Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the leader of the Green World Campaign, we have to discard the current extractive economy regime of using chemicals to maximise farm yields, and replace it with a more planet friendly organic approach.
How A Regenerative Revolution Could Reverse Climate Change
Lorin Fries
Oct 21, 2018, 04:00pmEarlier this month the world’s leading climate scientists released the most urgent warning on climate change to date.
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Among the ambitious ideas to meet this challenge is to enable a regenerative revolution – one that supplants our extractive economic model, and goes beyond “sustainability,” to draw down carbon and reverse course on climate change. Marc Barasch is among the leaders striving to galvanize such a transformation. He is Founder and Executive Director of the Green World Campaign, and an environmental activist who co-convened a first-of-its-kind conference for a regenerative society earlier this year. In our interview he shares what a regenerative revolution might achieve, how technology can help, and how we could advance this economic transition.
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Fries: Why should we focus on regeneration now?
Barasch: If we stopped emitting carbon from every tailpipe and smokestack on the planet today, it would not solve global climate change. We’re in a crisis, and it’s only the beginning: we need to reverse course, not just hold the line. We have legacy carbon in the atmosphere that has to be drawn back down. Soil, trees and vegetation naturally capture carbon, if they’re healthy. The Rodale Institute has found that if current farmland practices shifted to regenerative, organic approaches, 100% of annual global CO2 emissions would be sequestered. That’s how powerful soil carbon sequestration is – but we’re not practicing it at anywhere near the scale that’s needed.
Fries: What technologies might enable a regenerative revolution?
Barasch: Blockchain is one opportunity. An excellent example is China’s Ant Forest initiative, where 200 million Alipay customers signed up to perform green good deeds in exchange for tree planting tokens, demonstrating a pent-up demand from the public to respond directly to the current crisis. Each person can accumulate enough positive credits to get a virtual “tree” — and for each of these, Alipay plants a real one. They reached a couple million trees already and have a new goal of half a trillion. This shows the hidden funding potential in small contributions, which can be blockchain enabled, to fund a regenerative revolution.
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Fries: How do you see large farms and companies engaging in the regenerative movement?
Barasch: Revising our chemical-dependent, soil-destroying form of agriculture requires a way for farmers to transition. They know that these practices are harming the land that they want to pass on to their children, but they feel stuck in this system. This is a transition that Rodale Institute, Patagonia and a consortium of companies are trying to facilitate through a new regenerative organic standard. Giants like Unilever, Danone and others are also developing regenerative agriculture initiatives and announcing new sourcing commitments.
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Sounds all sweet and natural – but a quick peak at Wikipedia gives a glimpse at the level of abundance all those nasty extractive economy agricultural chemicals have given to our world.
… Crop yields in the Middle Ages were extremely low compared to those of the 21st century, although probably not inferior to those in much of the Roman Empire preceding the Middle Ages and the early modern period following the Middle Ages. The most common means of calculating yield was the number of seeds harvested compared to the number of seeds planted. On several manors in Sussex England, for example, the average yield for the years 1350-1399 was 4.34 seeds produced for each seed sown for wheat, 4.01 for barley, and 2.87 for oats. (By contrast, wheat production in the 21st century can total 30 to 40 seeds harvested for each seed sown.) Average yields of grain crops in England from 1250 to 1450 were 7 to 15 bushels per acre. (470 to 1000 kg per ha.) Poor years, however, might see yields drop to less than 4 bushels per acre. Yields in the 21st century, by contrast, can range upwards to 60 bushels per acre. The yields in England were probably typical for Europe in the Middle Ages. …
Read more: Wikipedia
Nature isn’t human friendly. Any food crop is almost immediately infested with pests, many of which are entirely capable of wiping out an entire field. In the absence of chemicals your only hope of bringing in a decent yield is to sit out there picking bugs off the vegetables, or let the pests have their way and hope predator species control enough of the pests so you get something for your effort.
A few seasons planting without chemical fertiliser depletes a field of nitrates. After depletion, without chemical fertiliser it takes years to regenerate a field back to its original potential, hence the old practice of leaving fields fallow for extended periods.
Farmers don’t go to the trouble and expense of applying all those chemicals because they are too lazy to research alternatives, they do it because they have no choice, if they want to return better than medieval farm yields. The grim reality is, without all those “extractive economy” agricultural chemicals and practices to deliver additional nutrients and control pests, most of us would starve.
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Obviously we need to take radical action. But so radical as to accept GMO’s. I mean, life on earth is at stake, and scientists may say it’s safe based on decades of studies, but you can’t trust scientists.
It always strikes me that people who are telling us–and who purport to know the most about–how we should be producing our food are people who have never actually tried it. Or tried to make a living at it. IN reality, they have NO idea how complex and uncertain that industry actually is.
I agree. I checked Wikipedia and found this on Marc Barasch:
“Marc Ian Barasch (born 1949) is a non-fiction author, film and television writer-producer, magazine editor, and environmental activist. ”
Lorin Fries has no Wiki profile, but there are plenty of references to her. She graduated from the Kennedy School at Harvard and has spent her post graduation life working for government and NGOs. She spent 2 years working for food NGO in Uganda.
They both seem to excel at writing but both seem to be totally lacking of experience working in agriculture.
Simple. Eliminate the Haber process and cut natural gas consumption by 4-6%. Only about a billion people would die. To start. Simple.
Yes, many would starve. That appears to be the goal.
New hybrid grains bred for better fertilizer use and yields are critical . The hysteria about GMO’s is only noisier than the CO2 cacophony. Maise, corn was bred from weedy wild varieties by the Inca (not “scientists”?) in central america – this has been going on since agriculture. China’s new hybrid rice with better vitamins is high tech, critical for India , Philipines.
GMO is becoming irrelevant in commercial agriculture. Rapid hybridization is faster with consistent outcomes and no hysteria about frankenfood. GMO will be for exotic specialty requirements not feeding billions. And the hybrid advances won’t be what you think. Instead of square tomatoes you will get tomatoes that all ripen at once so you can get in an extra crop in every year. Instead of bushy high yield plants you will get vertical vines you can plant closer together with only enough room for robot pickers reducing land use. Many more unobvious but radical changes are coming.
Bonbon, the Inca were in the Andes, in South America. While responsible for developing potatoes and quinoa, they did not originate maize. Various natives in what is now Mexico and Central America bred maize, which is wildly different from its uncultivated relative, teosinte.
Those “various” bred modern maize from that weedy teosinte with careful selection techniques. We do not even know the name of the builders of the Peruvian pyramids of Caral, nor those who spread enriched black earth in the Amazon. Yet how about the Sachuayacu Urubamba script near Cuzco which is archaic Sumerian?
The strangest I have heard is the maize carvings in a Spanish Granada silo dating before Columbus. In fact 6 months after the fall of Granada, Columbus got his ticket west after waiting 7 years.
Could it simply be the “Inca?” never told previous explorers maize needs human assisted pollination?
Why don’t we just spray Brawndo on the crops? After all it’s git electrolytes, which is what plants crave.
The most serious problem facing the planet today are the idiots who think carbon or CO2 is a problem. If it is such a menace I suggest they stop exhaling immediately. That will get the rest of us a break in the insanity.
Soil amendments are one thing. Substances like Roundup are quite another. Studies produce answers to questions asked. Some questions can be foreseen to have the possibility of producing the wrong answer and don’t get asked. Roundup usage became widespread as an aid to low- till agriculture, which is an attempt to slow the loss of soil, due to common tillage practices. Almost everyone in the US now has Roundup traces in their bodies. Some countries have banned the import of certain foods from the US, for that reason.
China is making attempts to halt the advances of their deserts by the planting of wide swaths of trees. I wish them good luck.
Many narratives make claim that the world’s deserts began and spread due to the hand of man, acting out of tune with local conditions. Attention to the spreading deserts in Spain and other parts of Europe, can offer support to that viewpoint. There is even desertification in Iceland, where the landscape denuded of trees for fuel, has seen the productive soil swept away.
Vast swaths of the US Southern Central Plains were essentially turned to desert during the Dust Bowl era. Massive efforts to reclaim the land and turn dirt back to soil were successful, for a time, but most shelter belts used to prompt those efforts have now been ripped out, to make the acreage where they stood, tillable.
Researchers were recently surprised to find random geometric areas of lush green in the Central Plains, using Google Earth images. Those areas were the result of the very few remaining shelter- belt enclosed fields.
The solutions to soil fertility and conservation issues are not one- sided.
Rep. Devin Nunes Identifies Trump as the first Presidents since JFK to address CA water crisis.
China’s South-North Water Diversion Project (SNWD), is a three-route scheme for diverting flow northward to the water-deficient North China Plain, from the various parts of the water-plentiful Yangtse River Basin.
This is the spirit of the 1960’s US NAWAPA North American Water and Power Alliance.
Strange that so-called “communist” China is doing all that American style large scale action now? I’m afraid some here are still stuck in von Hayek’s hall of mirrors.
Reducing the human population to a few million individuals has long been the dream of many so called environmentalists.
Was Darwin “left”? Full title of his infamous book :
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life).
His cousin Galton a eugenicist.
Favored races spared, of course.
I won’t quote Bertrand Russell, Prince Philip, Paul Ehrlich, Parson Malthus.
Premise is contradicted by science in some cases.
Rice fertilized with organic nitrogen generates more tons of CO2 than if inorganic nitrogen was the fertilizer. For that matter this disparity is even worse as a result of organic nitrogen fertilization when the rice field is flooded until being drained mid-season; again inorganic nitrogen for thìs type of cultivation is better. See Figure 1 “a” of cited source below.
Wheat fertilized with urea for nitrogen has sparse effect on tons of CO2 produced. The use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on wheat however did provoke more tons of CO2 being released. Test sites were in England; see Figure 1 “b ” of cited source.
Source citation = (2018) “The environmental costs and benefits of high yield farming”; click on “Supplementary information” to view Figure 1
Many years ago when I was an agronomy major at an ag school, there was a “new” department that was into sustainable agriculture. They bought expensive seeds of a particular type of Chysanthemum from Tibet. They were going to make a safe pesticide from them. They planted the seeds in one of our experimental fields. Well, nothing really grew. They then came, somewhat sheepishly, to our department to ask about what could have gone wrong. One of our professors asked, “what was your seedbed preparation.” They said, “Seedbed preparation?” Then he asked, “What was your fertilizer schedule?” They said, “Fertilizer schedule?” He then asked, “What was your pesticide schedule?” They said, “Pesticide schedule?” Finally he asked, “What was your irrigation schedule?” They said, “Irrigation schedule?”
CRISIS!
“We’re in a crisis, and it’s only the beginning…”
“demonstrating a pent-up demand from the public to respond directly to the current crisis…”
Way too many folks here that have never farmed. Many others obviously are very educated about plants, but again, don’t know farming. Let’s say I take a 200 acre field out of production and plant alfalfa. How many years before that crop puts as much nitrogen in the soil as one treatment of ammonium nitrate?
And, here is the big kicker, where do I go to plant that 200 acres I just took out of production? I still need that production to obtain the money to keep the farm running and people still need the corn/soybeans for food. Ya’all know productive farmland doesn’t grow on trees, right?
Get out of the universities and cities and live in a rural farmland. You may get an appreciation for what you’re talking about.
Jim,
Second that.
As well as farming, spent 8 years researching plant nutrition.
Some folks writing here have no idea of scale or practicality or economics.
Geoff.
Every solution warmunists prescribe will result in reducing the population. It’s their dream.
Has no one proposing this BS noticed the size difference between the “organic” produce and the typical fertilized product? Where is all of the land going to come from to produce all of the necessary produce organically? Are we going to clear more trees? Has no one also noticed that “Organic” produce coasts almost twice as much as the typical product? That means that the poor will get even less of the needed fruits, vegetables, etc necessary for a healthy diet and the rich will be paying twice as much, or is that the plan? A plan to reduce population.
Modern 21st century organic no-till fields out produce 20th century plowed fields.
13% of US fields have converted to no-till farming to increase yields.
Elimination of fertilizer is a side effect of modern soil science, not the goal.
See no discussion in the article or the comments on Rules and Regulations on recycling waste as fertilizer. Quick scan of the internet shows that many municipal, county, state and federal rules and regulations will need to be looked at and changed. As a teenager, 50 years ago, you knew it was spring when you smelled the manure being spread on the field. You could tell you were outside the city limit by the smell. Today there are oder rules, drainage rules, sterilization requirements [an odor free sterilizer will cost a farmer more to purchase and operate than he saves], storage rules, etc, etc. Will be some heavy pushback from the “Gentlemen Farmers” that are living in the country to escape the city and the taxes. Seems as if everything my father put in the Manure spreader is now considered “Hazardous Waste.”
Agriculture is my field of expertise. I have studied (books) permaculture, and related breakthroughs for decades. Yes, we do need organic and regenerative agriculture. Many of these farmers actually make a living (poison-based farmers do not–they get their income from city jobs). Permaculturalist Sepp Holzer is restoring the cork trees of Portugal, and has a lemon tree growing outdoors in the Austrian Alps.
Nearly all of the books howl about climate change, and yes, that is extremely tiresome. But. THIS IS OUR WIN POINT. If you can manage to get past the need to be right and “they” are wrong, then this is where we can work WITH the alarmists, increase the carrying capacity of the Earth for Life, increase the nutrient content of our food, enhance both human/symbiotes and wildlife, and reverse desertification.
The book “Restoration Agriculture” by Mark Shepard (2013) has an amazing description of what happens when we move beyond monocrops to utilize far more of the sunshine on an area of ground.
Part of our hatred of climate alarmism is an awareness that the power elite are using it to try to establish a world government with high-IQ ivory tower idiots in charge. They don’t understand that they are in an echo chamber, nor how dangerous that can be. Large numbers of independently-informed people are drastically wiser than small groups of brains, even when they are as smart as WUWT readers or Bilderbergers. We must keep our eyes peeled on this and fight back and win against information monopolies.
To get anybody to change, they must be mostly RIGHT. That is why Regeneration Agriculture is our win point. Improving soil quality and reducing poisons is genuinely beneficial. We all know that organic-rich soil is more fertile. Also, when most farmers study what Eliot Coleman knows about pest management by soil nutrition, we will live longer.
Then we can point out that Michael Mann’s proxy was plant growth, and that NASA’s leaf area measurements show that he was right–plants are growing 40% more these days, some of which is CO2 fertilizer. When the screamers have improved agriculture, this becomes easy to think with and they can also face the definition of “climate optimum.”
Let’s win!
You’ve never made a living farming have you?
Your book learning means nothing when it comes to making a living growing crops. Do you really think that if the solutions you have proposed were more productive than those being used today that farmers would not be switching en masse to them? You are basically saying that farmers are uneducated oafs who don’t know what they are doing. That you, as an educated elite, know best and if you only had the power, you could solve the world’s problems.
Here is what I propose. Why don’t you give up what you are doing now for a job, get some financial backing to start a farm doing what you propose, and show everyone how easy it is to make money doing it.
Thank you Jim!
I mentioned that my expertise is mostly books precisely not to make myself look more knowledgeable than I am.
Real farmers ARE switching to various breakthroughs that I know about. As a consumer, it is striking to see an explosion in pastured eggs, for example. A hundredfold what existed a decade ago, and in regular stores, not just Health Food Stores.
Polycultures and perennials are just beginning. I do not panic and think we have to fix everything in one week. We are doing very well as a species currently and we have time. There is a ton to learn, and it is great fun.
Lady Life, writes “Improving soil quality … organic-rich soil is more fertile.”
Lady, You have two basic ways to improve soils so that you get higher yields. One is artificial fertilizers, another is improving soil carbon. But, they are not exclusive. People who use fertilizers commonly improve soil carbon through returning stubble or other ‘waste’ to the soil.
So you put more carbon into the soil. Plants grow better upon it. Sadly, you have not included in your mental equations that the plants grow better by depleting that carbon (one of the reasons). In the end, most carbon used in agriculture ends up as CO2 and much of that goes into the air, where some people seem to hate it being.
It comes back to what I said above. If you improve the carbon in your sopils by adding plant material grown elsewhere, all you are doing is stealing nutrients from that elsewhere and getting higher freight costs to import low density, bulk material. Far better economics if you ship high grade fertilizers. Nature makes the added carbon by plants taking CO2 from the air, making more carbon per unit area when the yield from that area is higher. No need to ship carbon in, just add urea, phosphate, potash, trace elements as needed, as you diminish them year by year.
Geoff
p.s. I love to grab a fistful of crumbly black soil and roll it in my hand as much as any farmer does. But you have to manage your land to get it. And use modern science, not old-fasioned muck and mystery.
Geoff,
You should research the 3rd way to get carbon into soil.
The “liquid carbon pathway” which was discovered in the last couple decades.
For highly efficient “C4” photosynthesis grasses, 50% of the carbon they pull out of CO2 is pushed into the roots and exuded into the soil with the aid of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF).
The AMF make glomalin out of it in vast quantities which they slough off into the soil.
Glomalin is what the USDA calls “the real soil builder”.
Glomalin forms a protective wrapper around soil aggregates to protect them from rain water which leaches the nutrients away in plowed fields.
Suicidal nonsense… but to be expected from bigoted right-wingers who impulsively reject anything vaguely “progressive”, lefty or hippy. Moreover, even if this System-friendly bunk about yields were true [disproved here https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-big-myths-about-modern-agriculture1/ ], it is myopic in the extreme to think that it is sustainable. Yeah, that word. Sane humans don’t defecate on their own plate. Ironically nightsoil would be far better than NPK. We are destroying the soil we depend on, by erosion and by artificial chemical poisoning. Now the soils are so unhealthy farmers feel they need to use the chems just to produce any yield at all… and those crops are unhealthy too, causing us to sicken and die. Dead zones abound and human disease rates grow. I suppose y’all laugh at the connection between demineralized and chem poisoned food and the rising tide of cancer and the other degenerative diseases. Yet it is unnecessary, the soils can be regenerated. Western farmers don’t care about that though, they’re just in it for the money. Little better than the monsters at Monsanto.
Daniel,
Western farmers aren’t in it for the money. The vast majority could make more doing almost anything else. They do it because the love the life. And they still have their farms in many if not most cases because their great-great-grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandfathers and fathers and mothers cared about the soil, as do they. We have developed new ways of preserving and improving the soil since the native bunchgrass was first ploughed. (I realize you didn’t mean “Western” in the sense of the American West, but my region is representative of the methods which you abhor, without which the world could not be fed.)
Daniel,
I like the Scientific American article, but even if doesn’t reflect the latest in regenerative farming.
Two of the keys are that:
– the AMF population be restored via inoculation. The reason no-till works is it doesn’t damage the AMF soil network like plowing does.
– the cover crop be chosen from the subset of plants that have C4 photosynthesis. C4 capability has primarily evolved in grasses, so appropriate grasses should be grown in the non-crop portion of the year.
If you do that, during the non-crop portion of the year, 50% of the carbon extracted from CO2 via photosynthesis will be exuded into the soil where it builds up in a few years to create a healthy dark soil.
It takes a few years to transition, but after a few years the cover crop effectively replaces the fertilizer as to maintaining healthy growing conditions for the main crop.
As near as I can figure, the “Chinese” reference in the title is solely because 200 million Chinese volunteered to perform green good deeds.
Not that significant portions of 200 million actually performed green good deeds and kept performing them.
Where did this nonsense originate from?
At the end of the linked alleged research, which isn’t research.
That alone tells one everything they need to know.
That is, if the person hasn’t already discovered that Rodale has a history of selling junk and dubious claims based on far fetched assumptions.
Eric should have not presented this article with very little knowledge on the agriculture. Poor quality commentation on the Chines proposal. The same is in motion in India. One state already is 100% organic. One point is: organic is not to reduce CO2. To keep the soil and humans healthy. FAO presented on an average 30% of food is going as waste. This is around 40-50% in India and thus natural resources used to produce that much is going as waste. The traditional farming system includes cropping systems and animal husbandry. With the intercropping, the cereal plus pulses fix the nitrogen. —- plenty of research in this direction. So organic in cooperative mode improves the soil and human health brings down the cost of production and minimise suicides and lessen the climate risk.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
FAO released a draft “Agroecological approaches and other innovations for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition” on 4th October 2018 for comments. I am submitting my comments – 25 pages. See given below few points from that comments:
Though officially Uttarkhand is organic state, to change this scenario under the pretext of augmenting production the state agriculture department is supplying “mini kits” of chemical fertilizers and micro-nutrients free to small farmers secretly. The whole objective is to replace organic farming with chemical inputs and hybrid seeds. On the name of free the government is addicting the lands with chemical fertilizers and then once this is withdrawn the farmer has to pay for it. Thus soil degradation and increased cost of production break the back of farmers. Also, this changes the healthy millets to unhealthy millets.
Madhya Pradesh [MP] government formed a separate “Agriculture Cabinet” and passed a comprehensive “organic policy” to make MP an organic state. However, this does not translating in to action, as the government is subsidizing (90%) to hybrid maize seed distribution programme involving the US based seed giant Monsanto and two other biotech companies under “Project Sunshine”. This is named as “Yellow revolution” and also it is being implemented in Gujarat, Odisha, Rajasthan, among others. That means, government telling something and doing something else due to the pressure from MNC!!!
Illegal proliferation of an unapproved Bt-Cotton variety with herbicide-tolerant trait, namely GB-III, which was developed by US-based multinational seed company. It is “Round-up Ready Flex’. The application was withdrawn for commercial release in 2015 but they are grown in India, more particularly in the state of Telangana illegally. Same was the case with the introduction of Bt-Cotton in India during 2002. Even before the government’s clearance for commercial cultivation, seed was produced and supplied to farmers [we filed a PIL in Andhra Pradesh High Court in 2003]. Low moral ethics in GM seed business. The lobbyists compel the seed retailers not to sell non-GM seed and as a result adulterated seeds were rampant. Unfortunately, FAO and CGIAR groups monopolized the tradition germplasm and kept in their gene banks and with the GM seeds they have been ruining the tradition wisdom in seeds.
In a first-of-its-kind study in India, the Centre for Science and Environment [CSE] tested 65 food products available in the market for genetically modified (GM) ingredients. To its horror, CSE found GM genes in 32% of the products; almost 80% of them imported. This is mainly children/infants food.
UN agencies like FAO instead of fighting against such fraudulent activities perforated in developing countries supporting their illegal activities by publishing this type of reports. FAO should thrust to eradicate harmful technologies and food dumping in developing countries.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr Reddy,
Usually I enjoy your learned inputs. Very disappointed by this effort of yours.
There is NO credible research to show ‘organic’ farming outperforms modern chemical agriculture in any way, except in capture of the vulnerable mind of the willing.
Geoff.
Geoff,
For traditional 20th century organic, I’m sure your right.
For 21st century organic, I’m sure your wrong.
– use no-till planting techniques that don’t destroy the AMF network in the soil (arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi).
– inoculate the soil with AMF if it is AMF deficient (AMF is natural and ubiquitous in pristine grasslands).
– allow glomalin to accumulate in the soil going forward. Glomalin is produced by AMF in very large quantity.
– slowly reduce the amount of fertilization each year as the glomalin acts as a soil glue to build up aggregates of nutrients
Glomalin is what makes pristine soil dark. If you don’t know what it is, time to learn. Its discovery in 1996 totally transformed soil science.
Look at the pictures in this recent tweet (April 2018):
https://twitter.com/NDSUsoilhealth/status/986615135497347072?s=19
In 2014, they started with compacted hard to farm clay. By 2017, they had quality topsoil. AMF’s production of glomalin did that, not fertilizers.
PhD (Soil Biochemistry) Christine Jones is perhaps the world’s leading expert on 21st century soil science and soil building:
ttp://ecofarmingdaily.com/interview-sos-save-soils-dr-christine-jones-explains-life-giving-link-carbon-healthy-topsoil/
A) The fungi you reference are symbiotic with the roots. Tilling does not destroy them!
B) Nor does tilling destroy non-fungal symbiotic relationships.
Now, tell us how all crops dependent upon non-seeds will be grown? e.g. potatoes, yams, pineapples, bananas, sugar cane, trees, bushes, e.g. blueberry, etc. etc.
People smitten with one form of agriculture should not declaim their repudiations of all other agriculture.
One should also note, that many of the products sold as “organic”, but grown in foreign countries are not necessarily “organic” by American Laws.
AT,
Agreed that AMF live symbiotically with plant roots. Did you notice in the main article above it talks about cover crops being on the ground if a cash producing crop isn’t?
That’s to ensure the AMF have roots to get energy from.
AMF attach to the roots, but in turn grow hyphae. The hyphae can be several inches long and act like extensions to the roots. They are visible to the human eye, so if you pull up vegetation in soil with a healthy AMF population, you will see what looks like fine roots, but are in reality parts of the AMF.
As to AMF not being damaged by tilling:
The USDA did a 3-year test back around 2005:
They took a plot of land that had been used for growing a crop for years.
They took half the plot and switched to no-till farming on part of the plot and continued traditional farming on the rest.
Each year they tested the soil to see how both the amount of glomalin increased and the amount of soil aggregates.
Glomalin increased significantly in those 3 years, while aggregates increased, but less so.
The plot of land they used also had a natural, unfarmed, perimeter that had been in place for 15-years that they used as a reference for what the natural glomalin and soil aggregate could be.
They found the 15-year undisturbed grass perimeter had significantly more of both glomalin and soil aggregates than even the 3-year no-till land indicating that the no-till land would continue to improve in soil quality for additional years beyond just the first 3.
You can find a graph of the results on page 3 of this brochure:
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/12650400/glomalin/brochure.pdf
Agreed! Geoff.
USDA tests all food stuffs extensively and thoroughly.
To date, Organic is strictly a marketing label, not a food quality.
Back in the 1970s, USDA, through various state agriculture extension services proposed that small farms and niche farms could utilize the “organic” label to sell their produce at higher prices.
I attended several of these “organic” marketing presentations in Pennsylvania.
Up till the early twenty first century, one could still download these USDA presentations.
While there are requirements growers must meet to label their foods “organic”, none of their foods are healthier, better quality, or more nutritious.
If they are grown as per the organic norms, their foods are healthier, better quality with more nutricious.
It is a chemical free food.
sjreddy
Dr Reddy,
ALL food is a mixture of chemicals; and nothing more or less.
Geoff.
not so,
sjreddy