Guest Post for ARC2020 by Louise Payton, Policy Officer at the Soil Association
The Soil Association, UK organic certification body and also “the UK’s leading membership charity campaigning for healthy, humane and sustainable food, farming and land use and environmental charity”, have organised a Soil Symposium, which finishes today. To highlight this important event, and key messages about agro-ecological farming methods and soil, Louise Payton, Policy Officer at the Soil Association, has written this special guest post for the ARC2020 website.
7 ways to save our tired soils
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in 1936 that ‘The history of every Nation is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil’. In fact many great civilisations have crumbled alongside their soils, degraded through years of cultivation to the point where food production was not viable.
Sadly, we are still making the same mistakes. Traditional farmers found that their soils grew ‘tired’ after years of cultivation and the solution was usually to move on. In recent decades as science has progressed, we began to view soil as an inert matrix holding the key nutrients required by plants, and we have replenished those nutrients lost with chemical fertilizers.
But healthy soils are more than a matrix supporting a nutrient soup, they are very much alive….
Read the entire great article by Louise Payton, Soil Association for ARC2020 on: www.arc2020.eu
