[Ccpg] The Food Nightmare Beneath Our Feet: We're Running Out of Soil

[Sierra Permaculture Guild]

 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<http://www.growbiointensive.org/>,
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*<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143036556?ie=UTF8&tag=odemaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0143036556>and
David Montgomery’s
*Dirt: The Erosion of
Civilizations*<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520258061?ie=UTF8&tag=odemaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520258061>lay
out in painful detail the historic connections between soil depletion
and the demise of those societies that undermined the ground beneath their
feet.

http://www.alternet.org/food/146624/the_food_nightmare_beneath_our_feet%3A_we%27re_running_out_of_soil
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