Passing on the knowledge before it's too late

The back to the land movement has always been an interest of mine. My grandparents, like many others in their generation, grew up rural, but even in their later years, in a semi urban setting, continued with large gardens and some livestock. I observed the passion, skill and knowledge with which they produced their food. Their freezer and pantry were brimming with produce that came out of their own large gardens. Nothing went to waste. I remember after a very bountiful harvest of watermelons, they cut out the melon hearts, pitched them into a cauldron and reduced the melon juice until it became the most delicious syrup. I wish now that I had lived closer and that I could have worked alongside them more. A child of the fifties, and with parents that moved away from self sufficient food production into buying all foods in the grocery store, a lot of the skills my grandparents had did not get passed on to me.

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Why Conserve? Bo-ring.

Why should we conserve in a time of prosperity? Really? Try to answer that question as though a child had asked it. Is it really necessary to conserve something that for now seems to be plentiful?

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Phosphate: Hard Landing or Soft Landing

In last week's column on sustainable phosphate, I made the point that phosphate use in our current food system is inherently not sustainable. Nature only moves in a cycle, but our current food system does not recycle phosphate. Within our current system, the phosphate plants need comes from phosphate mines, and the phosphate once “used” becomes a pollutant ending up either in Lake Winnipeg, or a landfill. This disrespect for nature's cycle, will catch up with us, we just don't know when. It's inevitable. Nature always bats last.

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Sustainable Phosphate

by Eric Rempel

In last week's column I suggested that, rather than merely celebrating the productivity of our conventional food production model, we also compare that model with the alternative – the organic model. We may find the organic model has more to offer than expected.

To that end, let's look at phosphate. Phosphate is essential to life. In order for land to produce abundantly, the plants growing there need to be able to access adequate phosphate. In nature this has not been a problem. Plants take their nutrients from the soil. The plants die or are eaten by animals. The animals defecate and ultimately die. The minerals that were taken up by the plant return to the soil to be taken up by subsequent plants. We call this a cycle, and because it is a cycle, it is sustainable.

Agricultural producers have always known that if an area is farmed (ie crops are grown and produce removed) the farmed area will gradually become less productive. Even with no scientific understanding of what was happening, they knew that this decline in productivity could be reversed by the addition of manure.

About 100 years ago science identified what was happening in that field – the plants were removing minerals, notably N, P, and K, without replacing. This discovery made industrialized agriculture possible. This knowledge, coupled with the ability to harness oil energy, made industrialized food production possible following WWII.

In the industrialized model, the producer identifies the minerals that are below optimal in the soil (usually N,P, and K), purchases them and adds them to the soil. The P and K comes from mines, and the N comes from natural gas. All of these raw materials are in limited and diminishing supply. This model is not sustainable. Like it or not, we will need to find an alternative way sooner or later.

The main reason there is limited interest in alternatives is that there is no financial incentive to look for alternatives. The pricing of mined phosphate reflects only the cost of mining, processing and shipping. Pricing does not consider that a limited supply is being depleted.

Some organic producers are driven by economics, but on the whole they are driven by ideology. Most of these producers (and supporting researchers) are acutely aware of the unsustainable nature of the industrialized model, and are aggressively looking for alternatives.

These producers do not augment soil mineral deficiencies with chemicals. In that regard they are like farmers 100 years ago, but that is where the similarity ends. These farmers, on the whole, take a keener interest in the science that affects their production than conventional farmers. They are acutely aware of the many soil organisms that populate their soil. They seek to monitor these organisms and to nurture them. Wherever possible, they return removed plant nutrients to the soil. They have found that there are soil organisms that convert unavailable phosphate rack to plant available phosphate.

I have little doubt that there is much more to be discovered, but I am convinced that the sustainable way of maintaining our stock of essential P lies in the organic direction. We do well to encourage organic creativity both with our shopping dollar and government policy.

Sustainable Agriculture

It was in the 1970s – 50 years ago – that then US Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz is to have said “Before we go back to organic agriculture in this country, somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve or go hungry”. There may be more delicate ways of phrasing the issue, but the question is a real one: how are we going to feed all the people of the world? Is the industrial model, with its emphasis on inputs, the only way, or is there a different model?

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