Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

experiments at Rothamsted from 1843 to 1975 showed that plots treated
with farmyard manure for more than a hundred years nearly tripled in soil
nitrogen content whereas nearly all the nitrogen added in chemical fertilizers
was lost from the soil—either exported in crops or dissolved in runoff.
More recently, a fifteen-year study of the productivity of maize and soybean
agriculture conducted at the Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Pennsylvania
showed no significant differences in crop yields where legumes or
manure were used instead of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The soil
carbon content for manured plots and those with a legume rotation respectively
increased to three to five times that of conventional plots. Organic
and conventional cropping systems produced similar profits, but industrial
farming depleted soil fertility. The ancient practice of including legumes in
crop rotations helped retain soil fertility. Manuring actually increased soil
fertility.
This is really not so mysterious. Most gardeners know that healthy soil
means healthy plants that, in turn, help maintain healthy soil. I’ve watched
this process in our own yard as my wife doused our lot with soil soup
brewed in our garage and secondhand coffee grounds liberated from
behind our neighborhood coffee shop. I marvel at how we are using
organic material imported from the tropics, where there are too few nutrients
in the soil in the first place, to help rebuild the soil on a lot that once
had a thick forest soil. Now, five years into this experiment, the soil in our
yard has a surface layer of rich organic matter, stays moist long after it
rains, and is full of coffee-colored worms.
Our caffeinated worms have been busy since we hired a guy with a small
bulldozer to rip out the ragged, eighty-two-year-old turf lawn our house
came with and reseed the yard with a mix of four different kinds of plants,
two grasses and two forbs—one with little white flowers and the other with
little red flowers. The flowers are a nice upgrade from our old lawn and we
don’t have to water it. Better still, the combination of four plants that grow
and bloom at different times keeps out weeds.
Our eco-lawn may be advertised as low maintenance, but we still have
to mow it. So we just cut the grass and leave it to rot where it falls. Within
a week all the cuttings are gone—dragged down into worm burrows. Now
I can dig a hole in the lawn and find big fat worms where there used to be
nothing but dry dirt. After just a few years, the ground around the edges
of the lawn stands a quarter of an inch higher than the patio surface built
at the same time we seeded the eco-lawn. The worms are pumping up
the yard—plowing it, churning it, and pushing carbon down into the
dirty business 201