More food or less food? Treat your soils as a friend...

For all those people who like agriculture or let’s call it farming, you will like a BBC programme called ‘Countryfile’. Last Sunday was show the benefits of nurturing the soils and how to get away from artificial fertilisers. The farmer in question, Adam was rather interested because he was shown the differences of his farm soils compared to those of his neighbour’s farm. Those soils were far richer in micro-organisms, were more fertile. The reason was that ‘David’ was not using fertilisers but treated his soils in the old way. Manuring and leaving them to rest from time to time. The results were quite astounding. The good thing about such programmes is that other farmers might well want to do these things as well since fertilisers have risen in price six-fold! It seems a win-win situation by using less or no fertilisers and getting healthier soils. It was also said that grasslands are great carbon sinks. That alone would be good news for the planet. It is easy to be despondent about the planet’s ecosystems or rather the pressures that are put onto them but it is not all bad news as long as humanity generally is willing to change things around. Even desert areas can benefit from changing our behaviour and practices. In the end money talks and as long as the finances make sense things can change rapidly. But may I ask one thing, leave the politicians at home please as these people can put a jinx on almost anything they do.

As the world’s population is still growing rapidly we certainly need to look at how we produce food. We need to understand the biological make-up of soils, and if needed how to improve them. It seems that we are too fond of mono-culture and I have seen this in my own garden where I grew one type of crop year on year. Then wondering why following years were not so good or even no fruit at all! It certainly pays to work with nature and not in the way humans would prefer. Because that way is folly and will lead to diminishing food production.Meaning possible starvation in some regions of the world.