Why Bare Soil (and top soil erosion) Is A Problem For Us All
The clock is ticking on our top soil
I’ve been writing recently about how the clock is winding down on the viable growing season for 2024 crops. When it comes to eating seasonally, NOW is the time to truly enjoy the rising peak in harvests and production.
The next four to six weeks will see the maximum variety of foods available that are locally produced. It’s the time to begin freezing, canning, dehydrating, and otherwise preserving peak fresh foods so that winter isn’t a dull and expensive place for meal choices.
These harvests mean burgeoning tables at the Farmer’s Markets and anywhere fresh local foods are available for sale. It’s a time of incredible diversity and bounty.
But this time of year starts to look very different on the farm.
Those big harvests mean a garden being emptied out.
Spent patches and vacant spaces start to take over the garden landscape. Drying vines and stubble remains. Or the tilled earth left behind as the crops are pulled out of the ground entirely.
This is the other end of the garden cycle.
And whether you have 6 raised beds or 60 acres in production, the challenge of bare soil is something that needs to be addressed if we want to have food in the years to come.
Why bare soil is a problem
In an ideal world, the soil is a living, breathing microcosm of activity. Plant roots hold the soil in place and support site-specific “colonies” - for lack of a better word - of organisms. These organisms interact with each other, with the plants, and with other larger creatures to create the very foundation of our planet and food system.
We rarely consider the fact that as human beings our very life depends on the soil and our ability to grow, raise, hunt or gather food from the land. Even life in the sea (and lakes and rivers) has a connection to the soil and nutrients found on land.
According to Ohio State University:
A teaspoon of productive soil generally contains between 100 million and 1 billion bacteria. That is as much mass as two cows per acre.
Can you imagine holding two cows in a teaspoon?? It boggles the mind.
And honestly, this morning, my brain cannot wrap my head around that statement.
But I trust it because that quote comes from research by Dr. Elaine Ingham who founded the Soil Food Web School. If you ever want to learn the facts about our soils, and how much damage modern industrial agriculture is doing to them, then Elaine is your go-to person. I’ll save her story for another day, but suffice it to say that healthy soils - with a HUGE emphasis on the word “healthy” - are what keeps us alive on this planet.
And that makes bare soil a major problem.
Bare soil exposes all those millions and billions of bacteria and other other soil creatures to sun, direct rain, and wind. The bleaching and leaching of the soil surfaces leaves it light and crumbly, dusty, and the wind then does the rest.
“Sun dried” might turn an average tomato into a delicacy, but it is a death sentence for the soil.
When you feel a bit of grit on your face on a windy day, it’s hard to imagine that this soil might have come from a farmer’s field somewhere far away. But if you ever stand at the fence line of a farm and see the field sunken down 1-2 feet on an otherwise flat area, then you can see first hand the results of soil erosion played out over years and decades.
Bare soil leads to the loss of productive farm land.
The loss of productive farm land will ultimately mean less food for everyone.
And the current agriculture paradigm in the US, and many parts of the world that have adopted US practices, is to harvest the main season crops and leave the fields alone until spring planting. That’s months of exposure to sun, wind and rain. That’s months of erosion.
Every garden is susceptible to soil loss. Whether you have 6 raised beds or 60 acres, or more, the principle remains the same.
Bare soil = Loss of productivity
Fill planting and cover crops
The solution for soil erosion isn’t particularly hard: replant after harvesting.
It is a practice for every garden, big or small. When you take one crop out, you replant with SOMETHING.
The question is what is that something?
At it’s most basic, the honest truth is it doesn’t matter what you plant as long as the soil gets covered again quickly. Growing new plants is what will protect the soil community best and preserve soil fertility.
As I recently noted, there is still time to get more harvestable foods from your garden if you use the short-season cool crops as fill planting options right now.
In my agricultural training, the go-to option promoted is typically fall rye. This plant grows quickly in the fall and overwinters to hold the soil in place. The challenge, especially for small gardens, is that you pretty much have to till in the spring to deal with the stocky rye plants. I find that’s a much bigger job than I want to have, and if you try just cutting the rye back you end up with pokey, sharp stocks to try and work around.
The Soil Food Web School promotes a more diversified approach. Elaine works with dozens of cover crops and promotes a high biodiversity strategy. This also means that if one cover crop fails to grow well under the current conditions, then another one might fill in.
Because I am a seed saver, I have lots of extra seeds to work with for this kind of experimentation. I find that mustards and brassicas like Pac Choi and arugula are exceptionally good at coming up fall and filling in spaces. Likewise, kale grows easily and is more likely to overwinter than other greens, making it a great choice for fill planting.
I’ve also started to experiment with various herbs that can form ground covers like oregano and thyme. Neither are particularly hard to pull out, so even if they take over your bed this fall, they are easy to pull out (and USE!) in the spring.
I am also exceptionally fond of yarrow as a ground cover, but it can be a little bit trickery to remove. Yarrow has the advantage of being mowable so it can be used in rows and even lawns to increase biodiversity.
But the honest truth is that the list of options is far beyond just winter rye, which as I say is a challenge for small scale growers. Experiment with a wide variety of plants to see what works best in your area. Just be warry and warned that ANY plant labelled as “spreads easily” might not be a good choice in your fertile garden beds. That kind of plant can become a weed itself and do more harm than good.
Why this matters, even if you don’t garden
If you don’t currently garden, you might be thinking this doesn’t apply to you. But loss of soil affects us all.
The destruction of fertile soil using current modern agricultural practices is destroying the foundation of our food supply. Top soil (the part where plants can live and grow) is being lost far faster than it is being built in the typical commercial system.
And this is where YOU come in. Because there are alternative systems that need to be supported and become widespread. Regenerative farming practices actually build new soil on an annual basis. They also clearly demonstrate that the soil loss created by commercial agriculture is completely unnecessary.
This is a vote with your dollars scenario.
You choose every day which food you eat, and by default decide which agriculture systems gets your money.
Make better choices.
Choose foods produced through regenerative systems.
Choose foods from local sources where you can drive by and see with your own eyes what practices are occurring on the land.
Choose foods from Farmer’s Markets where you can talk to the grower yourself and ask questions.
Avoid ultra-processed foods that are all linked to destructive farming practices AND destroy your health at the same time.
Avoid grain finished livestock altogether, because feedlot farming completely separates the plant (feed) production from the animals and creates erosion and pollution in both systems.
Choose grass-fed beef and pasture-raised poultry and pasture-raised eggs. Why? Because these systems allow for the natural cycle of soil-plants-animals to occur within the farm, which the scale where this process is highly effective at counter soil fertility loss and erosion.
Regenerative farming clearly demonstrates that the rate of soil erosion and fertility loss is reversible. The only reason it isn’t happening faster is because the large corporate controlled farms are getting away with poor land management, and making huge profits while destroying our future food production ability.
You can, in addition to making better choices, :
Make your voice heard.
Talk to your local politicians. And vote for leaders who are concerned about saving our soils and food future.
Talk to your grocery store manager and ask for more regenerative options.
Shop where you can access regenerative foods.
Practice fill planting and cover cropping in your home gardens and teach it to your friends.
And let’s end with a story that gave me so much hope.
My sister lives in Alberta. She recently went to a Farmer’s Market where kids from the local high school were selling fresh-made butter.
Now THAT’S a fantastic summer workshop/participatory program if ever I heard one. They had honey that they had produced too.
Just wow! And let’s see more food and farming summer opportunities for kids where they get some hands on experience with creating and selling food. Because there is no better teacher than learning what it takes to do something yourself.
The world will be a different place when our children are inspired to take a hands-on role in producing food in sustainable ways.
Fundamentally, as ancient humans living in a modern world, we crave is a connection to real food. Have you ever tasted real butter made from fresh cream? It’s nothing like what is sold in most stores.
Here are two questions to think about today:
Are regenerative farm products available where you shop?
If you garden, what types of fill planting and cover cropping works in your setting?
Let us know in the comments.
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This is such an amazing post. I found it on notes this morning, and loved it (and subscribed). I'm a fellow Canadian, in the "Garden valley" of Manitoba. In late fall when the crops are in and the wind picks up, sometimes the air is dirty brown, as the soil blows across the fields. It always amazes me how accepted and 'normal' this is to the farming community.