Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Nitrogen madness
The costs of unsustainable agriculture
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/6/24/14650/8776

Tom Philpott is right to highlight the tremendous ecological debt we've built 
up by depending on nitrogen fertilizer to run our crop production system. 
Depending on mined and fossil-fuel produced nitrogen for our food is no more 
sustainable than depending on peaking oil and mountain-top removed coal for 
our energy.

There's no more "cheap" food and fuel, because, really, there never was. The 
huge irony -- currently obscured by the psychological jolt of widespread 
shortages of food and fuel -- is that we were just learning of how not cheap 
industrial food has been:

1. The Pew Foundation report on industrial livestock production tells the 
U.S. public that environmental, human health, and livestock treatment 
short-cuts that made factory farming seem like such a sweet way to get cheap 
protein simply can't go on.

2. A global collection of analysts concluded earlier this year that 
"advanced" farming using high-production technologies has failed to account 
for the resulting human and environmental costs. Place-specific improvements 
must take into account traditional wisdom, social implications, and basic 
water and biodiversity impacts, said the International Assessment of 
Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).

3. Even after years of cajoling, state regulating, and badgering by 
environmentalists, the more than 40,000 Pennsylvania farms located within the 
Chesapeake Bay watershed discharge 46 percent of the nitrogen and 58 percent 
of the phosphorus in these waterways. They're facing stronger regulation, but 
no new paradigm of how to produce the crops and meat their buyers demand.

Regenerative organic farming does not use synthetic chemical fertilizer -- a 
product without residual benefit -- depending instead on a biologically 
vibrant soil ecosystem that makes timed-release nitrogen available to crops.

Important parts of this system are:

    * Legume crops that interact synergistically with specific soil bacteria 
to convert free nitrogen from the atmosphere into forms that crops can 
utilize;
    * Crop rotations to balance fertility needs from year to year;
    * Cover crops which are incorporated into field surface to increase soil 
organic matter;
    * Compost (made from crop residue, animal manures, and other organic 
matter) as a soil amendment to improve soil health and biological activity.

It's like Thomas Friedman said recently of the "big idea" to suspend the 
18.4-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax this summer: "[This] proposal is a reminder 
to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the 
energy to be serious -- the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused 
and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout."

We, as a country, have not yet begun to fight for a more sane way to grow the 
food we need to feed ourselves and to have our farms prosper. The crisis of 
nitrogen fertilizer supply and affordability is real, but the biggest part of 
the answer is not to haul or manufacture tons more to support our corn habit, 
but to simply ask:

What food and feed crops would do better on the fertility we can grow in ways 
that improve soil, don't pollute as much, and keep lots more carbon in the 
soil that non-organic methods?