A Devastating Omission (A Grazier’s Manifesto)
Ignorance of the ecology of soil has led us to some destructive conclusions for environmental activism.
There is a time to make allies, and there is a time to call out your allies when they make such a serious mistake that they will undo the very goal they strive for. In the conversation over the climate crisis, sustainability, and what should be done to restore our ravaged environment, I am shocked at how little ecology is actually understood or even considered. For the last seventeen years, my family has been in the business of building soil in a perennial permaculture system. We have tapped into the web of trophic cascades. We have tended a micro-ecosystem of diversity involving hundreds upon hundreds of species. We have tapped into multiple feedback loops of nutrient cycling that feed and ameliorate the soil. At times earthworms are so prevalent that in the wet mornings I have to take care, lest I step on the myriads of copulating couples. We have facilitated the sequestration of water. So too, the sequestration of carbon. But for most environmental activists, we are the enemy.
Our farm has provided some of the most nutrient-dense food for hundreds of families, all while never spraying a single pesticide, herbicide, or fungicide. We have never tilled, which causes the destruction of the entire living organism that is the soil’s ecosystem. We have minimal reliance on technology, particularly the kind that is dependent on fossil fuels, which means our work is predominantly a manual labor of love. We dare to consider ourselves a part of Nature and not some benevolent outsiders preserving a precious resource. We consider the destruction of the environment ultimately an act of suicide. Consequently, we have reinserted ourselves into our surrounding ecological trophic cascades, feedback loops, and nutrient cycling. In other words, we eat in such a way as to encourage as much health in the ecosystem as possible, because we believe eating is Nature’s currency. And if we have any capital, we want to spend it ameliorating the systems that keep the soil healthy. We accomplish all of this by raising and eating meat.
In 2014, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) put out a study that warned we may only have 60 more harvests left if the degradation of soil continues at present rates. This study, of course, has been hotly contested and many consider the number 60 arbitrary at best. What cannot be denied, however, is the agricultural paradigm which the study highlights. Such an industrial paradigm considers soil as a resource to extract. Am I the only one who is dumbfounded by the hubris of a system that haggles and debates over the end point of an ecosystem that has been evolving for over a billion years? I believe a short, though woefully simplistic, history of soil can help; not only to reestablish some humility in light of its scale, but also to remind us of what has driven the health of the soil to become the unimaginably complex ecosystem that it is today.
A mere few billion years ago, the earth stabilized and water condensed, providing the conditions to weather rocks and stone, loosening and grinding up minerals. Life forms, which began in the water, produced microbes through photosynthesis, some of which gathered along shorelines. Then, over a half a billion years ago, a threshold was reached and an explosion of biodiversity happened when lichens appeared on the scene and grew on rocks, out of water, in a symbiotic relationship between fungus, algae, and bacteria. Not only did lichen accelerate the weathering of rock, but their cycles of life and death provided new biological nutrients to be incorporated into the body of the soil. Within millions of years another threshold was reached as the lichen had set the groundwork for an explosion of diversity of land plants. The soil now incorporated all these new nutrients…
Unfortunately, the layman’s understanding of soil is generally stuck at this level, which is why textbooks tend to teach us early on — and the general media constantly reinforces — the idea that soil takes thousands of years to make. Even organizations such as World Soil Information (ISRIC) make remarkable statements such as; “Soils are considered a finite resource as their formation and development requires hundreds to thousands of year (sic), as their loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan.” (1) When Scientific American covered the FAO report in December 2014, the opening statement said; “Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.” (2)
I have a growing suspicion that it is our plant-centric filter to environmental issues that leads us, as a culture in general, to ignore the rest of ecology. The history of soil does not stop with plants. With the explosion of land plants, built on the foundation of lichen, came another explosion in a parallel kingdom of life; that of the fungi. Specifically, mycorrhizae, which are essentially fungi that develop symbiotic relationships with plant roots. This development also exponentially grew the nutrient interchange within the soil. Naturally, the thresholds of explosions did not stop there. Once established, the interwoven system of minerals, microbes, bacteria, fungi, and plants provided ample nutrients for land animals to thrive. And, once again, another explosion of nutrients cycled into the system. Now it wasn’t just the activities and deaths of plants and microorganisms that recycled nutrients, but the daily cycling of nutrients through the intestines of these herbivores, namely manure, vastly increased the accumulative biomass pouring into the systems of the soil. It is an ecological principle that each evolutionary leap, upwards in complexity, strengthens and ramps up the production of the whole system. Plants, though eaten by the more complex animals, benefit exponentially by the nutrient cycling these animals provide. Eating is Nature’s currency.
The question then becomes what, precisely, is destroying this unfathomably complex, synergistic, and prolific system that once produced topsoil in depths measured by feet? The very fact that we need to ask this question exposes a paradigm that considers soil at best, simply a vessel to hold plants, and at worse, a resource to mine. Ecology reminds us that soil is a living organism that has evolved with minerals, microbes, algae, bacteria, plants, fungi, and animals. Why are we losing this precious living organism by the billions of metric tonnes every year? And why is this living organism becoming sicker and sicker, less diverse, and less productive each year? I can give you a clue. It is not the most vilified animal — the cow, the ruminant — that causes this destruction. In fact, leave her the hell alone. Any ecologist who knows the first thing about prairie and grasslands can tell you that the ruminants evolved to become the most profound driver of this synergistic soil-building system. What kills the living organism called soil is the plow. And what sickens the soil are the chemicals and synthetic fertilizers we are constantly applying to it, which destroy the relationships between minerals, microbes, algae, bacteria, plants, fungi and animals.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) of the USDA will tell you that “there are more soil microorganisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on the earth.” (3) What do people think happens when we take this ecosystem, run a metal object through it, tear up all the plants that were growing there, turn it on its head, and mix it up till it is “nice and fluffy”? Plowing is not just a disruption, it is a wholesale destruction of an environment. All those interactions between minerals, microbes, algae, bacteria, plants, mycorrhizal fungi, and critters are completely severed and the systems have to start all over again. Even above the surface this becomes strikingly evident. When you want to plant an acre of kale, you must first remove everything green that is in that acre, not unlike the removal of some pesky Native Americans who happen to be in the way of our land appropriation. Soil, in a sense, is the Earth’s skin. And when we plow it and tear out all the vegetation that is already there, the skin immediately wants to scab over. These scabs are your pesky weeds, which will need either another round of plowing or some powerful chemicals to kill everything else but your health-conscious kale. Vegetable or grain growing incorporates the production and efficiency of a single variable. And annual, to boot. Which means you will have to repeat this destructive cycle over and over again.
Can you grow vegetables in a way in which you do more good for the soil than harm? Yes, but it takes an enormous amount of work and only a tiny percentage of crop farmers manage to build soil rather than deplete it. The work is enormous, because the crop farmer has to add in all the functions of an ecosystem that she has taken out. You will need to plant multiple cover crops in order to keep the soil covered at all times. You will need to minimize the physical disruption of the soil’s structure. You will also need to plant numerous kinds of species to maintain a bare minimum of diversity. And if you do not have animals in the mix, you will need to provide bio-stimulants to jump start the whole interchange between plants and microorganisms. It is a reliable rule of thumb, that plant production, particularly at the commercial scale of our modern agriculture, hinders the processes that cycle nutrients into the soil, while proper management of animal production supports these critical systems that build soil.
On our farm, by means of rotational grazing, we have kept the ecology intact and the animals do the work that the conscientious crop farmer must do. And the animals do it all day long without the dependency on machinery (typically run on fossil fuels) or the buying and planting of new seeds. We do our best to mimic the animal-plant-fungi-bacteria-microbe-soil synergistic systems that built the deep, deep soils once found in the Midwest. Rotational grazing is a prolific system in which we first and foremost harvest solar energy. Our solar panel is the perennial pasture, boasting hundreds and hundreds of species that make up a complex surface which captures as much sun as possible and photosynthesizes it into biomass. We never plow, and we never apply chemicals, so our solar panel is revved up to maximum production. Our animals eat this biomass, drop their manure, and then move on, allowing that area to recoup and grow literal tons of biomass again. This pulsing of dying and regrowing pumps enormous amounts of nutrients into the system, by means of the carbon cycle. This has been shown to rapidly build topsoil at rates over an inch a year.
Time for a very important distinction.
First, I need to give due credit. Much of what I know about soil systems comes from Dr. Christine Jones, an Australian soil ecologist, who coined the term ‘liquid carbon.’ (4) She makes a very significant distinction between increasing soil by adding ‘biomass inputs’ such as compost, versus the actual building of humus. The biomass model understands soil from a reductionist paradigm, where soil is akin to a Lego structure where one adds different ingredients here and there to effectively build the whole. But when one understands that the soil is a living ecosystem, where trillions upon trillions of life forms are interrelating, the communication and the communication pathways between these living things are of essence, much more so than the sum or ratio of the ingredients.
In this vein, most gardeners add their compost or work some manure or leaves into the ground and think they have increased the organic material and therefore ‘built’ soil. Jones will point out that while some of this organic material will feed the plants, most of it will simply be decomposed and returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Nothing wrong there. The decomposers and the plants will love you for this bounty, but this a far cry from building humus, which is the stable form of sequestering carbon. Contrast the gardener or crop farmer to the perennial pasture, whose soil structure has remained intact. Key to the communication between plants and the nutrients in the soil is the mycorrhizal fungi: microscopic ‘mushrooms’ that physically bond and meld into the plant roots, and create an internet-like network beneath the surface. This mycelian internet of interwoven threadlike hyphae is an essential communication pathway most vulnerable to the tilling of soil. When the mycorrhizal network is left intact, its symbiotic relationship with the plant roots allows the carbon to act like a liquid, where the plant roots ‘leak’ carbon in the form of sugars and other carbon based compounds. These carbon molecules are called root exudates. The mycorrhizae gobble up this carbon in exchange for all kinds of micronutrients that keep the plants healthy. Between this carbon exchange and the microscopic biological activity, humus is made deep beneath the surface: a life-supporting medium that also happens to sequester carbon in a stable form that can last for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Now, add in the grazing ruminants, and you have the pulsing of the pasture being eaten, dying back, and then regrowing. This is precisely the rhythm that once occurred with the herds of Bisons, numbering somewhere around 50 million, marching through the grasslands and eating and trampling everything in sight before moving on. Grasslands have evolved to thrive in this rhythm namely because of what is going on beneath the surface. When the ruminants eat a large portion of the grasses, the roots beneath also die back as well. This decomposing material becomes a smorgasbord for all kinds of living things, feeding microbes, bacteria, worms, and a whole host of other life forms. Then the grass, hardy as it is, if allowed appropriate amount of rest time, will spend energy to regrow. This means more root exudates, and like a stimulus package, microorganisms rush in to consume these nutrients. The plant roots may absorb many of these microorganisms directly or predators may show up, and the cycles of death and excretion cause even more nutrients to become available. Biodiversity is increased, multiple communication pathways are supported, and all these interactions jointly create the critically vital polymer we call humus. Humus retains stable carbon and holds water, both of which are essential to maintaining life on earth. Thus, grazing animals instigate trophic cascades that rev up the soil-building systems, which depend on the innumerable interactions between plants, fungi, microbes, bacteria, and a host of small critters. Plants alone will never achieve such regenerative and ecological health without the animals they evolved alongside with. Consequently, when grazing animals are appropriately managed, there is no better process to heal our soils and reverse some of the damage we have done to our very own home we call Earth.
So, to my sisters and brothers who are fighting for the healing of our environment, your vegetarian and vegan leanings have thrown the baby out with the bath water. If you truly care about the Earth, learn to ‘speak’ her language, that of ecology. If you do, you will see that the most dynamic organism, that which we call soil, is of utmost importance. And to care for it properly as it has evolved to function, we need to raise, manage, and EAT the animals that have long played the essential role of building the soil into the unfathomably complex and productive organism that it is.
For further reading about soil, water, methane, and more, see my next article.
