Philip Small reviews a brace of articles from E/The Environmental Magazine The Scoop On Dirt: Why We Should all Worship the Ground We Walk On, part I and part II, by Tamsyn Jones.

It is beautifully written, but settles into a tired view of soil. As a soil scientist, it irks me that this essay flubs the opportunity to celebrate the unfolding understanding of this dark and patient resource. . .

Ultimately it works into a description of Third World soil erosion, chemical burn-out and exhausted productivity. We are told that without aid from the powers that be, the soil, and those it supports, will suffer. I accept that on face value, without hesitation. Third World nations are requesting training in soil management and nutrients to replenish their exhausted soil. We should help them in this. . .

There is much to like about this piece. Soil seldom gets such professional treatment. However, because it is so well-written – she is a journalist after all – one may not easily spot that some of the observations are presented as foregone conclusions, yet are not supported or warranted. Most of the first 20 paragraphs are full of solum-esque richness. By the end at the 60th paragraph, all the good will banked during the beginning of the essay has been mortgaged by hyperbole . . .

I've selected what seemed to me to be the gist of his review with the caveats and courtesies elided. It is a hyperbole-free review. I would say, much more bluntly, that the article is a crock of manure except that this isn't fair to manure. It isn't so much "Soil Erosion for Dummies" as Philip calls it (see below) as the urban pseudo-natural religion of the politicized environmental movement (which has nothing to do with the environment).

The more I learn about soil, the more disservice I see in this type of "Soil Erosion for Dummies" pablum. For one it implies that, absent man's influence, all soils naturally improve with time. Only the young ones do. Nature is not so kind to old soil and soil management must be guided by this fact.

What qualifies as "soil regeneration"? It has always bothered me that regenerating the living processes in the topsoil and regenerating substratum soil mass from the bottom up are treated as not worth differentiating. Still. 80 years, 500-1000 years, or more years to regenerate an inch of soil: You can tell people any number you want, everybody in the know understands its just a theatrical device. A million years is highly theatrical. It implies waiting for a climatic shift or a geologic system reboot.

The rule of thumb for well managed grazing systems is that soil builds at an inch a decade. Few achieve this rate - there's a sales pitch in there somewhere too - but they have the emphasis in the right spot: management. The time needed varies dramatically depending on what is done. It isn't helpful to only speak of worst case scenarios of exploitation or neglect in inhospitable places and advance that as a useful perspective.

Philip also faults the articles for their lack of engagement with the soil science and knowledge garnered in the past several decades. Like most environmentalist tracts the articles are stuck in the 1960s, talking about the 1940s and earlier, and don't even have a grasp of the knowledge of that era. Similarly, it makes a dogma of selected best practices to the exclusion of everything else, and so prescribes unworkable policies for the present and the future.

I've been posting on this subject for years, engaging with the organic myths of pseudo-environmentalists and their historically impoverished views of agriculture. First, humans have been consuming soil for eons. This isn't something that began with the industrial revolution. Some of the earliest Greek writings were accounts of events from their dim past, before writing, in which land degradation from agriculture was a still visible part. The same is true for China, the Near East, and to a lesser extent Europe. There were some lucky spots, such as the Nile delta, that escaped this fate due to local conditions: yearly floods renewed the land with sediment loads from the heart of Africa.

Second, importing fertility from other places to allow continuous production isn't new, it is centuries old if not older. The laborious importation of organics from afar, such as seaweed and peat, as well as mined minerals such as lime, sulfur and sodium nitrate (Chilean saltpeter), and manufactured fertilizers such as potash (potassium) and calcium nitrate (Norweigan saltpeter) were all done before we learned how to make ammonia from methane. Fossil fuels are not a necessary part of fertilizers, they were just cheap and abundant. Phosphorous from blood and bones, and nitrogen distilled from dung and urine, emptied the graveyards and chamber pots of the world for both military and agricultural uses.

In most places, for most of history, agriculture was destructive for soil. In the few places this was not true it was an accident of location, such as the Nile delta where nature repaired the damage, or something that resulted from clever bio-engineering by humans. The Plaggen soils of Eurasia and Terra Preta soils from the Amazon are examples of human created soils that have been discussed in other posts.

The more useful lesson from history is not that industrial methods are a problem or that we need to regress to pre-industrial "organic" methods as defined by believers, it is that the useful methods of the past can be made even better by enlightened use of modern methods. The old ways and the more modern ways aren't opposites, they are complements.

Growers that neglect attention to balanced fertility, soil chemistry and structure, and the micro and macro organisms that define healthy, fertile soil in favor of something more like agroponics in which soil is merely a granular medium giving plant roots something to cling to so that they don't fall over in the wind, cannot long succeed on a large scale. But when the wise practices of the past are used in conjunction with the newer capabilities made possible by advanced chemistry and breeding we become bio-engineers comparable to those past masters, as they would do if they were still practicing today.

Take this passage from Part I as an example:

. . . in many countries with naturally acidic soils, such as Australia and Ghana, overuse of fertilizers is causing soils to become even more acidic. In the case of Ghana, Hepperly says that the soil has become so unnaturally acidic that it can no longer grow its native sorghum crop.

Almost everything you do makes soil more acidic. Manure, organic matter and even rain (it has nitrates created by lightning) increase soil acidity. The problem isn't the use of fertilizers, it is failure to do effective fertilization that considers balanced soil fertility. Some fertilizers, such as calcium, reduce soil acidity. Others, such as many nitrogen compounds and sulfur, increase it. Testing soil to determine its acidity prior to formulating fertilizer recommendations is easy and cheap. An experienced grower can even tell by the smell and taste of soil.

Getting the PH right is beneficial in multiple ways. It makes the soil nutrients already in the soil more plant available. Adding a mineral such as calcium, a secondary nutrient, neutralizes acid soil. Plants then grow better, as if you had added primary nutrients as well. If you also add primary nutrients then less are needed to get strong response from plants.

This ties into one of Philip's concerns about the neglect of recent progress in soil science in the articles.

Conspicuous by its absence are post 1950s discoveries like terra preta and glomalin, discoveries that hint at workings of soil health beyond our current understanding. I choose these examples because they hold the promise of achieving unprecedented soil vitality in the arable soils most of concern in the essay.

Terra preta has been actively researched since the early 1960s. It is a key component of carbon negative fuel production. Terra preta is made by adding charcoal to soil, but total soil carbon continues to build long after additions of charcoal stop. Charcoal producing household wood-gas stove designs are available. Simple and efficient, these can be used to establish terra preta nova on a scale that matches the Third World's soil carbon crisis. Larger adaptations of the process are being developed commercially. A solar furnace (pdf) alternative is promising.

Glomalin was discovered in 1996. Produced by fungi from carbohydrates supplied by plant allies, glomalin holds 1/3 of global soil carbon, and in a recalcitrant form to boot. It dramatically improves soil health. Low soil nutrient status tends to favor its production, as plants are encouraged to fuel and hydrate their fungal allies in exchange for phosphorus. Perhaps a similar process is supported in terra preta, and accounts for the mysteriously rising tide of soil carbon.

Without a celebration of the ongoing exploration of soil, one is left with the impression that soil scientists have long since exhausted the soil of its potential for significant and exciting discovery.

The links in the above grafs are from Philip's post and are worth examination. Charcoal, like calcium and wood ash (high in potassium carbonate), is alkaline and will not only have the benefits it is best known for, it will sweeten acid soils. This isn't a benefit for soils that are too alkaline to begin with, but sulfur - a secondary nutrient like calcium - has an opposite effect, as does nitrogen and organic matter such as manure. Whatever soil you have there are known methods for amending it which must be considered since anything you do changes soil PH. Just growing a crop with no amendment at all changes soil PH. Plants change soil PH with root exudates and sometimes synthesize acids in their leaves.

Philip says:

We are told that without aid from the powers that be, the soil, and those it supports, will suffer. I accept that on face value, without hesitation. Third World nations are requesting training in soil management and nutrients to replenish their exhausted soil. We should help them in this.

We might also work with first world activists and science writers to help them understand the rudiments of soil management. In both cases (first and third world) it will be useful to find ways to explain the issues in terms of existing knowledge so that it more comprehensible. It is a common failing of scientists to insist that others learn to speak their language and accept their world view, though it would seem that the roles should be reversed. Indeed, scientists might even learn something if they could speak and understand farmer talk. It has happened before. Terra Preta, after all, was invented by people with no western science background. Their knowledge was likely bound up with a superstitious world view (as is ours when you look at it closely) but that's a framework in which they hang their knowledge, not the knowledge itself.

This is worth doing because the problems we have are not that one agronomic system or another is good and others are bad, it is that they are all incomplete as generally practiced, though we have the knowledge to improve them. And we must since world food, fiber and fuel production must become perhaps three times as productive in order to feed, clothe and provide energy for our still growing and developing population. Advocacy for systems that are even less productive than our best - even if they satisfy other needs - fail to engage that reality. For example, an "organic" system that is 75% or 80% as good as industrial agriculture using fertilizers and improved cultivars won't meet needs. We need systems that improve soil and are much more productive, using the least amount of inputs of material and energy. We know how to do very much better than we have, so there is hope that we will do so on a large enough scale to succeed.