By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published in September 2021
We can regenerate our soils. If we want healthier soils – and therefore healthier food, healthier bodies, healthier minds, healthier waters, and a healthier climate – then we can have them. Choices abound for us to do right by that which sustains us. In our backyards, on our farms, and within our whole food system options are available that protect and nurture the soil. In this final article of our three part series we explore just some of these methods and systems. While the threats to soil health are great, the opportunities for regenerative practices are equally so. The choice is ours.
We begin quite literally closest to home – in our backyard and community gardens. Seasoned gardeners will give you a standard set of simple rules for good soil-keeping: compost, mulch, rotate, diversify, cover crop, leave put, and keep to paths. Here are a few notes on each of these practices:
Compost
As plants grow they take up nutrients from the soil, depleting its fertility. Compost and manure help return said nutrients to the soil while building soil organic matter. Compost can be homemade or purchased from your local municipality.
Mulching
Mulching is when you cover the bare soil with woodchips, grass clippings, or hay. Mulching feeds soil microbiology as the organic material decomposes, maintains soil structure, and protects against both wind and water erosion. It also helps suppress weed growth and keeps your top soil from drying up.
Crop Rotation
Crop rotation means planting your vegetables in a different spot each year over the course of years. This helps protect plants against diseases since planting them in the same place each year gives more opportunity for pest populations to stabilize and grow. Crop rotation also helps conserve soil fertility. Each plant likes to feast on certain nutrients. Too many years in a row of the same plant can leave that part of the soil stripped bare of that particular good. Rotation gives the soil a chance to rest and recover.
Plant Diversity
Plant diversity is good for soil biology. Different plants exude different enzymes and substances from their roots, which feed different types of soil bacteria and fungi. A diversity of plants means diversity of life in the soil.
Cover Crops
Cover crops are planted in the late fall and often plowed under as green manure in the early spring. These crops first of all keep plants in the ground, which protects against erosion. They also help protect soil fertility. Nitrogen-fixing cover crops like clover take nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil. Other crops will take up nitrogen from the soil as they grow thereby keeping it safe from being washed away and ready to be returned to the soil in the spring.
Leave Plants in the Ground
As much as possible leave plants in the ground after harvest. These bodies continue to provide food for the microbiology, help protect against erosion, and are generally good for long-term soil structure. It’s simply another way of composting.
Keep to Your Paths
Finally, keep to your paths. Depending on the size of your garden you will create paths to walk through it. These paths in turn, under the weight of your body, will compact the soil. Compaction is a harm multiplier – for biology, erosion, structure, and more. If you keep your paths this means you are protecting the other soil – the food-growing soil – from such disruption.
Consumer & Voting Choices
Perhaps for city dwellers the greatest tool we have to protect soil is neither shovel nor trowel but wallets and ballots. Even the most avid gardeners still buy a good proportion of their food. The rest of us even more so. And all of us can vote. But do we, as American food activist Michael Pollan once said, vote with our forks? Do we buy and eat food that was grown in a way that conserves and restores the soil? While not wanting to put all responsibility on the shoulders of consumers – deeper systemic realities exist – it is nevertheless true that the food choices we make do have an effect. Given this reality it is important to consider what can be done at the farm level to protect and conserve the soil.
Farmers and gardeners care for the soil in different ways sometimes. Composting, for example, is not feasible at the farm scale. To source fertility, farmers in the last century have in large measure turned to synthetic fertilizers. While supplying adequate amounts of nitrogen these fertilizers are created using natural gas, a non-renewable resource. Many realize that depending on a limited resource to grow food is not sustainable. These farmers are turning to traditional methods of maintaining soil fertility – animal manures, crop rotations, and cover crops.
Mixed Farming Practices
Folks like Wendell Berry advocate mixed farming systems, where farmers raise animals and grow crops on the same farm. In such systems reciprocities abound that ultimately benefit the soil. Animal dung from pasturing becomes future fertility for crops, pasture grass restores and regenerates the soil, etc. Such mixed systems are not the norm. For the sake of the land this traditional way of farming may be our future.
Signs of Hope
Other methods for caring for soil are growing more popular. And contentious. For over fifty years organic farmers have abstained from pesticides, instead relying on crop diversity and crop rotations to keep pests and diseases in check. Many farmers, conventional and organic, are moving away from tillage practices. By not disturbing the soil farmers maintain the structure, preserve the soil’s invisible life, and ultimately reduce erosion.
Agriculture Canada estimates that over 70% of Canada’s soil is at very low risk of erosion, mainly because of the adoption of low-till practices. Meanwhile Our World in Data highlights the consequences of different farming methods on soil erosion. 39% of conservation-managed soils have a lifespan of over 10,000 years compared to only 18% of conventionally-managed soils. Amazingly 1/5th of conservation-managed are actually thickening – rather than eroding. Altogether such methods add up to more than the sum of their parts. For example, a review of 56 studies published in the journal PLoS found that compared to their more conventional neighbours, farms that abstained from synthetic chemicals, used cover crops, and crop rotation had 32-84% more microbial mass. All around us are signs of hope for the future of soil.
Of course a few exemplary farms are not enough. At the food systems level there are economic structures, government policies, and cultural norms that need to change if we are truly serious about soil. For example in the U.S. and E.U. politicians are talking about concrete policy proposals to pay farmers to protect the soil. Already the State of Maryland pays farmers $45 an acre to plant cover crops. Others argue we need to pay twice as much for food if we want to support sustainable farming.
Soil Regeneration and Wider Change
In our present economy this would make food too expensive for many – a clear inequity. Preserving the soil also means that housing must be affordable. When many people are spending more than half of their income on housing they can’t afford to pay a just price for good food. Of course these are only a few, preliminary ideas. The list of systems change proposals could go on and on. It could be its own article. Even its own book. Regardless of the inevitable complexity and detail, choices exist. If we want to regenerate our soils we can.
