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HEALTH IN A CRISISDoes the answer lie in the soil? By Alan Rosenberg of Lindros We discover serious problems the world over when we investigate the state of human health. This is equally true of the health of animals and plants, and the fertility of the soil. The food we eat is impoverished and de-natured, the air we breathe often poisonous. The water we drink is rank with chemicals or excrement, and the ground we rely on is often not much more than a medium for artificial nutrients. And the systems that govern us and the societies we form are sadly more exploitative than they are nurturing. Much valuable research has been carried out with regard to all these problems but it seems imperative that we must study them in their complexity, in their inter-relationships, rather than to try to separate them or take them singly, if we are to come up with sustainable solutions. And since health starts with what we feed ourselves we can see that these problems are urgent concerns of the farmer. In setting a path that emulates the free-market economies of the so-called developed world, are we in SA not perhaps in danger of losing sight of the baby in our bathwater? The industrial economies, established as the de facto standard for the modern world, were built on the resources plundered from the colonies of imperial trade expansion. We know this. We also know that the pollution of our planet’s atmosphere and waters, the degradation of our landscapes and environs, global warming, the depriving of indigenous communities of their cultures and traditional livelihoods, are all outcomes of the pursuit of wealth and surplus that is the central occupation of the industrial free-market economy. And yet here we are aspiring to the same models and values, as if they were a solution to the problems that overwhelm us, and not part of the cause. It is the task of a responsible government to make provision for the well-being and health of present and future generations. “It is the task of agriculture to be the primary health service of a nation” (Lady Eve Balfour). Ideally, it would be the desire of every serious farmer to know how he can meet the demands of his fellow human beings for proper food, in such a way that soil, plants and animals entrusted to his care are efficiently cared for and healthy in their nutritional value. scientist, government and farmer, these three, with the support of the consuming public, must meet objectively to investigate the production of food and address the long-term fertility of the nation’s agricultural soils. There cannot be a more important step towards a healthy human existence than the investigation into the right methods of food production. The problem of healthy food production is vast and complex because it involves man, animal, plant and soil – not as separate entities and problems, but in their connections with and their effect upon each other. We must accept their dependence, their inter-dependence and their co-dependence on each other for a true sustainable solution. This situation is made only more complex by the fact that the environment itself makes a contribution to the overall situation. Only the closest co-operation between the many different views and methods can lead to sustainable solutions. In agriculture we are working with the living. This includes two realities, being firstly the processes of life and secondly physical, mineral matter. Together they create a whole and are not separable. A restriction to purely quantitative analysis will not suffice when we deal with life processes. We can understand the properties of inorganic matter, which is accessible to measure, weight and number, but a living organism is more than the sum of the substances into which we can dissect it during analytical processes. Advances in Systems Theory, Chaos and Micro-biology promise revolutionary ways of seeing things and extending our understanding of life, but our most immediate and accessible wisdom lies in the intuitive knowledge of the farmer, accumulated in time by constant observation and practise that in some not yet dispossessed indigenous societies extends back for generations. Down the ages nature’s fertile living soils had been sufficient for the existence of abundant life until the industrial revolution and the advent of industrial agriculture, with its practices of mono-culture and artificially fertilising, progressively changed the conditions of the soil and seriously reduced the essential nutritive and biological values of foods produced. And this has only been exacerbated by the commoditisation of crops and economic policies which aim for quick results and immediate interest on capital invested, which in turn is required to escalate as profit growth. Working with nature requires a longer term policy. Soil is a substance teeming with ‘LIFE’. If this life is killed the soil quite literally dies. It is the living organisms in soil and the products resulting from their activities that differentiate soil from subsoil. Subsoil is derived from the breakdown of rock that forms the earth’s crust. Its mineral content, measured in terms of inorganic chemistry, has been our preoccupation. The mistake has been to extend this conception to the topsoil, for by the time subsoil becomes topsoil it is no longer wholly inorganic. Topsoil is a mixture of the disintegrating mineral rock (parent material), organic matter and humus with its population of micro organism. (The population of micro organisms in the soil has been estimated to reach tens of millions to the salt-spoon full. F.H. Billington.) ‘Humus is a product of the decomposition of animal and vegetable residues brought about through the agency of micro-organisms‘ (Waksman). It is far from dead in the sense of having returned to the inorganic world. It is still composed of organic matter in the transition stage between one form of life to another, a process and not only matter. Once the inorganic passes into the organic - and this is a constant process - it is subject to continual changes within the organic cycle. The variety in the forms of life through which it may pass are almost endless. In overlooking the ever-recurring cycle of birth, growth, maintenance, reproduction, death, and decay (passing once more into birth), we seem to accept birth and death as a beginning and an end, a completion and not as part of a continuum. By ignoring the law of return we surely weaken the continuum, the thread of life. Life returns what it takes – with interest. Agricultural practices formerly aimed at maintaining and improving the soil’s fertility, are now driven by considerations of exploitation. Agricultural practices were an expression of ‘culture’; currently they are expressions of economics. We moved from agri-culture to agri-business and currently to agri-power. Agriculture was accepted to be a part of living nature, but today it seems as if it is an expression of natural resource abuse. Nurture the health of your soil. For our health, soil’s most important constituent is “life” itself.
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