"We're dirt farmers. Our primary job is to tend the dirt. That's the basis of everything."
Excerpt:
Helene dropped up to 30 inches of rain on southern Appalachia, causing historic flooding and landslides in parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia — a largely rural region where agriculture is a vital economic driver and cultural cornerstone. The mountains make it hard to spread out here, so farms tend to be small, and many growers use flood-prone bottomland because it is flat and fertile. But floods of this magnitude hadn’t hit here in generations. In North Carolina alone, Helene caused an estimated $4.9 billion in damage to the state’s agriculture sector. In Tennessee, agricultural losses were estimated at $1.3 billion. Thousands of farmers lost crops, tools, machinery, barns, buildings, animals, and fences.
More than a year later, growers are also contending with the loss of something more vital, and more difficult to replace: their soil.
Runion knew immediately that his livelihood was ravaged. Without good soil, a farmer can’t farm. “When you see 4 feet of sandy soils on top of your topsoil, you know that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “That was overwhelming.”
Over millennia, floods helped build the fertile land that farmers depend on. But today, climate change is driving more powerful and unpredictable storms. One study found that rainfall associated with Helene was 10 percent heavier due to man-made climate change. Research by the U.S. National Science Foundation suggests that what scientists call “100-year storms” will become three times more likely, and 20 percent more severe, over the next 50 years. What’s more, there’s little solid information about what happens to soil during a flood, or what to do when a farm’s soil is eroded or covered with material from elsewhere — its nutrients washed away and microbial communities disrupted. It’s a blind spot that is becoming more of a liability as storms like Helene become more common.
“None of us had ever seen anything like this before or responded to an emergency like that,” said Stephanie Kulesza, a nutrient and soil scientist at North Carolina State University. “And so we weren’t really prepared for recommendations to provide to producers.”
Soil can take thousands of years to form. Rock is weathered and slowly dissolves into smaller and smaller pieces. As dead leaves, animals, trees, and other plants decompose, they add organic matter and nutrients to the rock. Microorganisms establish themselves in the mix, driving nutrient cycling, aiding with decomposition, and stimulating plant growth; then worms and bugs, like beetles and ants, burrow in the mixture, aerating it. For soils to work well for agriculture they need the right structure — airy enough to allow water to enter and move through, but not too quickly or too slowly — and sufficient biological and chemical richness, including nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, to nourish crops.
Farmers use synthetic or natural fertilizers to ensure their soil has enough nutrients. They can also introduce practices like no till — farming without plowing up the ground — to maintain the physical properties of their dirt. Topsoil, the rich, uppermost layer with the most available nutrients for crops, tends to make up less than a foot of the entire soil profile, but it’s crucial for agriculture.
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Topsoil is the foundation of healthy farming and food production, but it’s being lost at alarming rates❗️
Adding compost to the surface of our soils is one way we can increase organic matter (OM) and help rebuild this precious layer. ✨️
But let’s be real: rebuilding topsoil takes time and consistent care. It’s not a quick fix.
Compost enriches the soil, feeds microbes, and improves water retention—laying the groundwork for healthier, more productive land over the long term. 🌳🌻
Every bit of compost we add is a step toward healthier soils and more resilient farms. 🌍
"Most commercial crops are annual. They provide only one harvest and must be replanted every year. Growing these foods on an industrial scale usually takes huge amounts of water, fertilizer and energy, making agriculture a major source of carbon and other pollutants. Scientists say this style of farming has imperiled Earth’s soils, destroyed vital habitats and contributed to the dangerous warming of our world.
But Kernza — a domesticated form of wheatgrass developed by scientists at the nonprofit Land Institute — is perennial. A single seed will grow into a plant that provides grain year after year after year. It forms deep roots that store carbon in the soil and prevent erosion. It can be planted alongside other crops to reduce the need for fertilizer and provide habitat for wildlife.
In short, proponents say, it can mimic the way a natural ecosystem works — potentially transforming farming from a cause of environmental degradation into a solution to the planet’s biggest crises.
This summer I traveled to Kansas, where I met the scientists who are trying to make Kernza as hardy and fertile as traditional wheat. I visited the farmers who must figure out how to grow it effectively. And I invited my friend Jenny, the founder of artisan baking company Starrs Sourdough, to help me make a loaf of Kernza bread.
Kernza has a long road from the laboratory to the kitchen table. It will be even harder to transform the farming practices that humans have relied on for most of history. But if the scientists, farmers and processors are successful, perennial foods might one day be available on grocery store shelves — and the bread that Jenny and I are baking could offer a taste of what’s to come...
Research suggests that the world’s soils are now eroding 100 times faster than new soil can form, and an estimated 33 percent of soil is so degraded that its ability to grow crops is compromised. Meanwhile, monoculture — the strategy of sowing huge fields with a single crop — achieves higher yields but also puts more pressure on soil and increases the risk that plants will succumb to pests or disease.
Many of humanity’s solutions to these problems also create other issues, Land Institute researchers say. Fertilizer can counter soil degradation, but it pollutes waterways and produces nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Pesticides might reduce threats from insects, but they destroy other vital species. Cover crops will curb erosion, but they can be difficult to plant and maintain.
And modern farming is hugely carbon intensive. Factoring in fuel for machinery and food transport, methane produced by belching livestock, and the carbon that’s lost when ecosystems are converted to cropland, agriculture accounts for about a quarter of humanity’s annual planet-warming emissions.
Yet farms are also threatened by climate change, which will increase the risk of prolonged droughts and catastrophic floods.
In Kansas, one of the nation’s leading producers of wheat, these problems are on full display. The state loses an estimated 190 million tons of its rich topsoil each year. Climate change has made Kansas summers hotter and drier, but also makes rainstorms more intense. The state’s farmers are among those most at risk of losing crops as a consequence of human-caused warming.
'It’s a disaster,' Tim Crews, the Land Institute’s lead soil ecologist, tells me one damp day in June. Our shoes squelch in the mud as he leads me around the institute’s Salina, Kan., campus. As we talk, the rain is almost certainly destabilizing soil and washing it into surrounding streams.
Crews sweeps his hand out, as if to indicate not only the farm fields across the road but the entire U.S. agricultural system.
'This is the ecosystem that feeds us, and it has just been nuked,' Crews says. 'Is this really the best we can do?'
Land Institute scientists disagree about how to describe what they’re proposing. Is it a natural evolution from the past 10,000 years of annual agriculture? Or something more like a midcourse correction?
Rachel Stroer, the Land Institute’s president, calls it a 'paradigm shift.'
'Instead of an annual monoculture,' she says, 'we’re trying to create a perennial polyculture' — cultivating diverse mixes of long-lived plants.
'We want to create an agricultural system to feed humanity that uses nature as the measure of success.'
Before people started intensively farming here, Kansas boasted some of the richest soils on Earth. In native prairies, dozens of grass species intermingled with clover, wildflowers, lichens and shrubs, their roots extending as far as 15 feet into the ground. Periodic fires sparked by lightning or set by native people helped clear debris and promote new growth. Insects, birds, prairie dogs and buffalo foraged in the vegetation, while millions of munching microbes buried carbon and other nutrients deep in the earth.
'The ecosystems that built the soils upon which we eat today, and that we have degraded, were perennial and diverse,' Stroer says. 'That’s where we get those two characteristics that we’re trying to bring back into agriculture.'
Yet proponents of perennial polyculture have a problem: More than half of all calories consumed by people come from grains, and no one has ever domesticated a grain that lived beyond a year.
That challenge falls to plant biologists such as Lee DeHaan. The son of a Minnesota corn and soy grower, he’d heard family members talk about the Land Institute’s ideas with some skepticism.
'But it captivated me,' he says. 'I saw it as solving food for humans, environmental problems and financial security for farmers.'
He began experimenting with a wild grain known as Thinopyrum intermedium, or intermediate wheatgrass. Originally from the steppes of Europe and Asia, it had been brought to North America as forage for cattle, but scientists had a hunch it could also feed people.
In the early 2000s, Land Institute scientists planted their first plots of intermediate wheatgrass. When the plants matured, DeHaan and his colleagues selected the 1,000 top specimens to replant. And when those plants matured, they chose the best among them for further breeding. It was the same process that farmers have been using to domesticate crops for millennia.
To the scientists’ surprise, those early harvests were wildly successful. The new batch of plants had stronger stalks and bigger seeds that didn’t fall out of their husks before they could be harvested.
'We started to realize we were not that far away from something farmers could actually use,' DeHaan says.
'But the original domestication of crops took hundreds and thousands of years,' he adds. 'And with climate change, we don’t have that much time.'
So he turned to tools that were unavailable to his ancient predecessors: gene sequencing, artificial intelligence and advanced supercomputers. Once DeHaan identified the genetic markers associated with the traits he was looking for, he didn’t need to wait for the plants to fully mature before picking the best ones to breed.
After two decades and 11 cycles of this process, the Land Institute has domesticated a form of wheatgrass whose seeds are two to three times bigger than those of its wild ancestor. Under ideal conditions, it can provide as much as 30 percent of the yield of traditional wheat. They call their trademarked creation Kernza — an amalgamation of 'kernel' and 'Kansas.'
But the plant’s best qualities are below ground. DeHaan shows me a photograph of Kernza’s roots hanging in a Land Institute stairwell — the life-size image is so long, it takes up two stories. In the first four years after planting, Land Institute research suggests, a one-acre plot of Kernza will pull roughly 6.5 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air and into those deep roots.
Kernza can’t completely replace regular wheat — at least, not yet. As Jenny kneads our bread dough, she explains that the weaker gluten proteins in Kernza flour make it harder for loaves to hold their shape. And because Kernza grains are so small, the flour also has proportionally more bran, the hard outer coating of a grain. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — bran is full of fiber, protein and other nutrients. But it’s not exactly ideal for making angel food cake. Still, mixed with an equal amount of whole-wheat bread flour, it’s shaping up to make a good-looking loaf.
Jenny places the dough inside a cast-iron cooking pot, which will help the bread bake evenly, and slides it into the hot, waiting oven... The proof will be in the eating. Jenny pulls our loaf from the oven, filling the kitchen with a tantalizing, yeasty smell.
'I’m excited that there’s movement in the idea of more sustainable agriculture,' she says. 'I hope this can prove there’s a market.'
Finally the bread is cool enough to cut into. Jenny takes a bite, tilts her head and chews. 'It tastes like —' she trails off, then tries again.
'Texturally, it’s like rye, but a little spongier,' she says. 'And it’s almost like it’s got a hint of herby or spicy-ness.'
She grins. 'It’s delicious.'
And we both grab another slice."
- Sarah Kaplan, from "A recipe for fighting climate change and feeding the world." Washington Post, 12 October 2021.
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7 Permaculture Gardening Techniques To Try This Spring. Step-by-step instructions for making your garden more fruitful & sustainable for long term benefits.
Introduction to permaculture, which some might call “traditional farming.” If you’re in any sort of anthropological discipline, you probably learned about the “three sisters” of Native American agriculture: corn, beans, and squash.
That is permaculture. It can be combined with hydroponics, aquaponics, or aeroponics growing techniques to not only simulate, but develop a natural environment and a whole ecosystem, which focuses on whole-system health and helps maintain topsoil health.
You can do this in your yard (depending on your city ordinances and HOA rules), or a closet, or even a small terrarium, or one of those beta-fish tanks that has plants on top.
