The fertility of the soil in my vegetable garden is constantly renewed and improved using the systems researched and taught by Albert Howard - compost, green manures, animal manures, and organic mulches.
It is not hard to make soil - it is very easy to lose it.
I recently read two books, written sixty-three years apart, which cover different aspects of the same two-sided problem – the destruction of soil by export-oriented agriculture, and the destruction of human health as a result of eating the food produced by such agriculture and/or by having insufficient access to nutritious and affordable locally-produced foods. Sir Albert Howard wrote The Soil and Health. A study of organic agriculture at the end of his life as an agricultural scientist, farmer, and farming advisor. Published in 1947, it sums up the principles on which his life's work was based, the great results achieved by following those principles, and the great dangers of flouting them.
Howard's first chapters look at the profligate loss of soil fertility and its relationship to war, starvation and population collapse in ancient times, before moving on to the problem in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Commenting on the contemporary situation he writes:
“ The phrase mining the land is now recognised as a very accurate description of what takes place when the human race flings itself on an area of stored fertility and uses it up without thought for the future. In the mid-nineteenth century this began to take place on an unprecedented scale. For if agriculture was, so to say, the nursemaid of industry, she was persuaded to learn one salient lesson from her nursling. This was the lesson of the profit motive.”
The profit motive and where it leads when applied to food is the underlying theme of the book Empires of Food. Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, first published in 2010. Leaping centuries and continents to illustrate this theme, they look at long-distance food trading, its relationship with imperial conquests and the maintenance of armies, and where it has historically ended – in malnourished populations and weakened defence forces in the imperial heartland that are easy prey for invaders, and in soils which take centuries to recover enough fertility to support urban as well as rural populations.
The Roman empire is the best documented example of this process, and is covered by Fraser and Rimas, although to round out their picture I would also recommend reading what David Montgomery (2007) has to say on the subject in Dirt: the erosion of civilisations, and also Thomas Homer-Dixon's (2006) account in The Upside of Down of the food energy required to build and run the Roman empire, and what happened when it ran out. Fraser and Rimas lay bare the historical imperial construction of today's global food trading system, and the social impacts of states no longer producing (and storing and releasing at affordable prices) enough food to weather climatic or political storms. They also look at the heavy environmental burdens that the modern empires of food are imposing on nations in addition to the loss of soil and its fertility. These include toxic chemicals, greenhouse gas emissions and noxious wastes.
Fraser and Rimas pay particular attention to the situation of China today, which has moved from storing rice to exporting it and other profitable foods, while systematically destroying the soils on which export (and locally-consumed) production depends, whether by paving them over with roads and cities, drowning them under the dams formed by huge hydro projects, or poisoning them with agricultural chemicals and heavy metals from industry. (A report released on 7 November 2011 by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection said that one tenth of China's farmland is now so polluted by heavy metals such as lead and zinc that people are regularly suffering from poisoning.)
The upside of the high connectivity of the current global food system is that there probably won't be a repeat of invasions from the outside as there was in the past; the downside is that the collapse will be much more widespread than it was for the Mesopotamians or the Mayans. Fraser and Rimas think that a hybrid system of more local but some global food will still be possible (and desirable) in the foreseeable future. But that will depend on whether there is the political will to protect soil fertility at home rather than mining it abroad, and so far there is little evidence of this occurring in any of the great food producing states. On the contrary, they continue to negotiate and sign neo-liberalised trade and investment agreements that will make the problem worse. Therefore, the electoral advice that Albert Howard gave to 'the man in the street' remains as pertinent now as it was in 1947.
“3. He must use his vote to compel his various representatives – municipal, county and parliamentary – to see to it: (a) that the soil of his country is made fertile and maintained in this condition: (b) that the public health system of the future is based on the fresh produce of land in good heart.”
