5. Soil: The Living Skin of the Earth

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 5

2010 January. University of Michigan web page on Land Degradation.

2008 August 9. Devastating Drought Settles on High Plains. By Rebecca Lindsey, NASA Earth Observatory. Excerpt: Devastating drought has returned to the heart of Dust Bowl country. On the High Plains of northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and northern Texas, drought has been creeping up since fall 2007. By mid-June 2008, the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding areas slid into “exceptional drought,” the most severe category of drought classified by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma, the westernmost county in the state, is “at the epicenter of the drought,” according to staff climatologist Gary McManus with the Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS). The land is occupied by wheat farms, corn fields, and pasture. It’s an area of periodic drought; the Dust Bowl years have not yet faded from living memory.
“The area has been in and out of drought since the start of the decade. Mostly in,” McManus said. “But fall of last year was when it really started to get bad. In some places, this year has been as dry or even drier than the Dust Bowl.” As of early August, the Oklahoma panhandle was experiencing its driest year (previous 365 days) since 1921, according to OCS calculations. Through July, year-to-date precipitation in Boise City, Cimarron’s County Seat, was only about 4.8 inches, barely half of average and drier than some years in the 1930s, the height of the Dust Bowl.
...Viewed from the ground, the situation is equally discouraging. According to Cherrie Brown, district conservationist for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Boise City, subsoil moisture is virtually non-existent. “Any rain that falls is sapped by evaporation in two or three days. Four feet down, there is literally no moisture left in the soil. Recently we were digging as part of a project to decommission a county well, and we dug down to a depth of 7 feet, and there was still no moisture. Even irrigation can’t offset these deficits,” she said. As a result, crops have failed and pasture is severely degraded....

Summer 2008. Great Grasslands. Curtis Runyan, Nature Conservancy Magazine. Excerpt: While the Amazon rainforest gets much of the attention, most of the Brazilian land cleared for ranching and farming is in the Cerrado, a vast stretch of grasslands and savanna about half the size of North America's Great Plains. In recent years more than 50 percent of the region has been cleared or plowed under; only 2 percent is protected.
But in one corner of the Cerrado-the 1,400-square-mile district of Lucas do Rio Verde-The Nature Conservancy is partnering with the local government and all 360 major landowners to help ensure at least 35 percent of their lands are protected as natural habitat, the amount required by Brazilian law....

2008 February 29. Transylvania: Welcome to the Future. By Bruce Stutz, OnEarth. Excerpt: The steeply rolling hills of the Transylvanian plateau lie within the gnarled grasp of the Carpathian Mountains, which curve down through Central Europe into the heart of Romania...
"In Transylvania you will see a preindustrial, self-sufficient agricultural system," Jessica Douglas-Home, the slim, soft-spoken founder and chairwoman of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, assured me when I visited her London office. Since 1997, the trust, partnering at times with the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and the European Union (E.U.), has worked to restore and maintain the region's ancient villages, homes, churches, and, especially, agricultural traditions.
The region, Douglas-Home told me, is the very model of an integrated, sustainable world that consumes only what it can replenish, that treads lightly on its environment and leaves barely a carbon footprint behind. "When fuel shortages begin to make things bad for the rest of us," she said, "Transylvania will hardly have to cough."
With its small common grazing meadows and forested hilltops, this preindustrial landscape also holds great reserves of biodiversity, where rare wildflowers, insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians thrive. According to the E.U., some two-thirds of Europe's threatened and endangered bird species are found on such lands...
The effort to preserve these Saxon lands has become all the more urgent since Romania's accession to the European Union in January 2007. E.U. regulations designed to standardize and modernize farming methods, milking and dairy production, as well as the breeding, grazing, transport, and slaughter of cattle, have created difficulties for small farmers throughout the E.U., but especially in countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, where subsistence farms number in the millions...

10 October 2007. NEW FINDING: Organic farming combats global warming É big time. The New Farm -- Rodale Institute. By Laura Sayre. Excerpt: Data from The Rodale Institute's¨ long-running comparison of organic and conventional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effective at removing the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial organic matter in the soil.
Kutztown, PA. Discussions of global warming in the popular press seldom fail to note its potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture as we know it: more extreme and unpredictable weather, coastal flooding, even the loss of pollen viability for some crop species at higher temperatures all threaten to push the usual unpredictability of farming into the realm of the completely unworkable. But while these threats are indeed grave--and many farmers believe they are witnessing such effects already--researchers at The Rodale Institute¨ have been looking at the problem from the other direction: what impact do agricultural practices have on global warming?
On October 10, The Rodale Institute¨ (TRI), the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PDEP), and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) signed a memorandum of understanding designed to help answer that question. Twenty-three years of ongoing research at The Rodale Institute Experimental Farm already provides strong evidence that organic farming helps combat global warming by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and incorporating it into the soil, whereas conventional farming exacerbates the greenhouse effect by producing a net release of carbon into the atmosphere.
Organic Farming -vs- CO2 Fast Facts
If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.
Converting the U.S.'s 160 million corn and soybean acres to organic production would sequester enough carbon to satisfy 73 percent of the Kyoto targets for CO2 reduction in the U.S.
U.S. agriculture as currently practiced emits a total of 1.5 trillion pounds of CO2 annually into the atmosphere. Converting all U.S. cropland to organic would not only wipe out agriculture's massive emission problem. By eliminating energy-costly chemical fertilizers, it would actually give us a net increase in soil carbon of 734 billion pounds.

5 May 2007. Switch to organic crops could help poor. By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer. Excerpt: ROME - Organic food has long been considered a niche market, a luxury for wealthy consumers. But researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday that a large-scale shift to organic agriculture could help fight world hunger while improving the environment. ...Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, an FAO official who organized the conference, pointed to other studies she said indicated that organic agriculture could produce enough food per capita to feed the world's current population. One such study, by the University of Michigan, found that a global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least 2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world's current production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per day, researchers reported. ...The United Nations defines organic agriculture as a "holistic" food system that avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution and optimizes the health of plants, animals and people. It is commercially practiced in 120 countries and represented a $40 billion market last year, Scialabba said. ...FAO conference is at http://www.fao.org/organicag/ofs/index_en.htm

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