Though it rarely comes to mind, we live in an agricultural society. What we eat almost exclusively comes from farms. Failing their consistent output, even our most rarified of occupations would immediately cease. What we know as civilization has only arisen in the 10,000 year history of farming. In the US, the number of people involved in this fundamental occupation is vanishingly small, less than our prison population, a tiny group of minds holding the knowledge of food production. The farmer faces the daily imperatives of taxes, costs of living, costs of production, which shape decisions. The student of history should see the rise and fall of societies, sometimes built and collapsing on the same spots over and over, and almost always their fates determined by the changing relationships to the soil.
Soil is our largest agricultural export, eclipsing the grains we send abroad. Soils form at a rate that can not be significant in human terms. What we have is what we will have.
Soils are lost through wind and water erosion, oxidation from exposure and of course development into industrial and residential use.
Each of us who eats owes a debt to soil, a debt we very poorly repay in this country as the fertility of our digestion and the thin film of our topsoil which support it are steadily drained to the bottom of the sea. The sun meets the earth to create us and our world. In a very practical way, what we eat today determines what we can eat in the future, an understanding fundamental to the stability of the ancient societies of the Andes, Himalayas, and the Asian deltas. The farming of all permanent cultures, even if dissimilar in crops or climate, shares a universal obsession with a return of the products of the soil to the earth and with the protection of the mantle of topsoil on which we all depend . Next week we will talk about ways in which we try to emulate soil protective methods at the farm.
Tags: soil
