended trial to test her suggestion, using fertilizer on half of each individual field and leaving it off on the other half. After 4 years, the halves without fertilizer consistently outperformed the other halves, so it was easy to decide to ditch the cost and bother of applying fertilizer. Clearly, all the other steps he’d taken—not tilling, the cover crops, the occasional foray by cows to eat crop residue—had changed the soil so that his crops didn’t need fertilizer.”

“An acre of land alongside any American highway probably has more plant species than all of Iowa’s cropped lands put together. A lush mixture of plants aboveground means that there is a correspondingly lush community of microorganisms underground, as the different plants offer different root exudates and attract an array of different microorganisms, making the soil overall more resilient. Nature is always trying to restore balance to landscapes that humans degrade. When we create bare land, nature sends a battalion of weeds to colonize and cover the soil. When we establish a monoculture, nature sends in pathogens to weaken and even kill that crop, allowing other species to fill the void.”

“Now, the Browns have a winning trifecta of soil-health practices: no-till planting combined with cover-crop cocktails, followed by mob grazing.”

“He was producing 127 bushels of corn per acre, 27 more bushels than the county average, without fertilizer, pesticides, or fungicides, and with just a small amount of herbicide. He was spending between $1.00 to $1.25 to produce that bushel, whereas the county’s average cost per bushel was between $3.00 to $3.50. The corn and wheat were sold to standard commodity markets, and the cattle to specialty buyers of grass-fed beef. The soil organic matter in his cropped lands has gone from 1.7 to 5.3 percent, which he thinks is not nearly high enough—he’d like to get the croplands as high as his pastures, which are at 7.3 percent.”

“Even a modest two-or-three species cover crop causes a 90 percent reduction in sediment runoff and a 50 percent reduction in fertilizer runoff into the watershed, and sequesters a metric ton of carbon dioxide per acre.”

“In 1993, an infiltration test of the soil in one of his fields showed that it could only absorb a half-inch of rain in an hour. A 2012 test showed that the same field can now absorb 8 inches in an hour.”

“The history of every Nation is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil.” – FDR

“And finally, the organic systems were nearly three times as profitable as the conventional systems, because they are produced without costly chemicals and consumers are willing to pay more for them.”

“In the developed world, people throw away more than 30 percent of their food after they buy it. The price is so low that they don’t value it.”

“You can drive for 6 hours and see nothing but corn and soybeans, and before and after these annual crops are planted and harvested—a period of about 9 months—the ground is naked and exposed to the elements. This is agriculture, but we don’t eat what it produces. The corn and soybeans are commodities that feed cattle and other animals in feedlots, supply manufacturers making high fructose corn syrup and other food additives, and provide the raw material to ethanol makers.”

“Ecologist Matt Liebmann had an experiment going for 9 years in which he compared the conventional two-crop rotation of corn and soybeans with three- and four-crop rotations. With these more complex rotations and more diverse crops, Liebmann found that farmers could reduce their fertilizer use by 90 percent and pesticide use by almost 90 percent, with comparable yields and more money going to the farmer.”

“These days, White thinks both the hard-core old-school environmentalists and agriculturalists—the ones who would never think of working with one another—are increasingly irrelevant. ‘The rest of us have moved on,’ he says. ‘We’re trying to get local food systems going and trying to get carbon in soils and thinking about renewable energy and so on.’”

“Republicans used to talk about climate change in responsible ways, but were butted into denial by a well-funded campaign waged by the fossil-fuel industry. Al Gore stepped into the political vacuum but, say prominent pro-environment Republicans, did so in such a partisan way that it was easy for conservatives to scorn anything he championed. Given that most farmers and ranchers are deeply conservative, environmental activists maintain friendly ties with them by choosing their words carefully.”

“Good compost requires the aerobic decomposition of organic matter. Very basically, you assemble a pile of materials—some woody or dry plant materials (wood chips or dried leaves or even shredded newspaper) and some green plant materials (grass clippings) and a small amount of nitrogen-rich manure or legumes or nuts—and build it to a height of about 3 feet.”

“They didn’t clear the land for replanting; instead, new crops were planted within the debris of the last season’s cover crops. At the end of 2 years, the soil organic matter leapt by 67 percent and the soil’s water-holding capacity jumped by more than 30 percent—a big deal in this arid climate. The best of these plots produced four times as much green stuff as the world’s most productive ecosystems. ‘We showed that you can grow more crops faster, better, and with less water on soils where we’ve improved the population of microbes, both fungi and bacteria,’ Johnson told me. ‘The carbon sequestration is the icing on the cake.’”

“In these plots made highly fertile by the interaction between plants and the soil biology, the plants were generously shuttling 72 percent of the carbon they pulled from the air into the soil.”

“One of the conclusions Johnson and the other NMSU researchers reached might make the toes curl on climate activists around the world. In their report to Sandia—delivered in the context of a project to see if the Mars Curiosity rover’s carbon-measuring equipment could be used for quick and accurate analyses of soil carbon on earth—they stated, ‘The rates of biomass production we are currently observing in this system have the capability to capture enough CO2 (50 tons CO2/acre) to offset all anthropogenic CO2 emissions on less than 11 percent of world cropland. Over twice this amount of land is fallow at any time worldwide.’ Meaning that if only 11 percent of the world’s cropland—land that is typically not in use—improved its community of soil microorganisms as much as Johnson and his colleagues did in their test plots, the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil would offset all our current emissions of carbon dioxide.”

“Still, he says, it would be foolish not to try to do it by building healthy soil, since this also improves plant productivity, allows us to use less water, reduces our use of dwindling natural resources like oil and phosphorus, and lowers the impact of agriculture on the environment.”

#soil #farming #farms #plants #growing #crops

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