permaculture

["Gene Monaco" <efmonaco@comcast.net>]

I came to permaculture slightly after the biodynamic movement was in full 
swing, and so didn't take the time to engage in it the way many others have.  
I have heard about these preps over the years and while I have not doubted 
their anecdotal effectiveness, I am aware that others in the scientific 
community have been more critical of its more esoteric nature.  In recent 
years, I have been studying the beginnings of the soil food web, mostly as 
presented by Elaine Ingham, and I am slowly working my way through her 
material to wrap my mind around soil biology to effectively apply it to my 
farm.
I would like to ask the group to [politely] comment on the differences and 
similarities between the two approaches.  After reading the book "The Soil 
Will Save Us" by Kristen Ohlson I am encouraged that while the dark side of 
human nature is the biggest impediment to sustainable human survival, the 
techniques of soil restoration, if rigorously applied, can make an enormous 
impact, and so I fully support the sentiment in Marsha's post below.
-Gene Monaco

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture [mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf 
Of Marsha Howe
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 8:27 AM
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Cc: sanet-mg@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [permaculture] We need to protect the world's soil before it's 
too late | Popular Science

What do you all think about Biodynamic ag?  I'm sure all of us on this list 
are doing everything we can to heal the soil. In my search to be more 
effective at that I met Evan Folds of Progressive Farms. Through his deep and 
continuing work, he has been able to articulate in simpler terms the 
energetic element behind some of the Biodynamic practices. Based on what I've 
learned, and what Sekem.com has done using Biodynamic preparations in the 
Desert of Egypt, plus coupled with the design aspects of Permaculture we can 
heal the soil and, of course, not just the soil but the entire energetic 
environment with living organisms that are capable of doing what's needed.   
Evan is giving free 1 hr talks via webinars on Wednesday's at 6pm EST on the 
EAT platform. http://www.eatcommunity.com/
Evan has also partnered up with Linda Borghi, who has farmed using Biodynamic 
preps and principles for 21 years +, to bring this info to the urban yard 
farmer where we, at Farm-A-Yard.com, are making the education available to 
help those who want to learn how to farm their yard and show them how easy it 
is to jumpstart the healing of their soil by brewing their own 5 gallon 
bucket of BioEnergetic preparations. We've just begun using webinar delivery 
of the information and are building our presence on FB.  Thanks for the work 
everyone is doing on this list to change the world! We appreciate your 
feedback.


In grateful service,

Marsha Howe
marshahowe@gmail.com
619-807-6839

Sustainable Neighbors-Founder
Plot to Plate Education
www.sustainableneighborsnc.com

Director of Food Education
Guiding Wellness Institute
www.guidingwellness.com



> On Mar 23, 2017, at 11:18 PM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> http://www.popsci.com/topsoil-agriculture-food?dom=currents&src=syn
> 
> We need to protect the world's soil before it's too late
> 
> Book Excerpt: The Ground Beneath Us
> By Paul Bogard <http://www.popsci.com/authors/paul-bogard> March 21, 
> 2017
> 
> *The following is an excerpt from The Ground Beneath Us 
> <http://amzn.to/2n9NwIU> by Paul Bogard.*
> 
> It’s hard to believe that American society could possibly collapse 
> because of a lack of soil 
> <http://www.popsci.com/biodiversity-below-ground-is-critical-to-biodiversity-above-ground>.
> And it’s true that we in the States are blessed to live in a country 
> so rich in this life-giving source. But in a small world growing 
> smaller all the time, what happens to the soil in other parts of the 
> world—often much more at risk than our soils—will eventually affect us 
> and our economy, and the stability of the world around us.
> 
> For example, soil scientists fear that we are wasting and damaging our 
> topsoil—the layer in which most of our food grows—at an entirely 
> unsustainable rate.
> 
> How unsustainable? One recent study reported that on average the world 
> has only sixty harvests remaining. “On average” because although in 
> the United Kingdom that number is one hundred harvests and in the 
> United States the number is even higher, for other parts of the 
> world—think Africa, India, China, and parts of South America, where 
> the human population is largest and growing ever larger—the number of 
> remaining harvests is lower, meaning that in fewer than sixty years 
> the topsoil will no longer support the growing and harvesting of food.
> 
> Two incompatible facts: at the very moment when we know that by 2050 
> we will need significantly more food, we are paving over some of our 
> most fertile soil. Human settlements have traditionally taken root in 
> fertile areas, and as these increasingly urban areas grow in human 
> numbers, we are developing the ground and thus losing the best soils 
> for growing food. In the United States, the amount of ground being 
> lost to development is stunning—more than a million acres a year. As 
> one result, whereas in 1980 the nation had an average of nearly two 
> acres of cropland for each citizen, thirty years later and with ninety 
> million people added, that number had fallen to 1.2 acres per 
> American. “How an Exploding U.S. Population Is Devouring the Land that 
> Feeds and Nourishes Us,” reports the subtitle of a study 
> <https://www.numbersusa.com/sites/default/files/public/assets/resource
> s/files/vanishing-open-spaces-study.pdf>
> on sprawl. And once this ground is paved, there’s no going back. As 
> one expert noted, “Asphalt is the land’s last crop.”
> 
> While soil sealing and sprawl are urban-focused impacts that many of 
> us can see at our feet, other serious threats to soil take place far from 
> sight.
> These are primarily threats created by agriculture, and especially 
> industrial agriculture as practiced by Western countries and exported 
> to developing lands. The main culprits? Intensive tilling and the 
> overuse of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The resulting 
> degradation of soils includes salinization, compaction, acidification, 
> and the decline of organic matter. Around the world, experts say, 
> about 40 percent of soil used for agriculture is already considered 
> either degraded or seriously degraded, meaning that in this 40 percent 
> at least 70 percent of the topsoil is gone. In total, in the past 150 
> years, half the topsoil on the planet has been lost. This means a lot 
> less food for an already hungry—and ever-growing—human population.
> 
> “Under a business as usual scenario,” says John Crawford, an 
> Australian sustainable agriculturist, “degraded soil will mean that we 
> will produce thirty percent less food over the next twenty to fifty 
> years. This is against a background of projected demand requiring us 
> to grow fifty percent more food, as the population grows and wealthier 
> people in countries like China and India eat more meat, which take more 
> land to produce.”
> 
> The potential for human suffering and environmental catastrophe is 
> enormous. Consider the East African country of Tanzania, home to a 
> human population of some fifty million. Tanzania is also home to an 
> elephant population already decimated from years of poaching. In just 
> six years, from 2009 to 2015, the country saw more than half its 
> hundred thousand elephants killed. What happens if, as projected, 
> Tanzania’s human population doubles to more than one hundred million 
> in the next twenty years, while at the same time the soil’s ability to 
> produce crops diminishes? What happens to wildlife when millions of 
> people don’t have enough to eat? And then what happens when the 
> wildlife is gone? Similar scenarios for disaster exist all over 
> Africa, and on other continents as well.
> 
> Even in considerably more stable situations such as in North America 
> and Europe, we are not immune from the consequences produced by the 
> continuing loss of soil and depleting of soil’s quality. For example, 
> degraded soil means soil that contains fewer nutrients and grows food 
> that is less nutritious. That’s why, as Crawford explains, modern 
> wheat varieties have half the micronutrients of older strains, and the 
> same is true for fruits and vegetables, many of which have lost a 
> significant percentage—sometimes more than half—of their nutritional 
> value just since 1950. “If it’s not in the soil,” he says, “it’s not in our 
> food.”
> 
> All this might not matter so much if we could just find more soil, or 
> just make soil ourselves. But for all practical purposes soil is a 
> nonrenewable resource. The recipe for soil is incredibly complex, 
> requiring an intricate mix of the right chemistry, biology, and 
> physics. And it simply takes a long time to form. The rule of thumb? 
> Between five hundred and several thousand years for an inch of topsoil.
> 
> Which brings us back to sustainability. What we need to be talking 
> about, one soil expert told me, is, “Can we continue agriculture the 
> way we’ve been doing it the past fifty years for the next two hundred 
> years? The answer is almost certainly no.”
> 
> In fact, while there are many examples of how our way of life is 
> unsustainable, our abuse of soil may rank as the worst. The British 
> writer George Monbiot recently described our soil crisis this way:
> 
> Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of 
> climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no 
> obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of 
> major danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were miraculously fixed, 
> we’re finished if we don’t address an issue considered so marginal and 
> irrelevant that you can go for months without seeing it in a newspaper.
> 
> George Monbiot
> 
> The number of harvests we have left, whether it’s sixty or ninety or 
> thirty, isn’t the point. The point is that if we do not change the way 
> we farm and build, we will run out of soil. “Almost all other issues 
> are superficial by comparison,” writes Monbiot. “What appear to be 
> great crises are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady 
> trickling away of our subsistence.”
> 
> *Excerpted from The Ground Beneath Us <http://amzn.to/2n9NwIU>, 
> Copyright ©
> 2017 by Paul Bogard. Used with permission of TKTK.  All rights 
> reserved.* permaculture mailing list permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org 
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