- Rotational grazing will reduce methane (greenhouse gasses). Some scientists posit rotational grazing could actually reverse climate change in as little as five years if every dairy farmer in the United States grazed their cows rotationally. The soil is improved, the need for nitrate chemical fertilizers is eliminated, the milk and the meat is more nutritive, there's no run-off of nitrates or pollution into the rivers.
- Biochar is a carbon negative--that's right, not neutral but NEGATIVE--soil amendment that removes carbon from the air, kicks compost into gear, and traps carbon in the soil for a half life of about 100,000 years. And you can make it yourself. And if you don't want to make it you can buy it.
- Soil conditiong to treat soil like a living organism has been used successfully in China and all over the Middle East to reduce erosion, stop dust storms, aid in water retention, stop run off from floods, and REVERSE. DROUGHT. CONDITIONS. Farmers are using it right now in California, South Carolina, North Dakota and all over the United States to do exactly that while their neighbors lose top soil into the air and rivers along with the chemical fertilizers they pour into their crops for fast growth and no nutrition. Azonite, mycorrhizal fungi, and cover crops are creating top soil by the metric ton and transforming dead farmland back into viable soil.
Exciting, right?
That's why I was startled to find out that all of these things have been around for decades. I happened to stumble across an urban farm podcast about biochar and followed it down a rabbit hole of soil building into a world of scientific information I had never heard of. I thought maybe I'd just missed the bulletin but when I went into my local organic nursery looking for azonite, charcoal, mycorrhizal fungi, and cover crop seeds I realized I wasn't the only one who didn't know about these soil conditioning climate change planet saving strategies. While hidden on a shelf with obscure organic soil amendments was a single, granola bar sized packet of mycorrhizal fungi inoculant, there was an entire wall of fungicide products. While there was one kind of cover crop seeds--red clover--there was a second entire wall of herbicides that advertised their ability to kill clover down to the taproot. And while I had my little packet of pollinator flower seeds, there was a third wall of insecticides promising to kill wasps and yellow jackets. Were those somehow supposed to not kill bees?
The answer seems obvious--big soil science is missing getting its message out to an enormous population of potential soil builders, pollinator growers, carbon scrubbers and rain water collectors: the urban farming community.
It's easy to ignore urban farmers as just backyard vegetable growers, but historically when American and the globe has gone to war, the women of the world have stepped up with backyard vegetable growing to feed the globe. Victory Gardens have always been a mainstay of food deserts not just during the previous century but throughout history across all continents; but in World War I the women of Europe, Australia and America pulled food from over five million gardens to the tune of something like $1.8 billion worth of potatoes, eggs, and vegetables. In World War II the White House joined the effort with Eleanor Roosevelt's inaugural Victory Garden in the White House lawn in 1943, and American women alone bumped up food production to 18 million gardens on public and private lands. Studies show that backyard growers have been intrical in preserving bee populations during the frightening colony collapse disorder; while commercial bee keepers send their Italian honey bees off to almond grove monoculture in California where they live for a season and then die, backyard growers in urban neighborhoods with their increase in pollinator flowers and the diversity of species have managed to keep wild bee population numbers up. Many urban farmers made the switch from pollen free to pollen rich species like sunflowers and started eliminating pesticides from their flowers in order to keep the pesticides off of their fruits and vegetables, and wild bee and butterfly numbers have swelled. In Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union left the island marooned with no source of fossil fuels, a forced agro-economy had to be instituted with backyard growers sourcing most of the food for the population from their backyards and public lands; those urban farmers essentially saved the island from starvation.
So why if urban farmers have the potential to make the same changes in the cities that commercial farmers are making in the country has the message of soil building not made its way into the gardening community? Why are we backyard growers not getting the memo?
Part of the reason, I believe, is the way the message is being delivered. Of course the message is going out primarily TO those commercial growers, but it's also the WAY the message is being delivered. There are youtube videos available of technical specs and cover crop mix proportions that anyone can view, so why are these things still not common knowledge? To answer that I think it's important to know that the vast majority of urban farmers are women, something like 75-80%. Well, the soil scientists will tell you, they're not ignoring this audience because they're women, they still have the same access to information as the commercial growers. Except there's a key piece of the puzzle missing in the delivery method.
Studies have shown that because girls mature emotionally faster they spend elementary school being bored with school and easily succeeding in subjects like math and science, because the boys lack of emotional and physical maturity leads to a restlessness that by necessity slows the learning pace in the classroom and requires more repetition. Most girls excel in science and math in elementary school because by the time the tests come or the scaffolded projects are due, they've been given more than sufficient time and repetition so that they most likely didn't need to study, and many times have been able to figure out the concepts ahead of where the teacher is without trying. When middle school hits, however, and somewhere between fifth and seventh grade the majority of boys have a vast jump in physical control and emotional maturity, teachers ramp up the pace, since they no longer have to contend with little squirmy five year old boys. For the first time in their lives girls find themselves being challenged in science and math especially because the pace now is such that they have to pay attention with an entirely different amount of focus than they've been taught is acceptable in the previous six years of schooling. They quickly find themselves drowning and because for the first time in their lives they haven't been able to figure out the concepts ahead of where the teacher is teacher (because now things are moving so quickly that they actually have to learn the lesson as the teacher teaches it) science and math becomes for many girls a source of dread. This psychological association for science and math with something uncomfortable is a key reason why those fields remain male dominated--not because women CAN'T excel or DON'T excel in science and math, but because many women purposely avoid it because of the negative associations for them and prefer a narrative based learning style.
This then could be why narrative driven books are so popular with the largely female audience of urban farmers. Books like Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Vegetable Miracle" manage to squeeze in a wealth of data, strategies, technique and history in with the story of a year of her life on her farm as she and her husband tried to eat only what they could grow or source locally. Novella Carpenter's "Farm City" doesn't sugar coat the emotional cost of killing a rabbit, chicken, goose, duck or pig, and describes in gory detail the disposal of each, but the narrative makes the story more appealing than the typical grim-faced white bearded fellow staring out of animal husbandry textbooks from the seat of his tractor. And this in turn can explain why urban farming communities have largely been left out of the ultra scientific, data-driven conversations of soil building: different learning styles.
Gabe Brown, as part of Living Web's soil building series, manages to do all things at once--talk about the science of soil building but link it to the narrative of his family farm and the trauma of how weather wiped out his crop not one year but three in a row until he had no other choice but to try sustainable farming practices. I'm hopeful that more farmer scientists will learn from his example and learn to teach across learning styles with humor, wit, and storytelling so that the planet as a whole can enlist the veritable army of urban farmers ready to change the world...with the daughters and granddaughters of those World War II Victory Gardeners that fed the world living up to their mothers' legacies.
Further notes:
What is mycorrhizal fungi? Essentially mycorrhizal fungi functions to form a symbiote between a fungi and the plant roots that allows the plant to draw even more nutrients and water from the soil. It also helps your plants to acclimate to the pH and unique characteristics of your soil which means your saved seeds become even more perfect to grow in your garden. Inoculant comes in a powdered form that you tap onto the roots of your new plantings at about a teaspoon at a time. You can also find these white networks of roots on plants in your local forest or canyon if you dig, and the proximity to the roots of your new plantings can allow the fungi to jump from plant to plant.
What is cover crop? Cover crop seeds can be many things from crimson clover to a peas and oats mix to alfalfa to sunflowers. Basically scientists have realized that the sun's damaging UV rays kill the soil network of bacteria and micro organisms which keep the soil aerated and nutrient dense and allow water absorption (a key cause fo the dust storms and floods in China and parts of the US is soil run off which causes mud flats and the lack of binding agents in the soil acting as glue without which dry soil just blows away in the wind). Plant cover crops to literally cover your soil and keep it from baking in the sun, keep the temperature moderate for your plantings, and to fix nitrogen in the soil. Crimson clover can also be used as a pollinator but for maximum nitrogen fixing you will want to cut it before it flowers. The taproots of cover crops aerate the soil and when the plant is cut (leaving the root in the soil) and dropped, the plant will decompose into nitrogen dense natural fertilizer that some commercial dairy farmers are starting to use for grazing systems instead of grass.
What is biochar? Basically, any scrap wood or wood products that would be allowed to decompose can be baked into charcoal and buried and the carbon that would have been released into the air upon decomposition will be trapped in the nooks and crannies. When that biochar is buried it traps that carbon back into the soil. You can buy biochar by the pound, make it yourself in a special oven, or make a simple biochar burner with a paint can inside a metal drum. One source of green house gasses is the decomposition of carbon based products in landfills; the gasses amplify when in promity to each other. When we compost in general and when we use biochar, we can drastically reduce those gasses, and the use of biochar can eliminate them completely.
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