Approach to global soil degradation.
Working towards net soil growth.
The way of our industrial agriculture seems to always want to sterilize a problem of inconvenience to productivity, in ignorance to the detriment of our role as stewards of the land. This isn’t a column to bash down an incredible era of industrialization that has brought more people out of poverty than ever in known history; rather an analysis of how to get back on track to a symbiotic path of man’s supervision over nature.
So let's get to it… what’s the conclusive problem with our system of agriculture today in sum in my opinion? Answer: fertile soil degradation. At current estimates of the rate of depletion on our soils, there will only be 60 years of topsoil left till our land cannot provide the nutrients necessary to sustain agricultural production.
Solutions: 1) Regenerative agriculture 2) minimize soil depletion rate & work towards a net positive soil growth rate. The rose-colored glasses wearer might swear to drop our industrialized agriculture system and transferring to regenerative agriculture immediately to solve this problem, though I agree to the fundamental practice, on account of population density would reverse all the benefits of wealth increase from the bottom up. Now the question is how can we use our current system to reverse the depletion rate towards net soil growth? (Currently our soil is being depleted 10 times faster than its restoration) One Solution is the implementation of worm castings to the soil amendment process of industrialized agriculture. This implementation would be a replacement too liquid manure applications.