February 4, 2010: Global
Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered
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It takes roughly a millennium to build an inch or two of soil; it takes less than forty years, on average, to strip an inch of soil by farming in ways that are more focused on current yield than on sustaining fertility. A third of America’s topsoil has eroded since 1776. In the 1980s, the United States lost four billion tons of soil per year. Roughly a third of all farmland in the world has been degraded since World War II, with annual soil erosion worldwide equivalent to the loss of 12 million hectares of arable land, or 1 percent of total arable land. About a third of China’s 130 million hectares of farmland is seriously eroded, and Chinese crop yields fell by more than 10 percent from 1999 to 2003, despite increasing application of synthetic fertilizers.
Awareness of the centrality of soil health is nothing new. Aristotle laid the foundation for the humus of theory of plant nutrition; his student, Theophrastus, is often called “the father of botany.” The homo of Homo sapiens is derived from the Latin, humus, for living soil. Leonardo da Vinci observed, “We know more about the movement of the celestial bodies than about the soil under foot.” Darwin spent the last years of his life studying the role of earthworms in soil fertility. After World War I, Sir Albert Howard, perhaps the father of twentieth-century organic agriculture, heralded problems that would follow the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers by munitions factories looking for new postwar markets for nitrates: fertilizers offered farmers boosts in yield but had deleterious effects on the health of microorganisms and the processes of growth and decay that are vital to the preservation of humus. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, despite beyond-explosive growth in our knowledge of everything from atomic energy to galactic motion, our ignorance with respect to life teeming in the soil remains humbling: It is estimated that in a gram of soil, there may be a billion single-celled organisms and millions more multi-celled ones, as well as over four thousand species, most of them not yet names of studied by scientists.
Yet we have slipped over the past half century, as if pulled by the gravitational or centripetal forces of population growth, technological innovation, consumerism, and free markets, into a food system that treats the soil as if it were nothing more than a medium for holding plant roots so that they can be force-fed a chemical diet.
We have become dependent upon technology and synthetic inputs, subsidized by what was, until very recently, cheap oil, which facilitated not only the production of nitrogen fertilizer, but also the management of large-scale, mechanized farms and the energy-intensive system of processing and long-range transportation necessary to bring agricultural products to distant markets. Agriculture accounts for more than 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—all the more shocking when one realizes that recent science indicates that fertile soil is a potent carbon sink, holding the potential to play a significant role in remediating global warming.
The problems of our food and agricultural systems go beyond Peak Oil and Peak Soil, however. Aquifer depletion, biodiversity decline, widespread use of pesticides and other toxics, industrial feedlots that pose health and waste-management problems, nutrition and food safety challenges that attend centralized processing, the decline of rural economies, price volatility in global commodities markets: it is quite a litany, surprising in its breadth and even more surprising in the degree of its invisibility when seen through the lens of the modern economy.
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You wouldn’t use a 747 to go to the corner store for a quart of milk. You wouldn’t use a backhoe to plant a garlic bulb. You wouldn’t use a factory to raise a pig. You wouldn’t spray poison on y our food. You wouldn’t trade fresh food from family farms down the road for irradiated or contaminated or chemical-laden or weeks-old food from industrial farms halfway around the world. You wouldn’t create financial incentives for farms to become so large that they need GPS technology to apply chemical inputs with quasi-military precision. You wouldn’t design a system that gets only nine cents of every food dollar to the farmer. You wouldn’t allow topsoil to wash down the Mississippi River, replete with pesticides and fertilizer residues, creating a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico. You wouldn’t use fifty-seven calories of petro-energy to produce one calorie of food energy.
No, no one ever sat down and designed such a system. Yet it is precisely such a technology-heavy, extractive, intermediation-laden food system that we now need to remediate and reform.
This is the system that has evolved in the wake of global capital markets and the investors who use them, much as industrial farmers use their land—as a medium into which to pour capital in order to harvest maximum yield.
Excerpted from Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered, by Woody Tasch (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008)
