The Food Nightmare Beneath Our Feet: We're Running Out of Soil
Each year the world loses an estimated 83 billion tons of soil. What
does this mean for food production and what can we do about it?
April 28, 2010 |
At his farm in Willits, California, John Jeavons teaches the next generation to grow soil.
Photo Credit: Cynthia Raiser Jeavons
John Jeavons is saving the planet one scoop of applesauce at a time. Jeavons stands at the front of the classroom at Ecology Action,
the experimental farm he founded on the side of a mountain above
Willits, in Northern California’s Mendocino County. For every
tablespoon of food he sucks down his gullet, he scoops up six spoonfuls
of dirt, one at a time for dramatic effect, and dumps them into another
bowl. It’s a stark message he’s trying to get across to the 35 people
who have come from around the country to get a tour of his farm --
simplified, to be sure, but comprehensible: For every unit of food we
consume, using the conventional agricultural methods employed in the
U.S., six times that amount of topsoil is lost. Since, according to the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average person eats a ton of
food each year, that works out to 12,000 pounds (5,443 kilograms) of
topsoil. John Jeavons estimates that using current farming practices we
have 40 to 80 years of arable soil left.
If you don’t already know the bad news, I’ll make it quick and
dirty: We’re running out of soil. As with other prominent resources
that have accumulated over millions of years, we, the people of planet
Earth, have been churning through the stuff that feeds us since the
first Neolithic farmer broke the ground with his crude plow. The rate
varies, the methods vary, but the results are eventually the same.
Books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and David Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
lay out in painful detail the historic connections between soil
depletion and the demise of those societies that undermined the ground
beneath their feet.
