agriculture soil
The water under Colorado’s Eastern Plains is running dry as farmers keep irrigating “great American desert.”
Farmers say they’re trying to wean from groundwater, but admit there are no easy answers amid pressures of corn prices, urban growth and interstate water agreements.
By BRUCE FINLEY | bfinley@denverpost.com
WRAY — Colorado farmers who defied nature’s limits and nourished a pastoral paradise by irrigating drought-prone prairie are pushing ahead in the face of worsening environmental fallout: Overpumping of groundwater has drained the High Plains Aquifer to the point that streams are drying up at the rate of 6 miles a year.
The drawdown has become so severe that highly resilient fish are disappearing, evidence of ecological collapse. A Denver Post analysis of federal data shows the aquifer shrank twice as fast over the past six years compared with the previous 60.
While the drying out of America’s agricultural bread basket ($35 billion in crops a year) ultimately may pinch people in cities, it is hitting rural areas hardest.
“Now I never know, from one minute to the next, when I turn on a faucet or hydrant, whether there will be water or not. The aquifer is being depleted,” said Lois Scott, 75, who lives west of Cope, north of the frequently bone-dry bed of the Arikaree River.
A 40-foot well her grandfather dug by hand in 1914 gave water until recently, she said, lamenting the loss of lawns where children once frolicked and green pastures for cows. Scott has been considering a move to Brush and leaving her family’s historic homestead farm.
“This will truly become the Great American Desert,” she said.
The agricultural overpumping from thousands of wells continues despite decades of warnings from researchers that the aquifer — also known as the Ogallala, the world’s largest underground body of fresh water — is shrinking.
Even if farmers radically reduced pumping, the latest research finds, the aquifer wouldn’t refill for centuries. Farmers say they cannot handle this on their own.
But there is no agreement among the eight affected states (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, South Dakota) to try to save the aquifer. And state rules allow total depletion.
In fact, Colorado officials faced with legal challenges from Kansas over dwindling surface water in the Republican River have found that their best option to comply with a 1942 compact is to take more water out of the aquifer. The state bought wells from farmers during the past decade and has been pumping out 11,500 acre-feet of water a year, enough to satisfy a small city, delivering it through a $60 million, 12-mile pipeline northeast of Wray to artificially resuscitate the river.
The overpumping reflects a pattern, seen worldwide, where people with knowledge that they’re exceeding nature’s limits nevertheless cling to destructive practices that hasten an environmental backlash.
The drawdown
The depletion of the High Plains Aquifer has been happening for decades, according to bulletins U.S. Geological Survey has put out since 1988. Colorado farmers this year pumped groundwater out of 4,000 wells, state records show, siphoning as much as 500 gallons a minute from each well to irrigate roughly 580,000 acres — mostly to grow corn, a water-intensive crop.
The depth where groundwater can be tapped has fallen by as much as 100 feet in eastern Colorado, USGS data show. That means pump motors must work harder to pull up the same amount of water, using more energy — raising costs for farmers. The amount of water siphoned from the aquifer since 1950 to irrigate farm fields across the eight states tops 273 million acre-feet (89 trillion gallons) — about 70 percent of the water in Lake Erie.
On one hand, the industrial center-pivot irrigation techniques perfected after World War II have brought consistency to farming by tapping the “sponge” of saturated sediment that links the aquifer to surface water in streams and rivers. America’s breadbasket produces $35 billion of crops a year. On the other hand, intense irrigation is breaking ecosystems apart.
Overpumping has dried up 358 miles of surface rivers and streams across a 200-square-mile area covering eastern Colorado, western Kansas and Nebraska, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife-backed researchers from Colorado State University and Kansas State University who published a peer-reviewed report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also determined that, if farmers keep pumping water at the current pace, another 177 miles of rivers and streams will be lost before 2060.
“Intermittent streams are more likely to be dry. Permanent streams are more likely to become intermittent. Large streams are more likely to be small. Everything has changed,” said KSU conservation biologist Keith Gido, one of the authors. “We have almost completely changed the species of fish that can survive in those streams, compared with what was there historically. This is really a catastrophic change.”
Disappearing fish species — minnows, suckers, catfish that had evolved to endure periodic droughts — signal to biologists that ecological effects may be reaching a tipping point.
The amount of water held in the aquifer under eastern Colorado decreased by 19.6 million acre-feet — 6.4 trillion gallons — from 1950 until 2015, USGS records show. That’s an average loss of 300,000 acre-feet a year. Between 2011 and 2015, records show, the water available under Colorado in the aquifer decreased by 3.2 million acre-feet — an annual average shrinkage of 800,000 acre-feet. Climate change factors, including rainfall, play into the rate of the drawdown.
If all pumping stopped immediately, it would still take hundreds of years for rain-fed streams and rivers to recharge the aquifer, Gido said.
“We’re not living in as sustainable a fashion as we need to be. Much of the damage has been done,” he said, “and restoring what we’ve lost could be difficult.
“It is happening all over the world in places such as Pakistan. It causes conflicts. As human populations grow, the demand for water is going to be greater. Conflicts are going to increase — unless we become more efficient in using the water we have.”
Farmers locked
For farmers, weaning themselves off groundwater is proving difficult.
They say they’re trying. They’ve reduced the land irrigated in eastern Colorado by 30,000 acres since 2006. They plan to retire another 25,000 acres over the next decade, said Rod Lenz, president of the Republican River Water Conservation District, who for years has advocated use of technology to grow more crops with less water.
“We have come to realize that, yeah, we are overmining it. We are acutely aware of that now. There’s a definite attitude to make more than just the natural progression as far as efficiency,” Lenz said, noting state officials monitor pumping and determine how many acres owners can irrigate.
“We’re constantly trying to find ways to stay in compliance,” he said. “We’re looking at serious conservation.”
For years, agriculture experts have pointed to drip-irrigation technology to do more with less. Federal agencies in the past dangled help for farmers who invest. But few in eastern Colorado have installed these systems, largely because they are expensive.
Farmer and cattleman Robert Boyd, a leader of the Arikaree Groundwater Management District, said the federal government should intervene to ensure survival of High Plains agriculture.
“Do you want us to be sustainable? Or not? It may come to a point where no one can actually irrigate,” Boyd said.
He pointed to proposals to divert water from the Missouri River Basin and move it westward through pipelines across the Great Plains.
“If the federal government wants agriculture to be sustainable, they need to pump water back toward the mountains. They need to figure out how to get water back toward the higher parts of the rivers,” he said. “The federal government needs to step in and make the states work together to make agriculture — and urban areas — sustainable.”
For now, farmers struggle, increasingly weighing water uncertainties in calculations that include corn prices falling to around $3.50 a bushel in recent years from $7. But drawing down the aquifer does not violate any law in Colorado. The state engineer’s office monitors well levels and requires permits for wells, limiting the number of acres a farmer can irrigate. But there’s no hard limit on how much water can be pumped.
In contrast, state rules limit groundwater withdrawals from the Denver Basin Aquifer — a source for many of Denver’s southern suburbs, including Castle Rock and Parker — to less than 1 percent a year. This is meant to help natural recharge keep pace with human demands.
But on the High Plains, the situation is like mining intended to fully exploit diamonds or gold.
“If you want to have it all back the way it was 150 years ago, you would have to remove everyone from the area. I’m not sure how we could do that today,” deputy state engineer Mike Sullivan said in an interview.
Sullivan and state engineer Kevin Rein emphasized that thousands of acres no longer are irrigated. “And there need to be some more retirements of land to get us into a more balanced situation,” Sullivan said.
They defended Colorado’s practice of pumping more groundwater out of the aquifer, saying this is necessary to comply with the Republican River Compact. Disputes over river flows have risen as far as the U.S. Supreme Court and Colorado’s legal obligations to deliver water to Nebraska and Kansas are clear.
“What we do with the pumping does help the streams,” Sullivan said. “It does provide a wet stream. … We could not meet our (legal) obligation without that today, even if we turned off all the wells.”
But there’s no end in sight for the drawdown of groundwater.
Nature exhausted
And for farmers who built their world on the High Plains Aquifer, the environmental fallout is increasingly painful. In the rural view, it is a problem that cannot be addressed by farmers alone without help from people in cities. All of the industrial agriculture is done with urban residents in mind — the people who consume the crops and cows that farmers grow.
“The world population is going to double. And we’re not going to be able to grow more farmland. We’re losing farming ground every day to development,” said Cody Powell, manager of 21st Century Equipment, the John Deere dealer in Burlington, an agricultural hub. “You take away farm ground for development, bring in more people. Who’s going to feed them? The only way to do that is to put water on crops.”
People in cities increasingly demand environmentally correct crops, which requires more water. “If they want natural grain-fed cattle, and non-GMO (genetically modified organism) crops — all that good stuff — it is going to take water,” he said.
A farmer can grow more by using pesticides and genetically modified seeds, he said. “With the same amount of water, you could get twice as much corn.”
He knows too well the perils of losing water. He grew up in southern Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley at a time when Aurora and other Front Range suburbs were buying up rights from farmers. This buy-up to slake growing suburban thirsts ended up killing agriculture across hundreds of thousands of once-irrigated acres.
And now when Powell goes back, he sees communities “overrun with thugs” near where his grandmother lived. “It makes me feel sick,” he said.
In eastern Colorado, the problem now is that few can afford to invest in high-efficiency water technology, such as irrigation drip tubes and tape installed underground to eliminate evaporation losses, and soil-sensor systems that let farmers irrigate only when absolutely necessary.
Federal programs to subsidize installation of this technology have withered. And the overpumping continues.
“The fear out here now is not that the aquifer is going to get ruined,” Powell said. “The fear is that the state is going to shut off wells.”
And prairie residents practically cringe to see the pipeline northeast of Wray that Colorado uses to convey groundwater away to Nebraska and Kansas to prevent future lawsuits.
The interstate compact was negotiated back when there was more water and far fewer people, they say.
“Now we just have weeds. We are feeling the effect of losing the water that Kansas is enjoying,” Scott said from her farmhouse. “It is robbing families of life. That’s what is happening to us. We should be entitled to the water underground.”
Past becomes future
The depletion means water scarcity increasingly dictates survival.
It is no surprise to historians. In the 1860s, John Wesley Powell’s surveys for the U.S. government warned that the land west of central Kansas was practically a desert. His report “On the Arid Lands of the Western United States” warned that the only way for people to live here would be by irrigating land. Otherwise, he wrote, the place could not support permanent communities. Tribes for centuries used the Great Plains seasonally as a hunting ground.
Settlers flocked in during the 19th century, initially relying on dryland farming. This led to massive soil erosion, culminating in the Dust Bowl environmental disaster of the 1930s.
Industrial irrigation took off during the 1960s, with tens of thousands of wells drilled through the 1980s.
But now, if people keep pumping, the dry-out will intensify, CSU senior research scientist Kevin Bestgen said.
“I appreciate it that people now are trying to reduce pumping. The reality is that the bucket they are pumping from does not refill. It is finite. And in order to allow recharge of that aquifer, farmers are going to have to get much more severe reductions in pumping levels. It has been going down and down and down,” he said. “People are getting what they can. This will turn out to be a tragedy. It is in the culture at this point. People want to grow corn now.”
Groundwater levels
The map shows the change in groundwater levels for various management districts in the Northern High Plains Basin over the last 10 years. The water level data is collected from wells in the areas. Click an area to see the changes in groundwater levels for 1-, 5- and 10-year periods.
Bruce Finley
Bruce Finley covers environment issues, the land air and water struggles shaping Colorado and the West. Finley grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford, then earned masters degrees in international relations as a Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at Northwestern. He is also a lawyer and previously handled international news with on-site reporting in 40 countries.
Follow Bruce Finley @finleybruce
Keep reading...Show less
Carbon emissions from warming soils could trigger disastrous feedback loop.
26-year study reveals natural biological factors kick in once warming reaches certain point, leading to potentially unstoppable increase in temperatures.
Warming soils are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought, suggesting a potentially disastrous feedback mechanism whereby increases in global temperatures will trigger massive new carbon releases in a cycle that may be impossible to break.
The increased production of carbon comes from the microbes within soils, according to a report in the peer-review journal Science, published on Friday.
The 26-year study is one of the biggest of its kind, and is a groundbreaking addition to our scant knowledge of exactly how warming will affect natural systems.
Potential feedback loops, or tipping points, have long been suspected to exist by scientists, and there is some evidence for them in the geological record. What appears to happen is that once warming reaches a certain point, these natural biological factors kick in and can lead to a runaway, and potentially unstoppable, increase in warming.
Slow-freezing Alaska soil driving surge in carbon dioxide emissions
Read more
Other tipping points posited by scientists include the disappearance of ice in the Arctic, which creates areas of dark water that absorb more heat, and the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from thawing permafrost.
In the Science study, researchers examined plots of soil in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, a mixed hardwood forest in the US. They experimented by heating some of the plots with underground cables to 5C above normal levels, leaving others as a control.
The long-term study revealed that in the first 10 years there was a strong increase in the carbon released from the heated plots, then a period of about seven years when the carbon release abated. But after this second calmer period, which the scientists attribute to the adjustment of the soil microbes to the warmer conditions, the release of carbon resumed its upward path.
In the last three years, the release of carbon has once again dropped back, which scientists attribute to another reorganisation of the microbes present. They suggest an increase in the number of microbes that can feast on the hard-to-digest organic matter, such as plant-based lignin, which gives clues to the possible cyclical nature of the process.
From 1991, when the experiment began, the plots subjected to 5C warming lost about 17% of the carbon that had been stored in the top 60cm of the soil, where the greatest concentration of organic matter is to be found.
Scientific understanding of the complexities of soil microbial activity is still limited, but the long-term nature of the study provides valuable insights into what might be happening, and is likely to happen in future, to vast swaths of forest soils across the world.
While deforestation has been the focus of most research into forests’ effects on climate change, with a recent study suggesting tropical forests are turning into carbon sources rather than carbon stores as a result, the impact of warming soils has remained much of a mystery. Soils are one of the world’s biggest natural carbon sinks, along with trees and the oceans.
Daniel Metcalfe, of Sweden’s Lund University, said: “If these findings hold more widely across major terrestrial ecosystems, then a much greater portion of the global soil carbon store could be vulnerable to decomposition and release of carbon dioxide under global warming than previously thought.”
Ultimate bogs: how saving peatlands could help save the planet
Read more
The study was carried out by scientists at the US Marine Biological Laboratory, led by Jerry Melillo, with contributions from the universities of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Melillo, who holds the position of distinguished scientist at the MBL, said: “Each year, mostly from fossil fuel burning, we are releasing about 10bn metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The world’s soils contain about 3,500bn tons of carbon. If a significant amount of that is added to the atmosphere, due to microbial activity, that will accelerate the global warming process. Once this self-reinforcing feedback begins, there is no easy way to turn it off. There is no switch to flip.”
He added: “The future is warmer. How much warmer is the issue.” While emissions from fossil fuels can be cut back, the reactions of the natural world to a warming climate may be impossible to control.
Some recent work has suggested that the warming of the globe may be progressing at a slightly slower rate than the upper range of previous studies estimated. However, feedback loops and tipping points have the potential to create sudden disruptions that are hard to take account of in standard climate modelling, and these could mean much greater changes and far higher rates of warming in the future.
Separately, research from Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and other institutions, published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, and Global Change Biology, called for more work on how soil could be used as a carbon store. When agricultural soils are well-managed, they can store more carbon than they emit, which would allow them to be used as potential carbon sinks.
But the scientists warn that “we still don’t have a strong understanding of the interactions among biological, chemical and physical processes regulating carbon in soils”. They say much more research is needed, particularly as there are dangers in soils in Siberia that are rapidly warning, and could release vast quantities of carbon. They also warn that there may be 25-30% less organic matter in some soils than previously estimated.
“Soil has changed under our feet,” said Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar at Stanford. “We can’t use the soil maps made 80 years ago and expect to find the same answers.”
Keep reading...Show less
Hey Saskatchewan, let's talk about the 'ugly side' side of oil.
It is time for people in oil-producing communities to start speaking up about the noxious gasses that are poisoning their health, the spilled salt water and oil that contaminates their fields, and the infractions that oil companies commit in their everyday operations.
Skip to main content
National Observer
HomeNews Deep Dives & InvestigationsOpinionMagazineEntertainmentVideosTeamHelp
Hey Saskatchewan, let's talk about the 'ugly side' side of oil
By Emily Eaton in Opinion, Energy, Politics | October 1st 2017
#2 of 3 articles from the Special Report:
The Price of Oil
A pile of old pump jacks and batteries, tainted red with corrosion, lies north of Oxbow, Sask. in September 2017. Photo by Mark Taylor for the Toronto Star
It is time to end the culture of silence around the oil industry in Saskatchewan.
It is time for people in oil-producing communities to start speaking up about the noxious gasses that are poisoning their health, the spilled salt water and oil that contaminates their fields, and the infractions that oil companies commit in their everyday operations.
It is also time that the Saskatchewan government end the secrecy and cover-ups that pervade its regulation of the oil industry.
A year-long joint investigation by National Observer, the Toronto Star, Global News and four journalism schools across the country has uncovered that the Government of Saskatchewan has failed to regulate the oil industry in the public interest, resulting in egregious impacts on public health and the environment. Instead of properly monitoring and enforcing its own regulations, the government has instead invested its time and resources in defending the industry at all costs.
Dianne and Allan Bunz visit their son Michael's tombstone in a cemetery near Wawota, Sask. on Sept. 26, 2017. Michael was a chemical salesperson killed on the job due to exposure to hydrogen sulfide. The Saskatchewan government did not issue any public safety warnings after his death. Photo courtesy of Mark Taylor for the Toronto Star
They hid information on toxic gas
Premier Brad Wall has travelled to Washington to promote cross-border pipelines, he has sparred with the Trudeau government over carbon pricing, and he has attacked those working to usher in a new (non fossil fuel-based) economy for promoting “magical thinking” characterized by “pixie dust" and "unicorns.” At each and every opportunity, the Saskatchewan government has deflected and covered up serious grievances and criticisms of the oil industry, and has tied the prosperity of the province to industry's health.
Yes...I was blinded by the pixie dust and gored by the unicorn. https://t.co/mLxoZGBxWc
— Brad Wall (@PremierBradWall) June 15, 2016
It is those living and working in the oilpatch who have been most impacted by the serious infractions of an oil industry that is virtually unregulated, and has emitted noxious gasses like hydrogen sulfide, which has poisoned people in their backyards. Yet these same people are afraid to voice their grievances for fear of chasing away the industry they rely on.
As someone who has studied Saskatchewan’s oil economy for seven years now, I understand well where this reluctance to talk about the ugly side of oil comes from.
The truth is that the Saskatchewan government has been essential to creating the culture of silence that pervades oil-dependent communities. At the same time the Saskatchewan government hid information from the public about the gasses that poisoned rural oil-producing communities, the premier boasted of the clean environmental record of the oil industry.
As The Price of Oil investigation shows, when regulators learned of companies that were breaking the rules, they kowtowed to industry by imposing no fines or consequences. Despite numerous violations and dangers affecting public health, of which regulators were well aware, the government chose to intimidate and silence critics by representing any challenges to pipelines and the oil economy as contrary to the interests of Saskatchewan and Canada.
In my research in oil-producing communities around the province, I have talked with dozens of people negatively impacted by the oil industry. One farmer recounted his long struggle to have an oil company acknowledge and address the contamination of his well water with natural gas. It took seven years for the company to test and address the problem in the first place, and then another four years until a permanent solution was implemented. This farmer reports being able to light gas on fire as it exited his kitchen tap and that his daughter, whose bedroom was in the basement next to the plumbing, has suffered severe health problems that he associates with the gas.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall meets with Canadian premiers and delegates during the First Ministers' Meeting on Dec. 9, 2012 in Ottawa. File photo by Alex Tétreault
Saskatchewan has a serious problem
It is clear to anyone who cares to listen to these stories that people are suffering in rural Saskatchewan. Instead of acting on these serious infractions, the government has covered them up and denied there is a problem.
Regulators are afraid to engage the public and researchers for fear of losing their jobs should they speak frankly about the problems. The political opposition, the NDP, has also been too timid to speak openly about the real grievances of rural people, lest they be painted as anti-industry.
We have a problem in Saskatchewan. Rural communities and First Nations reserves are being held hostage by an industry that provides them with jobs, and the income that allows them to stay on the lands that their families have stewarded for generations, yet is imperiling community and environmental health. Few are willing to speak out.
We are in desperate need of a different vision for rural Saskatchewan, yet even the Official Opposition is afraid to offer one. Industry can only be better regulated if we break the culture of silence that pervades our communities and our bureaucracies.
Once we can talk frankly about the problems, we will need to step up the enforcement and monitoring of our regulations. We need to address openly and honestly the problem of fugitive emissions in our province – fully 17 per cent of our total greenhouse gas emissions come from wasted and escaped gas from the oil industry, and far too many people are being poisoned from these noxious emissions.
Most importantly, we will need to engage rural communities in developing community-level plans for transitioning to more sustainable and just economies, supported through government subsidies.
A bale of hay catches the last sunlight on a summer evening in southeastern Saskatchewan. Photo by Robert Cribb for the Toronto Star
Share this article.
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
October 1st 2017
Emily Eaton
Sign up for our daily briefing
Email Address *
I'm already signed up.
Related stories
Inside Saskatchewan's failure to stop a silent killer
By Elizabeth McSheffrey, Mike De Souza, Robert Cribb, Patti Sonntag & P.W. Elliott | October 1st 2017
The Price of Oil
Fear and money breed silence in Saskatchewan
By Elizabeth McSheffrey, Mike De Souza, Robert Cribb, Patti Sonntag & P.W. Elliott in News, Energy, Politics | October 1st 2017
National ObserverSign up for a daily briefing
About
Team
Advertise
Shop
Speakers Bureau
Privacy
Contact
Admin
Ethics
Support award-winning independent journalism.
Independent Publisher of the Year
Best News Coverage
Best Column
Best Digital Solution
Donate
© Observer Media Group 2017
Keep reading...Show less
Chips, chocolate and coffee – our food crops face mass extinction too.
It’s not just animals, many seed crops are also endangered. So why is agrobiodiversity so overlooked? This valuable source of affordable, nutritious food could disappear if we don’t act.
Chips, chocolate and coffee – our food crops face mass extinction too
It’s not just animals, many seed crops are also endangered. So why is agrobiodiversity so overlooked? This valuable source of affordable, nutritious food could disappear if we don’t act
• Read more: Sixth mass extinction of wildlife also threatens global food supplies
A dead tomato bush in the drought-affected town of Monson, California.
A dead tomato bush in the drought-affected town of Monson, California. About 33% of the world’s farmland is estimated to lack the nutrients essential for growing crops. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
View more sharing options
Shares
304
Comments
124
M Ann Tutwiler
Tutwiler is director general of Bioversity International
Tuesday 26 September 2017 01.01 EDT
A “sixth mass extinction” is already under way, scientists are now warning us. Species such as the Bengal tiger and blue whale are vanishing at an alarming rate, and mournful eulogies are being written on how those born in 20 years’ time may never see an African elephant. But who is writing the eulogy for our food? Huge proportions of the plant and animal species that form the foundation of our food supply – known as agrobiodiversity – are just as endangered and are getting almost no attention.
Take some consumer favourites: chips, chocolate and coffee. Up to 22% of wild potato species are predicted to become extinct by 2055 due to climate change. In Ghana and Ivory Coast, where the raw ingredient for 70% of our chocolate is grown, cacao trees will not be able to survive as temperatures rise by two degrees over the next 40 years. Coffee yields in Tanzania have dropped 50% since 1960.
Sixth mass extinction of wildlife also threatens global food supplies
Read more
These crops are the tip of the iceberg. Across the world, 940 cultivated species are threatened. Agrobiodiversity is a precious resource that we are losing, and yet it can also help solve or mitigate many challenges the world is facing. It has a critical yet overlooked role in helping us improve global nutrition, reduce our impact on the environment and adapt to climate change.
According to the World Health Organisation, poor diet is the biggest cause of early death and disability. Globally, 2 billion people are undernourished, while 2 billion are obese and at risk of contracting diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Focusing on large-scale intensive production of starchy crops for calories rather than nutritious diets has led to serious levels of obesity around the world, from the US to Kenya. Our agrobiodiversity base can be a source of affordable, nutritious food – provided we don’t let it disappear.
Take gac, a fiery red fruit from Vietnam with astronomical levels of beta carotene (which the body converts to vitamin A). Or the orange-fleshed Asupina banana, which has such high levels of carotenoids that a preschool child could meet 50% of their vitamin A requirement by consuming just one per day, when they would need to eat 1kg of some other varieties to reach the equivalent nutritional benefit.
Chocolate industry drives rainforest disaster in Ivory Coast
Read more
These relatively obscure species can offer incredible levels of nutrition, but only if they are still around and available to us. Food biodiversity is full of superfoods like gac – but perhaps even more important is the fact these foods are also readily available and adapted to local farming conditions. They open the way to year-round nutrition security.
About 33% of the world’s farmland is estimated to be degraded, lacking the nutrients essential for growing crops. Agrobiodiversity once again has a solution. Planting cold-tolerant legumes and forages throughout winter has helped farmers in France naturally reduce weed infestation as well as increasing soil’s nutrient content and capacity to hold water. Natural remedies such as this can enhance the sustainability of farms worldwide, reducing the sector’s impact on the environment.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming will reduce agricultural production by 2% every decade, while demand will increase every decade by 14% until 2050. Yet a wealth of traditional seed varieties have unique traits that make them tolerant to heat, drought and floods. They must be found, preserved and put to use in crop-breeding programmes.
A cocoa farmer holds dried cocoa pods in Ivory Coast where insects have eaten the cocoa trees.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
A cocoa farmer holds dried cocoa pods in Ivory Coast where insects have eaten the cocoa trees. Photograph: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images
This year in Ethiopia, researchers at Bioversity International discovered two varieties of durum wheat that were not previously on the market, but yield remarkably well in dry, marginal areas. Work is now underway to breed superior durum wheat crops using these high-performing traditional seeds, to help buffer farmers against recurring droughts and combat hunger in the region.
Biofuels: could agave, hemp and saltbush be the fuels of the future?
Read more
Global efforts to protect agrobiodiversity need to be stepped up urgently. But where can governments and agribusinesses start? A new scientific review of the evidence the agrobiodiversity can contribute to a better food system and wider sustainable development issues has been produced to answer this very question.
This assessment forms the basis for an Agrobiodiversity Index that can guide countries and companies towards the most impactful investment opportunities. These can range from increasing research and development on agrobiodiversity, to introducing more diversity into food supply chains. It will enable agribusinesses to estimate and monitor the impact of their supply chain investments and ensure future product lines are both sustainable and resilient. Similarly, governments will be able to channel funding into agrobiodiversity interventions that will safeguard domestic food supply and simultaneously improve environmental sustainability.
While wild elephants and rhinos thoroughly deserve our support, we should also be raising the alarm for our disappearing agrobiodiversity. After all, if there is one thing we cannot allow to become extinct, it is the species that provide the food that sustains the 7 billion people on our planet.
• M Ann Tutwiler is director general of Bioversity International
Topics
Food
Keep reading...Show less
In Canada, climate change could open new farmland to the plow.
As global warming intensifies droughts and floods, causing crop failures in many parts of the world, Canada may see something different: a farming expansion.
In Canada, climate change could open new farmland to the plow
by Chris Arsenault | @chrisarsenaul | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Sunday, 24 September 2017 07:50 GMT
As global warming intensifies droughts and floods, causing crop failures, Canada may see something different: a farming expansion
By Chris Arsenault
TORONTO, Sept 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As global warming intensifies droughts and floods, causing crop failures in many parts of the world, Canada may see something different: a farming expansion.
Rising temperatures could open millions of once frigid acres to the plow, officials, farmers and scientists predict.
"Canada is one of the few countries where climate change may create some opportunities for growing crops in northern latitudes," said Rod Bonnett, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, a lobby group representing 200,000 farmers.
But determining just how much land in the world's second largest country could become suitable for farming as a result of climate change is not easy, said Ian Jarvis, a senior official with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a government department.
In the country's three prairie provinces alone - vast swaths of flat land in central Canada covering an area more than twice the size of France - the amount of arable land could rise between 26 and 40 percent by 2040, Jarvis said.
"Most of the improvements are happening in fringe areas of agricultural regions," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Canada is in a better situation than much of the rest of the world."
Dan Lizee, operation manager picks up a handful of wheat off the conveyor belts that transfers wheat from the train cars to the cargo ships in the gallery at the Alliance Grain Terminal in Vancouver, British Columbia October 6, 2011. REUTERS/Ben Nelms
HUNGRY MOUTHS
Canada is the world's largest exporter of canola, flaxseed, and pulses, government figures show, and is one of the top wheat producers.
Farmers hope the country of 35 million will be able to capitalize on the opportunities presented by warmer conditions - including by exporting more food to other regions hard-hit by increasing heat and crop failure.
World agricultural production will need to rise about 50 percent by 2050 to keep pace with population growth, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
As rising heat and more extreme weather cut harvests in some southern regions, hungry mouths across the developing world may turn to northern nations like Canada for help, experts predict.
"We are seen as one of the few countries that can provide food for a growing global population," said Bonnett of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
LAND, WATER AND ROADS
Warming is expected to open new land to farming in Canada's northern prairies, parts of the Yukon Territory near the Arctic, the Peace River region that straddles northern British Columbia and Alberta, and parts of northern Ontario, Bonnett said.
"There is a lot more interest in taking a look at underdeveloped land in northern Ontario and Quebec because of changes in climate," said Bonnett from his farm in northern Ontario where he grows hay and raises cattle.
In one zone of clay soil stretching from Cochrane, Ontario to Abitibi County in neighboring Quebec province, climate change could bring 10 million acres (about 4 million hectares) of new farmland - an area larger than Belgium - into production, Bonnet predicted.
But climate change alone won't make the land economically viable for agriculture, he stressed. Remote areas will need roads, irrigation systems and other infrastructure to become the next farming frontier.
Climate change and improvements in farming technology have happened so quickly that scientific models have not been able provide solid estimates on how much new food could be produced as temperatures rise, said government official Jarvis.
For instance, warming will also shift growing patterns in Canada's existing agricultural regions, allowing some farmers to produce more lucrative crops like corn and soybeans where they once grew barley or hay, scientists say.
Many farmers are now rethinking what they should plant as a result of the shifts, Bonnett said.
He also has installed two solar power units on his farm, taking advantage of sunnier, warmer conditions and the falling cost of renewable electricity production to cut his energy bills.
Tara Giles operates a combine as she harvests wheat on a 160-acre field located south of High River, Alberta, September 28, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Sturk
'DUST BOWL' RISK
One main obstacle stands in the way of Canada expanding its farmland, farmers and officials say: a potential lack of water.
"Canada could benefit more than most from climate change, but it hinges on its ability to manage its water resources," said Hank Venema, a researcher with the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development.
Canada's prairies, home to about 80 percent of its farmland, were devastated by the same long-term "Dust Bowl" drought that hit the United States in the 1930s, leading to farm failures and huge losses of topsoil.
It's a problem that could repeat itself as temperatures warm, leading to faster water losses, Venema warned.
In response to the 1930s drought, Canada's government at that time launched an ambitious effort to plant trees, store more water in the region, and rehabilitate farmland.
Similar public works may be key to capitalizing on today's shifting climate, Venema said.
WILD WEATHER
Alongside fears about water shortages, rising temperatures present other big risks for Canada's farmers, including more frequent crop-damaging storms and other wild weather.
"While there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Canada's agriculture industry, one thing is clear: we are likely to see more extreme weather events, soil erosion and higher average temperatures," noted Federated Insurance, a Canadian firm that evaluates risks for farmers.
But Canada is unlikely to face problems as severe as those south of the border.
Without adaptation to the new conditions, some U.S. Midwestern and southern counties could see yields decline by more than 10 percent over the next 25 years, according to Risky Business, a research initiative chaired by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
"I do not think you are going to see places in the deep south where agriculture is going to be obliterated. But it may have to adapt to different crop varieties," said Mark Robson, a professor of plant biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Northern sections of the United States, including along the Atlantic coast, will see longer growing seasons as a result of climate change, added Robson. That should allow them to plant new crops, like their Canadian counterparts.
But insect pests and plant diseases will also move north, and farmers will need new strategies to deal with them, he said.
A worker carries an air filter during wheat harvest on the Stephen and Brian Vandervalk farm near Fort MacLeod, Alberta, September 26, 2011. REUTERS/Todd Korol
'NOT A HAPPY PICTURE'
For Canada, most analysts and farmers believe the potential rewards of climate change will outweigh the risks - at least over the next 30 years.
But if heat keeps on rising and causes greater water shortages and crop failures, Canada could see a decrease in farm productivity by the end of the century, said agriculture official Jarvis.
For now, improvements in farm technology, drought-resistant crops and new harvesting methods mean farmers should be poised to ramp up production as temperatures warm.
"Canada could be playing a bigger role providing the food for the world as heat rises," Jarvis said.
"Other countries are going to be affected (by climate change) much worse than we are," he said. "It's not a really happy picture overall."
(Reporting by Chris Arsenault @chrisarsenaul, Editing by Laurie Goering and Megan Rowling.
Keep reading...Show less
Tucson’s seed library fosters food sovereignty in a desert.
With help from Pima County’s public libraries, Tucsonans grow urban gardens.
With help from Pima County’s public libraries, Tucsonans grow urban gardens.
Maya L. Kapoor Sept. 22, 2017
SHARE
In front of the Joel D. Valdez Main Library in Tucson, patrons can claim round concrete landscaping beds for free and create their own gardens with seeds from the library’s seed collection. Some of the three-foot-wide planters are festooned with exuberant jungles of squash, flowers and trellised bean plants, while others look more Zen garden than vegetable garden.
In addition to books and DVDs, in 2012 the Pima Country Public Library system became one of the first in the nation to circulate seeds. Aspiring gardeners can look up varieties electronically, put seeds on reserve and check out 10 packs at a time. Availability changes with the seasons: By mid-September, tomato seeds are long gone, but many other seeds — including dill, arugula, cucumbers, the flat white teardrop shapes of squash seeds, and the small dry beads of tepary beans — rattle in paper envelopes. Participating branches offer support as well as seeds, such as gardening classes, brochures, and, of course, books. The greenest beds flourish with flowers, herbs, vegetables and an idea: That public libraries can be resources for local food growers as well as local readers.
The Seed Library is a free service where patrons can check out seeds just like they would check out a book. When they have harvested the fruit or vegetable, they can return their new seeds to the library.
Courtesy Pima County Public Library
Now, five years in, Pima County librarians hope more growers will start bringing back seeds from the plants they grew, making the collection stronger and better adapted to local conditions over time. “Only maybe 40 percent of the donations we get are from local growers,” says librarian Betsy Langley, who helps manage the seed program. “We want to increase that and have a larger proportion of our circulating seeds be from local gardeners, because one of our goals is to have healthy seed stock and plants that are acclimated to Tucson.” Although there’s no requirement to return seeds, Langley says, “there are definitely some people who are just amazing and donate a lot back.” Seed patrons write their first names on return packets destined for repurposed card catalogs, along with information about the crop that’s useful to the library and future gardeners.
Langley explains that when the seed library began, only a handful existed around the country, generally run by gardening clubs or other community organizations. Pima County’s was one of the first to be run by a public library system. “We are trying to make sure everyone has the same access,” she says. The idea for a seed library came from sellers at a local farmers’ market; librarians quickly realized they already had the infrastructure in place. What’s more, Tucson is home to Native Seeds/SEARCH, a globally known regional seed saving organization that specializes in conserving and sharing desert-adapted landraces.
Ethnobiologist and author Gary Nabhan cofounded Native Seeds/SEARCH in the early 1980s, when he and a research partner were told by members of local tribes that traditional food crops were in danger of disappearing — and that tribal members’ health could benefit from their return. Today, Native Seeds/SEARCH safeguards some 1,900 accessions of domesticated crops and wild relatives, related to the agricultural practices of more than 50 indigenous groups, as well as Hispanic communities and Anglo settlers. Tribal communities in the region have free access to seeds. Native Seeds/SEARCH also teaches workshops where students learn to use, save and share local food plants.
Native Seeds/SEARCH helped the seed libraries get started through training and seed donations. Nabhan shares Langley’s interest in making gardening more accessible to all. “Sometimes the heirloom vegetable movement gets rarified, that it’s only for the gourmet,” Nabhan says. “But (in Tucson), it’s really an indigenous and immigrant movement. It’s in the households of the poor who can’t afford high water bills, whose kids need diverse nutrition.”
One library patron who enthusiastically returns seeds is a man whom I’ll call Mark. Mark has declined to give his name because he’s a self-identified “guerilla gardener:” one who, under cover of anonymity and secrecy, attacks his city’s rundown corners with greenery. In Tucson’s overlooked places — an empty wash, dusty highway verge, cracked parking lot — Mark plants things. What’s more, Mark scavenges plants and plant parts: seeds dropped by flowers on a lawn here, transplants gleaned from succulents or cacti on city property there. Though the results are lovely, all of this is of questionable legality. But Mark can’t seem to help himself. When the highway department created a drainage area between two roads a couple of miles south, Mark planted it with vegetables. Most of it got eaten by wildlife, but he didn’t mind. “There are so many javelina there, deer, rabbits,” he says, grinning. He’s waged a relentless battle with the gas station across the street from where he lives. He plants date palms at the edge of their parking lot; they remove them. They finally missed one, and now it’s shoulder high — and too thorny to mess with. “It won’t have dates in my lifetime, but someday,” Mark says.
One hot Sunday this September, after selecting seeds from the library’s repurposed card catalog, Mark shows off his planter near the front entrance. He’s slender, dressed in jeans, a faded black tee shirt, and a sweatband under a baseball cap, with deep crowsfeet lining his face. Despite the searing desert heat, his garden grows a multilayered thicket. Nasturtiums sprout at the bottom, squash climb metal trellises, and above that a stout chili pepper tree shelters everything, with countless other plants winding in-between. The topsoil Mark added to this planter, he gathered from a city landscaping project down the block. Hiding in his veggies are purloined pieces of cacti and succulents of dubious origin, so healthy they seem to be glowing in his borrowed soil.
When Mark sees library planters that other gardeners have abandoned, that guerrilla gardening instinct kicks in: He fosters them, planting library seeds. “If they come back, I’ll say, ‘I planted it for you,’ ” Mark says, shrugging. He points across the street to the sandwich shop, which has planters next to the sidewalk. “Imagine if that had watermelon instead of flowers,” he says. “People who were hungry could just walk by and pick fruit.” That’s no small dream; in the summer, Pima County’s main library shelters many homeless people from heat that regularly climbs above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. One man tells me he wanted to buy a banana at a nearby bagel shop but demurred because of the price: $1.75.
Mark began urban growing after a long battle with severe chronic depression and homelessness. He lived on his mother’s farm in the Philippines before moving to Seattle some 50 years ago. After an acrimonious divorce, Mark found himself depressed, homeless and broke. A counselor suggested trying a sunnier location, so he rode the Greyhound to Tucson two decades ago. Eventually, he found himself able to start working again. “You have to have the passion for it,” Mark says, pointing to one planter with a shock of greenery several feet high. “I taught that girl about gardening, and look at her plants now!”
Mike Lang looks at parsnips and peppers at the Pima County Public Library ‘Seed Library’ at the main branch in downtown Tucson.
Courtesy Pima County Public Library
The seed library’s popularity continues to swell. “In the last couple of years, we checked out about 28,000 seed packets each year. The first year we circulated about 7,000. That gives you an idea how much it’s grown,” Langley says. Indeed, the popularity of the seed lending program has become a new challenge for Langley; the main branch library where she works processes all of the seeds before they go out to the other branches. “It’s growing so much and all the libraries want to have it, but we can’t keep up the back end in terms of staff time,” she says.
According to the Seed Library Social Network, some 280 Western communities ranging from Anchorage, Alaska, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, have launched or are considering launching seed lending programs, many in public libraries. Interested communities often call Pima County’s libraries for advice. Not everyone supports seed lending programs: Although libraries lend seeds, state Departments of Agriculture have informed some that they are in violation of seller-focused laws, such as requirements to regularly test seed germination rates. “Of course we don’t have the resources for that,” Langley says. In a fall meeting of the Arizona Library Association, groups with seed libraries plan to share notes on how to manage such confrontations, should they arise.
At some 4,000 years old, Tucson, Arizona, is the longest continuously inhabited place in North America. This is one reason that the region’s food crop diversity interests people like Gary Nabhan of Native Seeds/SEARCH: Farmers around Tucson have had a long time to work with crops and their wild relatives. And aridland seeds have had a jump start on traits — such as tolerance to heat, drought and poor soils — that are becoming more precious with growing greenhouse gas emissions.
Beans from the Pima County Public Library 'Seed Library.'
Courtesy Pima County Public Library
These days, when Tucsonans grow plants from seed to seed, sharing with other library patrons, they continue this millennia-old tradition. For its One Seed program, the library selects a local, easily grown, wind or insect pollinated plant that gardeners around the city grow at the same time, with librarians walking them through each step of the process, from planting to harvest. This year, gardens throughout Tucson are growing a heritage breed of cowpea developed by Tohono O’odham farmers. “We wanted to choose a native plant that has a history here,” Langley says.
Langley looks forward to collecting any donated cowpea returns. She says having harvests grown out by many gardeners will make the seed packets stronger. “We’re going to have jars at all of the locations, so people can see how their contribution makes a difference and combines with other community members’.” The seeds will be repackaged and loaned out again: a community’s worth of saved seeds, stronger for the mixing.
Maya L. Kapoor is an associate editor for High Country News.
Follow @Kapoor_ML
Keep reading...Show less
Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'
Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.
The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.
Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.
EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study
Read more
The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.
It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial
“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.
“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”
Roundup in a supermarket
‘There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system,’ Charles Massy says of Roundup. Photograph: Rene van den Berg/Alamy
He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger. “Roundup is now on its sixth or seventh phase.”
Advertisement
Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”
Tall, lean, fit, with white hair crowning a face that has spent a life outdoors, Massy looks more like the establishment grazier he is rather than a powerful advocate for revolutionising everything about the way we farm, eat and think about food. We are at a tipping point, he says, and if we it ignore we are “history”.
Massy spent eight years going to his office in an outbuilding behind the house in the early hours of morning to write before a day of working on the farm; the 569-page book is his life’s work; the big picture, the long view both historical and into the future that pulls together the latest international scientific research and thinking on climate change, regenerative farming, industrial agriculture and the corporations driving it.
He writes: “While consuming more resources than the Earth’s systems can replenish, we are hurtling towards multiple calamities. We are degrading the air we breathe, denaturing the food we eat and water we drink and lacing them with a witch’s brew of deadly poisons.”
We have lost touch with the land, we manipulate the Earth to our own ends, we dominate it and are ultimately destroying it. Aboriginal people, he says, saw it differently, as something to be nurtured and nourished, a living entity. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.
Farmer and author Charles Massy
The farmer, scientist and author at home on his property, Severn Park. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Then white Australians brought what he calls the mechanical mind and the European mind. “It is a totally different continent to anywhere else in the world. It works totally differently to that young landscape of Europe with humidity and rich soils. Until we throw off the European mechanical mind we are going to continue to stuff the joint. It is not something inanimate that you can belt. It is almost like being with a lover, you have got to nurture it and care for it.”
Advertisement
Now 65 and “a fossil” Massy is, by his own admission, a “biophilia”, filled with the wonder and delight of nature. “I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus one’s heart also needs to be involved.”
But his own journey and awakening was slow and stumbling. He was at university when, at the age of 22, his father had a heart attack and he came home to manage the merino and cattle property. Well-intentioned and diligent he read the books, he sought advice, he learned. “I thought I was running a pretty good show.” His wool was being bought for fabric by “the top guys in Italy. We were the first group to breed animal welfare-friendly sheep.” But he now realises he was “blind” and “oblivious”, he saw the landscape “as if through a glass darkly”.
He writes: “I completely overlooked the most important of all factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually functioned in specific but sensitive ways.” He made mistakes; he assiduously ploughed a paddock just before a huge storm came and washed the topsoil away, “I had cost the landscape perhaps a thousand years of topsoil.” Like many other regenerative farmers he reached the conclusion he had to make a big shift when something “cracked” his mind open.
If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away
For Massy it was the years of drought, 1979 to 1983, that plunged him into depression and major debt. He finally understood that he needed a completely different mindset and management approach if he was going to come to terms with the reality of drought. “The land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this,” he writes. And so he began his journey towards enlightenment. After 35 years he went back to university and completed a PhD in human ecology, consulting everyone from scientists to Aboriginal elders.
The stories you need to read, in one handy email
Read more
We are driving in his ute across the plateau, cloud shadows dancing across the big-sky landscape, kangaroos and wallabies bouncing along, kelpies on the back to muster the healthy sheep. The paddocks are strewn with great monolithic rocks, 400m years old. There are birds and wildlife that have returned since he became a holistic farmer. Deep in the soil the bugs, microbes and fungi are sourcing nitrogen and nutrients. Change has to literally be grassroots, food health comes from the ground up, the health of people is entwined with the health of landscapes and soil. “The minute you fertilise and spray all that biology is gone. The vital thing about regenerative or organic farming is this healthy living dynamic soil. Landscapes with diverse arrays of plants are nutrition centres and pharmacies with vast arrays of primary and secondary compounds.”
As the dogs bound away to herd the sheep, he says, “One of the big ideas I discovered going back to uni was this concept which I came to, that our natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. I think it is one of the biggest ideas. I think it is as big as evolution. It has only just emerged with physics and chemistry and computers and stuff. The Earth itself it is a self-organising regulating system.”
The human element is the problem, the learning how to live tuned to its rhythms, to get out of its way, to listen to the land. “I say confidently that not many farmers can read the landscape. For them to change they have got to admit they have been wrong for most of their lives. The thing that is challenging about it is that you have got to be totally flexible to adjustment and really get your mind into how nature works and be able to change tactics.”
He tells the story of the grasshoppers. Before he began holistic grazing the property was regularly hit by plagues of wingless grasshoppers. “They turned an OK season into instant drought. They thrive under degrading management, bare ground provides them with egg beds. But once we began our biodiverse plantings plus holistic grazing we have not had a grasshopper attack since.
The entrance to Charles Massy’s property
The entrance to Severn Park: ‘Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property,’ Massy says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“Ecological grazing yields total ground cover, higher cover, deeper roots, more moisture absorption plus more biologically alive soils; it means nematodes and other creatures eat the grasshopper eggs. You get excited when you see a new plant species suddenly emerge again. Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property.”
Advertisement
The winter nights are cold on the plateau and, with a glass of red wine and before an open fire, Massy is unrepentant about criticising the big-end-of-town companies that promote chemicals in industrial farming, and the governments that don’t act. In the book he says unhealthy food “is not just poisoning us but is also, confoundingly, making us obese as well”. Now he says “when you are eating that McDonald’s crap even though you are bloated your body is still hungry because your organs are not getting nutrients.
“If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away. The big chemical companies and big food companies know exactly what they are doing. It is now causing millions of deaths – tell me why that is not genocide?”
But just as nature find its own solutions, culling, reorganising, so too is Massy offering answers, a “toolkit” of how to change.
“This combines the best of Old Organic – namely its respect, empathy and reverence for Mother Nature – with the best of modern, ecologically simpatico science and Earth-empathic thought.” The kind of people who make the change, he found, were those with strong belief in community and healthy food that does not come from contaminated soil.
Call of the Reed Warbler cover
What lies beneath “is a burgeoning mass of life and activity that is 10-fold that above the ground; fungi bacteria, and other organisms have begun to create and sustain an entirely different, living absorbent soil structure; the very heart and essence of healthy farming and landscape function. The secret is to simply restore healthy landscape function and allow nature to do the rest.”
Massy agrees that he is “not naive enough to think it would be a nice seamless shift. I think we are going to see some pretty frightening stuff.”
But for him, a defining moment came when, while sitting against an old snow gum, he heard the “beautiful, piercing song of a reed warbler” returning after a long absence from this area. It was, he says, a “metaphor for us humans to once more become the enablers, the nurturers, the lovers of Earth”.
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
