Read this for the full article, which was in the Telegraph recently. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/6828878/Britain-facing-food-crisis-as-worlds-soil-vanishes-in-60-years.html
Yes we have known about this a long time now in permaculture circles, but agriculture as we currently know is destroying our soils and although productive in the short term is the road to ruin. Intensive agriculture, ploughing, chemicals and all the rest is destroying soil structure and making them much more prone to erosion. An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually around the world with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”, the Carbon Farming (http://carbonfarming.blogspot.com/) conference heard. Also soil is a great store of carbon, and everytime we plough it up and expose it to sunlight much of that is oxidised and released back into the air. I am reminded of Arthur Hollins’ book; The Farmer the Plough and the Devil. Arthur of Ford Hall farm Shropshire was a pioneer of zero tillage agriculture, and his life long experience as a farmer convinced him that ploughing the soil is the very worst thing we can do to it.
To quote Bill Mollison, co-founder of the Permaculture concept, “If we dont stop agriculture then we are all dead!”… dramatic words perhaps, but in the light of the terrible damage we are doing to our ecological capital I think this is something we need to pay close attention to. Once again i am reminded that while we have been so fixated on the remaining stocks of our non-renewable resources like oil and various metal, it is the potentially renewable ones like topsoil, water, fish and trees that are actually the most under threat. I don not know of another system other than permaculture which spells out exactly how we might respond to challenges such as these.
Come on the May 2 week permaculture design course at the Workhouse to find out more and to meet like minded people.
