3. Good Organic Gardening - May-June 2016 AvxHome.in

THE GRAPEVINE | News
the grapevine
Environmental news and updates compiled by Jo Immig
Through cultivation
practices that leave the
soil bare and pesticides
that disturb microorganisms,
it’s estimated
industrial agriculture
has reduced global
carbon stocks in soil by a
whopping 50–70 per cent.
Join the regeneration
While our attention has been focused on
reinventing the way we produce energy,
making the switch from fossil fuels to
renewables, the role industrial agriculture plays
in warming the planet is a blind spot that’s
finally getting some attention.
The word on many people’s lips is
“regeneration”. Trending hashtags and websites
are popping up like milk thistle to promote the
role that regenerative agriculture has to play in
cooling the planet, restoring healthy soils and
feeding everyone well.
At the COP21 climate change negotiations
in Paris, the French government launched the
“4 per 1000” initiative, which aims for a 0.4
per cent annual growth rate in soil carbon. This,
they maintain, could halt the present increase
in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
It didn’t get much media attention but more
than 100 partners signed the initiative, which
aims to improve organic matter content and
promote carbon sequestration in soils through
the application of agricultural practices
adapted to local situations.
This might not seem new to those who’ve
been practising organic farming for years, but
a fresh badge might offer a way past the stale
line that organics is a niche form of agriculture
with little capacity to feed the starving millions.
But by all accounts — including the UN in its
2013 report Wake Up Before It Is Too Late —
local, small-scale organic farms are the only
way we can feed the world.
So what is regenerative agriculture? Its
underlying philosophy is to work with nature
and the inescapable wisdom of biology. Sitespecific
farming techniques are applied in ways
that take care of the environment, communities
and finances, leading to productive and
healthy farms that take care of soil, improve
biodiversity and sequester carbon.
It turns out a critical piece of the carbon
sequestration challenge lies in the way we treat
the soil. Carbon makes up about 50 per cent
of soil organic matter, or humus, and is vital
for healthy soils. Industrial agriculture largely
ignores it and focuses on levels of nitrogen,
phosphorous and potassium (NPK).
Through cultivation practices that leave the
soil bare and the application of pesticides that
disturb soil micro-organisms, it’s estimated that
industrial agriculture has reduced global carbon
stocks in soil by a whopping 50–70 per cent.
The major reservoirs in the carbon cycle
on Earth comprise the atmosphere, terrestrial
biosphere, the oceans and the sediments,
which include rocks, fresh water and soil
carbon. Carbon has flowed between these
reservoirs as a result of chemical, physical and
biological processes in a relatively stable way
for thousands of years.
Human activity has essentially disrupted the
global carbon cycle well beyond any natural
fluctuations expected over time. We’ve done
this by pumping vast quantities of carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere burning fossil fuels
and, by clearing forests and leaving the soil
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