| SOIL AND GROW BIOINTENSIVE®
All of life on Earth depends on six-inches of topsoil and the fact
that it rains! The soil is a living organism that must be fed and
nurtured to keep it feeding us. Down through the millennia farmers
have known this and have renewed the soil with organic matter and
other nutrients.
However, this basic understanding has been lost by the current conventional
agriculture. Soil has been viewed as simply another commodity, an
inert medium for growing, and has been inundated with chemicals
to provide high yields and kill insects and plant diseases. In the
process, once-fertile soils have become severely depleted of organic
matter, nutrients, and micro-organisms—the army of invisible,
beneficial workers in the soil. Depleted soils are in danger of
being blown away by wind or washed away by rain.
Thirty percent of the world’s cropland has been abandoned
in the last 40 years due to severe erosion.
- As little as 40 years of farmable soil remain globally.
- For each pound of food eaten in the United States, approximately
6 pounds of soil are lost to wind and water erosion, resulting
from agricultural practices.
- Twelve pounds of farmable soil are similarly lost in developing
countries, with 18 pounds of farmable soil lost in China for every
pound of food eaten.
- Approximately 213,000 people are added to the planet daily,
requiring about 34,000 more farmable acres each day to feed them—acreage
which does not exist.
- Due to all of these factors, by 2014 only about 64% of the world’s
population is likely to have an adequate diet.
On June 15, 2004, the United Nations observed that the world’s
land is turning to desert at an alarming speed—at twice the
rate that was occurring in 1970.
A GROW BIOINTENSIVE solution to these challenges:
Ecology
Action started its research in 1972 in its first research garden
on Syntex Corporation land at the Stanford University Industrial
Park. ‘A’ and ‘B’ horizons soil had been
removed and the garden was created on ‘C’ horizon subsoil.
In 1980 it was necessary to give up this site because Syntex needed
the land. Before the garden was moved Doug Maher, a student at the
University of California, Berkeley, tested the soil in one of the
growing beds. He listed the results in his Soil Science Master’s
thesis, finding that the humified carbon level in the upper 1 to
1.5 inches of the soil had been built up in only eight years to
a level that would have taken nature alone 500 years to accomplish.
The thesis extrapolated that GROW BIOINTENSIVE techniques, properly
used, have the potential to build soil up to 60 times faster than
it can be developed in nature.
In the GROW BIOINTENSIVE system, soil fertility is maintained
by allotting 60% of what is grown to compost crops. A focus on the
production, through these crops, of calories for the gardener and
carbon for the soil can ensure that both the gardener and the soil
will be adequately fed and that the farm will be sustainable. Because
this biologically-intensive method requires much less area to produce
the same yield of crops as conventional agriculture, if it were
used globally at least one-half of the world’s acreage could
be left in the wild for the preservation of the all important plant
and animal diversity.
“The soil is a living
organism. Like all other living organisms, she breathes, feeds,
grows, develops, and moves. Nature gave her external and internal
spiritual beauty. This must be understood by first seeing, then
feeling, understanding, and above all, falling in love with her.”
---Irina Kim, Biointensive practitioner and teacher in Uzbekistan
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