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Every meal you eat now costs the planet 10 kilos in lost topsoil.
That's the warning of "Surviving the 21st Century" author Julian Cribb to an international soil science conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on Dec 15, 2016.
"10 kilos of topsoil, 800 litres of water, 1.3 litres of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide – that's what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person," Cribb says.
"When you multiply it by 7 to 10 billion people each eating around a thousand meals a year, you can see why food is fast becoming the challenge of our age."
"The human jawbone is now by far the most destructive implement on the planet. It's wrecking soil and water, clearing forests, emptying oceans of fish and destroying wildlife as never before – but few people realise it because of long industrial food-chains that hide the damage from them," he says.
Do the 10 kg of lost topsoil result in 10 kg of night soil?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 16 2016, @11:42AM
I would also add hydroponics, which doesn't require soil, and produces quite well without fertilizer if you combine it with aquaculture, which can then supply fish to the diet.
For traditional farming in dirt, there's terra preta [wikipedia.org], an incredibly fertile and self-reproducing black soil that the aboriginal inhabitants of Brazil engineered. Studies have indicated that crops grown in it increase their yields by 800% [underwoodgardens.com]. Imagine multiplying your food supply by an almost full order of magnitude. Terra preta also replenishes itself. They mine it in Brazil to sell as potting soil in the cities; as long as they leave enough of the layer intact it will replenish itself. Soil scientists have figured out that the secret is the pottery sherds and biochar mixed in with the soil that provide a matrix for beneficial soil bacteria to colonize and retain nutrients year after year. But when they're able to fully reproduce what the Indians accomplished it will boost production in every agricultural area of the world.
Finally, there is the question of efficiency. Our civilization wastes a lot of food. We haven't always had the means to improve our farm-to-table efficiencies. Now we do, in terms of the technology. If we can fix the inefficiencies of the human economic system that overlays the technology, we can gain a lot more there. Whether or not our polities can manage that part is an open question, so in the meantime I believe it's best to DIY. Build your own garden and/or hydroponic/aquaponic setup and secure your own food supply. It's a better use of time than watching cable, and tastes better too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Burz on Friday December 16 2016, @07:41PM
Additionally, one of the main goals of organic agriculture is to prevent topsoil degradation and loss--to not farm like an intensive extraction industry. Buying organic *ought* to help, and I'd hope that data exists showing whether this is true in practice.