This post is a summary of emerging studies on the quality of food and a book I finished recently called Soil, written by Matthew Evans. It’s the state of modern agriculture, how the food we eat today is poisoning us and what we are doing to the earth that got us into this mess, enjoy!

Soil isn’t Dirt

Soil, true soil that resembles something closer to chocolate cake than it does to a handful of sand and rocks, is an insanely complex living ecosystem packed full of microbes, fungi, worms and various other tiny forms of life. The life contained within soil plays an intricate and critical role in the process of agriculture such as water retention for drought resistance, conversion of trace elements into their bio-available forms ready for uptake by the plants root system and the transport of nutrients around the soil to distribute between multiple growing plant species. All of this means that healthy, living soil creates a resilient system that supports the growth of high-quality nutrient dense food.

The Brown Revolution

The green revolution began in the early 20th century and saw an influx of agricultural “advancements” with the goal of feeding the incoming boom of hungry mouths while using less land to do it. These advancements were things like chemical fertilisers, pesticides, genetically modified crops and further reliance on tilling technology like the plough. While from a dollars and cents perspective (surprise surprise), it might have been pretty logical to put our hand on the scale to “optimise” existing natural processes, however this has once again back-fired and led to significant negative impacts on the health and stability of arable land.

The plough was seen as a pretty wizz-bang invention, with the theory being that turning the soil and creating large grooves in the land brings fresh soil to the surface and makes planting of seeds easier. In long-term practice, what it’s actually been doing is regularly disrupting the living ecosystems within the soil, breaking apart critical fungal networks and compromising the structural integrity of the top soil causing winds to blow it all away. Countries who have practiced it at scale now face extreme erosion problems. This erosion and stability loss also contributes to soil being much less drought-resistent, making it much more difficult for farmers to operate in the drier seasons.

Chemical fertilisers also have had a large hand in the degradation of soil health. Excess usage of fertilisers lowers pH causing acidification of the soil, this kills off microbes responsible for the transport of minerals and transformation into their bio-available forms. This means crops have a much harder time searching for the trace elements they require to grow full and nutritious and what we end up with is artificially inflated produce that has significantly less nutrient-density than those seen in organic and regenerative agricultural practices. The fun doesn’t end there though, with these plants having a harder time finding the intended nutrients, a bi-product we see is produce increasingly loaded with elements we definitely do not want in our food: cadmium, cobalt and various other heavy metals. Almost as if these natural systems are self-correcting by taking the cause of the damage out of the equation, humans.

The Carbon Sink

Agriculture is now marked as one of the major players in carbon emission. A primary reason for this is healthy soil is actually a fantastic carbon sequestering system. It’s commonly taught science that plants consume CO₂ to grow but that’s usually where the topic ends. What happens to that carbon dioxide? Plants turn it into cellulose and glucose which forms the body of the plant, some of it also gets converted into sugars and proteins that are released from the roots into the soil as food for the microbes living down there. In a healthy agricultural system, when a plant dies the carbon that was stored in its cells then composts into the soil. We can literally bury carbon in the ground and treat the soil as a big carbon bank, where carbon is stable virtually indefinitely.

When we plough soil or kill off microbial communities with our poor agriculture practices, all of the carbon that was safely stored underground is released back into the atmosphere. We could literally be feeding ourselves better whilst simultaneously aiding the sequestration of greenhouse gasses, but the conversation on how to do this at scale is only just starting to circle the agriculture industry.

Farming for the Planet

Many farmers are now bringing the conversation on regenerative and organic farming practices into the light. Rightly so, they have significant vested interest in preserving the arable land they have available to operate their business, while also preserving the health of the people consuming the food they produce. Practices like no-till, higher diversity in crop selection, crop rotation and integration of livestock to graze and fertilise the soil can all help farming turn the tide and restore intactness of our agricultural systems and bring soil health closer to what it was before we went and meddled with it.

Personally, learning all of this makes me want to bug out to my own plot of land and start a permaculture food forest, keeping my supply chain for food sources local and further connecting me with the food that I require to nourish myself and my future family. You are what you eat, so they say.

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