merefaith: discipleship in the ruins of empire

Early in Ellen Davis' book Scripture, Culture and Agriculture I came across what was, for me, the most startling set of statistics in a book filled with alarming figures. Davis writes,

Since the Priestly writer [in Genesis 1] calls our attention to plant growth and other events on the dry land, I begin with the plain observation of a team of Stanford terrestrial ecologists that "between one-third and one-half of the [earth's] land surface has been transformed by human action." The earth's total primary plant growth (the annual output as it would be sustained by natural ecosystems) is reduced by 40% through human activity, both direct consumption (for food, building, etc.) and activities that inhibit plant growth (such as paving of roads and parking lots). Worldwide, about the same proportion of arable soils - a resource renewable only in geological time - are degraded to some degree..."We have high-graded the planet, taking the best bits." (53f.)

I guess our world is getting smaller, and not just in the fashion championed by globalization. Our infrastructure places permanent lids on what could be productive soil (cities and farms both sit well on well-watered plains, after all). Meanwhile, industrial agriculture's mechanized disruption of soil accelerates erosion and the depletion of organic nutrients. Elsewhere in Davis' book, on a page I could not locate for this post, she presents the statistic that one-third of America's topsoil is gone.

But agricultural degradation goes back even to the very beginning of civilization. In August of last year, the Agroinnovations Podcast featured Richard Manning, a contributor to publications of The Land Institute and author of the book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization. During the interview, Manning notes how irrigation of annual grains gradually depleted Mesopotamian soil, such that one could generally trace a northward movement of the centers of power as the first cities along the Persian Gulf degraded their soil, and then the next cities up, and so on.

So it was no surprise to me to come across an article raising the possibility of, well, peak soil. The demands of a feeding a growing population on industrial agriculture meet the challenges of a shrinking land base. The author, geomorphology professor David Montgomery, writes:

Over the past century, the effects of long-term soil erosion were masked by bringing new land under cultivation and by developing fertilizers, pesticides and crop varieties to compensate for declining soil productivity. However, such ‘agrotech’ fixes become progressively more difficult to maintain because crop yields decline exponentially as soil thins. While fertilizers can temporarily offset the effects of soil erosion, the long-term productivity of the land cannot be maintained in the face of the reduced organic matter and thinning of soil that characterize industrial agriculture. Replacing soil fertility with chemical fertilizers and genetically engineered crops can boost productivity in the short run, but a world stripped of its soil cannot, in the end, feed itself.

There is only so much land left into which we may expand cultivation. The Amazon forest and Sahel grassland are largest tracts available, but their soil will become degraded much more quickly.

Montgomery's solution is positively agrarian: we must "better adapt what we do to where we do it." He encourages the shift of agriculture subsidies to small-scale farms, the promotion of soil-friendly methods such as no-till agriculture (which can also be done in the garden, btw, in SFG and other intensive, raised-bed methods), and the development of urban agriculture (this is where I think community gardens and urban homesteading comes in).

Montgomery defuses the agribusiness myth that organic, small-scale farming is less productive. Numerous studies over the years, he says, have shown comparable yields. Ellen Davis cites even more positive figures: "In every country for which data is available, smaller farms are shown to br 200 to 1,000 percent more productive per unit per area...small farming is more productive because the quality and even the quantity of labor and land care is higher when workers invest themselves in their own farm and community" (104). See also the assessment of small-scale farming in an Indian context by Vandana Shiva, "Globalization and the War against Farmers and the Land" in The Essential Agrarian Reader. She notes that the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (located in New Delhi) "has shown that farm incomes can increase threefold by giving up chemicals and using internal inputs produced by on-farm biodiversity, including straw, animal manure, and other by-products" (134).

Once again, I am guardedly optimistic. The resources and the knowledge are out there. The impetus and inspiration are given in the agrarian vision of Scripture itself. And the grace needed to move forward is supplied by the Holy Spirit.

Labels: Agrariana

Posted by Chris Schelin on Friday, February 13, 2009 at Friday, February 13, 2009 | Permalink