By Tom Braford
Sign up now for a weekly box of healthy food from the Green Beings CSA or join RIPE, Resilient Innovative Permaculture Environments, a worker-owned producer co-op!
Last month, the Our Farms, Our Future conference in St Louis drew 1000 farmers and hundreds of food production professionals from around the country, including yours truly.
The theme was all about how we can feed the world with nutrient dense food, while rolling back climate change at the same time. The clear message was, if we want healthy people and a healthy planet, we need healthy soils.
We heard about many of the same ag-related strategies to reverse global warming as those listed in Drawdown, which I have mentioned in previous articles, with a focus on cover cropping and other strategies that add biomass to the soil with minimal disturbance to the intricate web of microbial life that lives just below the surface and on roots of plants.
Of course, you can grow food on sterile, lifeless soils, in chemical brews and even in fish pond water, and that’s better than nothing, but there is a certain something that only healthy, minimally disturbed soils can provide.
Scientists are still studying what that something is, but it is clear that it holds great promise for the quality of life on this planet and possibly others some day.
We know that our soils have the potential to sequester more CO2 than our oceans and that the diversity and density of biomass in our soils contributes to the diversity and density of nutrients in our food.
As a long-time organic gardener, composter of all my organic waste and someone still enjoying excellent health at 71, I intuitively know that is true.
To find out more about how to subscribe to the Green Beings CSA or to get involved with RIPE:
Come be a farmer for a day on Saturday, May 5, starting at 9am at Arizmendi Ecovillage. You can expect to get dirty, have sore muscles, eat a hearty lunch, and find out how you can participate.
RSVP: braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com