All the dirt

We're Running Out of Soil

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....

...He enjoys working with the challenges of sub-optimal soil and limited sunlight, and is up-front about the fact that, by the standards of Grow Biointensive, as he calls his system, the gardens here are only moderately productive.

By the standards of the average visitor, however, the garden is exploding with life. Rye grass and Jerusalem artichoke wave across at beds of quinoa and amaranth. What looks like a casual paradise is actually a closely monitored science project. Every leaf that leaves the premises is weighed and recorded. Interns from around the world buzz through like bees, tending beds and fruit trees. The catch, if indeed it is a catch, is that Jeavons’ methods work best on a small scale, on relatively small plots of land, executed by people who are paying attention and care enough to expend the necessary labor. And while he believes his methods can be scaled up, his philosophy in general is that civilization needs to scale down, localize, put more elbow grease and less fossil fuel into the food chain.

At the heart of Jeavons’ system is a maniacal focus on composting. Now, when he uses the term he is not merely referring to the quaint re-circulation of leftover bits of lunch. Jeavons recommends that a gardener devote a full 60 percent of planting space to growing crops the principal purpose of which is to add biomass to compost piles. Cereal grains, giant overgrown daikon gone to seed and six-foot-tall (two-meter-tall) cardoons are among the many plants born to die and rot un-tasted, cut down and fed through the system, capturing more carbon with each generation.

Compost - build up the soils nutrients - make dirt!