SOS SOilS : How to create a famine with the best intention ever, a contemporary tale.
It is urgent to do something about saving the soils :
To act on the ground and make soil diagnosis in order to bring adapted solutions to each place, culture, agriculture and pollution.
It is important to communicate on how the soil works. The soil is alive… We human beings are more than 7 billion and still 80% of the life is under the ground. These beings are far more older then us. They have been organised for some million years before us and will survive us the same.
One must understand how the soil works before doing anything with it and risking to destroy it.
More and more when you speak with a farmer today, he tells you that after all these years cultivating, th only thing he doesn’t really know about is how his soil works… its composition he knows of it with analysis made with labs, but its’ dynamic? Its bacterian life, its Fungi… Nothing of all this.
Farmers in Europe are realizing this more often every day, it brings Big Hope.
A foundation created to compensate the carbon emissions with actions for the environment all around the planet…
Its’ first action: financing a plantation of eucalyptus in Chile to help the Mapuche Indians… Lets remember first, that eucalyptus is a tree from the Australian desertic steppe, which dreams to recreate the condition of its primary biome. To do so, it drinks 1400pints water a day, which he evaporates quickly and sprays its antibacterian essential oils by spreading bits of bark and leaves all around. Nothing grows under the eucalyptus it is well known by everybody. Neither can the vegetables of the Mapuche Indians …
Its’ last initiative in India: to distribute light Pyrolyse ovens to cook with the methane of the wood and produce light carbon as side product. And here start the desaster again. He teaches the farmers to turn over the soil and dig the carbon into it … convinced that it can play the role of a sponge as a reserve of extra water!
In fact this is what happens: first by encouraging the Indians to array it provoques carbon and methane emissions in the atmosphere by decomposing the anaerobiotic bacterial world which is suddenly at the surface…
The mycelial and bacterial world has been destroyed by the work of the farmer. It cannot play anymore its role of transforming the carbon into digestable organic matter for agriculture. It becomes then fossile carbon which is bound to asphyxiate all life at the surface of the soil, a bit like too much carbon in the atmosphere if you like. It empeaches the water to penetrate in the ground and provokes erosion.
One must never dig carbon into the ground, it kills its dynamic. Soil is not sewage.
To justify that digging carbon into the ground keeps water into the ground, is to aknoledge a profound mis-knowledge of the ground and of the way it works:
The soil is made of aerobian bacterias on the surface and anaerobian bacteria under. They exchange water, minerals and metals, which is how water can penetrate into the ground deep under. This is also the way bacteria are feeding the plants.
The porous carbon if becoming a sponge will forbid this process and provoque excess of water, hydromorphisms which can hinder the growth of plants like wheat for example.
This is how one can bring a green revolution to rot with the best intentions of the world and provoke famine in a short time.
In India, according to the journalist Palagummi Sainaith, a farmer commits sucide every 30 minutes, because he does not produce enough for his family and cannot assume his credit taken to finance a “modern” agriculture that we are pushing him to get into, while using all his own gods as advertisement.
Please stop this programme which can create a famine shortly, which India does not need.
Solutions are many to get rid of carbon.
One solution to repair this catastrophy would be first to stop turning over the soil. Sow directly in the herbs or ten days before harvesting the previous crop.
Sow a mix of leguminous and graminees and inoculate them with fungis endomycorrhizal (Glomus sp. ), ectomycorrhizal (Rhizopogon sp.) and Trichoderma sp. Cut the herbs or throw the stems…
You can add carbon if you want… but maximum half a teaspoon per acre… if not not you will harvest less.
The spores by setting a mycorrhizal net will feed on carbon and transform it in sugar to bring it directly to the plants… if you have too much carbon you wont favour the correct mix of fungi which can boost your crops.
One advise to get rid of the carbon while creating life : inspire yourself from nature!
Get rid of the carbon by creating revenues in cultivating morels ! They will eat carbon to produce wonderfull and expensive mushrooms, which will bring more money than by destroying the soil!
Another solution would be to frow you carbon in the irrigation damp and inoculate it with microalgaes or cyaniobacterias and produce diesel! So the Indians will be able to thank you and even finance your next projects …