Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[tradingpost@lobo.net]

Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, freelance 
writer, speaker and editor, living in the Yadkin River watershed of the 
Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is an Advisory Board member at the 
EarthWalk Alliance. She was assistant to the late homesteader and 
bestselling Living the Good Life author, Helen Nearing, and as Nearing’s 
executor helped found The Good Life Center at Forest Farm in Harborside, 
Maine. Her most recent book is the controversial Life Rules: Why so much 
is going wrong everywhere at once & how Life teaches us to fix it (Green 
Horizon/iUniverse, 2010). She also publishes a quarterly online 
newsletter, Starting Point, and can be reached at: www.ellenlaconte.com.
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Garden as if your life depended on it, because it will
by Ellen LaConte, originally published by Energy Bulletin  | Mar 31, 
2011
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-03-31/garden-if-your-life-depended-it-because-it-will

Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where 
snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price 
of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many 
Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on 
declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their 
mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility 
bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, 
prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more 
expensive—or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many 
as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their 
families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont 
Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country 
one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And 
the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest 
meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at 
poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely 
on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report 
near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and 
steak to fresh veggies and bread—and even the flour that can usually be 
bought cheaply to make it— will be temporary. But over the long term the 
systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and 
quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as 
reliable as they were.

What’s for Supper Down the Road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect

    the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down 
again,
    prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,
    some foods to become very expensive compared to what we’re used to
    and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the 
same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and 
more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like 
a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill 
your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and 
mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and 
collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could 
stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the 
bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

Why’s Gardening So Important Now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, 
rake and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a 
vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in 
the US around 1971. Lest you’ve missed the raging peak oil, that’s the 
point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in 
reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, 
and the dregs are irretrievable. We’ve shot or are about to shoot past 
peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many 
oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter. There are no new 
cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or 
new methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling, 
dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce more than 
a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That 
means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does 
that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil 
has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an 
exercise in Life Rules, “The ABC’s of Peak Oil” which helps readers 
imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one 
way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn’t leave much.1

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on 
cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on 
expensive oil that’s hard to get because it’s located in hard-to-reach 
or high-risk conflict-ridden zones. Cheap, abundant food on the shelves 
of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our 
bellies depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and 
herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields 
to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around 
the world. Past peak, that system’s going to have the half-life of the 
strontium 90 that’s escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, 
or there abouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: 
First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is 
biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of 
corn, wheat and soy for human and animal consumption—i.e., food—to 
production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and . . . 
Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive. Some energeconomy 
geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of 
opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing 
grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel, which would, 
not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military 
equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market 
item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, “The corn used to 
make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year.” Tell 
that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore’s deep-pockets friend and 
mega-ethanol and corn products producer.

Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming 
possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a 
premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or 
persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north 
Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more 
democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable 
food. Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that’s seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read “First” 
world, arable land has reached peak production. All those 
petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last 
century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic 
chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, 
self-regenerating system, that most American farmland—if its farmers 
didn’t go organic a while back—is comprised of dead soils. Peak oil 
makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution 
impossible, which is good for soil and other living things, not so much 
for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to 
injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to 
urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of 
grain and other field crops to attrition. Half the Earth’s original 
trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to 
feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in 
the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized 
agriculture in only a couple of centuries. China’s soils ride easterly 
winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in 
California while the American Bread Basket’s soils are building deltas 
and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil 
isn’t coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and 
wait.

3) Monoculture: We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is 
produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those 
farms practice monoculture: the planting one crop, often of one genetic 
strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast 
landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown 
with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, 
disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the 
whole crop. At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged 
a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the world’s 
wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. 
Times. Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind 
of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where 
revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), 
which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central 
and Eastern Asia. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it 
reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a 
universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new 
disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The 
current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might 
properly be renamed “Ugh.”

4) Climate instability. Bad — uncongenial — weather has lately 
devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, 
Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. Many climate scientists 
believe we’ve passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar 
weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests, intense 
cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will 
make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what’s 
being farmed for. The transitional climate will be unpredictable from 
season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related 
disasters which means farmers will not be able to assume much about 
growing seasons, rainfall patterns and getting crops through to harvest. 
If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we’ve been 
used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of 
climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. 
Especially if we keep messing with it. When a whole nation’s or region’s 
staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, 
everything down the line from the crops themselves become more 
expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of processed food. 
I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food 
comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn’t the place for me to offer my 
explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (Source.) 
No pundits, talking-heads or economic analysts (well, very few) deny 
there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among 
them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high 
unemployment and many of the lost jobs won’t be coming back. The less 
cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, 
funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in 
the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we’re going in all 
the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, 
anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all 
of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is 
how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it. 
Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going 
to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and 
each other’s food as seriously as we’ve taken producing a money income 
because growing numbers of us won’t have enough money to buy food in the 
conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what’s our 
recourse?

Gardening Like Everybody’s Business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most 
Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We’ve become 
accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process 
is about the have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning 
money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we 
need, we’ll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves 
and each other locally and (bio)regionally. Gardening — and small-scale 
farming — while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike 
fashion will be less about doing business than about everyone’s having 
something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not 
everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close 
and personal with those who do.

In a subsequent column I’ll review five variations on the theme of 
gardening to counterbalance the five reasons I think we need to.

    Back-yard, back-porch, back-40 gardening
    Community gardens
    Community Supported Agriculture
    Urban gardening
    Taking the ‘Burbs