This worked really well, at least in some parts of the world, so well it became an ideology. If you, as one of these chemical corporations, want to maximize your profits, the more farmers around the world you can convince this is the way forward, the higher the profits, obviously. Corporate profit growth rates tied to the globalization of an ideology. I call it an ideology because the idea they’re selling and around which the whole undertaking is built is something projected onto reality. It’s a rather simple way of looking at life that is tidy and manageable. It allows for what seems like a high level of control. It is a lens that blinds people to what doesn’t fit the narrative, and the solution to every problem that arises is more of the same and a doubling down.

 

 

Now I’m not against reductionist science, at least the variety where the scientists are aware of its limitations. I’m not blind to all it has made possible, much of which I enjoy. I’d even say I’m rather science-minded. The problem here is that the above chemical reduction of life was seen as the final story for agriculture. It engendered a manageable approach followed by massive investment. The story got locked in because economic principles started depending on that story.

 

 

Gradually it has become clearer and clearer how much this story falls short. The ways it does that is itself best elucidated by science, which has progressed a lot, going beyond reductionism in showing how necessarily interwoven all the players are. By now there’s a much clearer picture of the complexity of life at the roots of plants. It turns out that a lot goes on at the microscopic level that is ignored in the above ideology, and it is ignored to our detriment, mainly because the ideologues thought it didn’t matter. It is outside of the tidy story.

 

 

A loud voice in the newer science is Elaine Ingham of Soil Food Web Inc. In teaching, courses, videos, interviews, etc. she elucidates what has become her life’s work: understanding what’s actually going on in the soil, how the bacteria and the fungi and the nematodes and the microarthropods, and so on all interact at the root level of plants in the cycling of nutrients, how this happens in healthy soils and ecosystems, how our farming practices affect this and how these processes and with it the life carrying capacity of the soil can break down. That plus teaching people how to use microscopes, how to compost, and how not to. Hint: throwing vegetables on a pile and letting them rot for a year and a half is not it. If this interests you, search for her on Youtube or visit the Soil Food Web Inc website. There’s a lot worth checking out.

 

 

Basically, the way life works at the root level of plants, how nutrients cycle, and how plants grow, happens as part of an intricate web with many actors all acting symbiotically. Actors that you can not just reduce as if they can exist independently. They can’t. They’re interdependent.

 

 

What happens when you plow the soil? You rip this web open. You rip through the fungal networks. You turn the soil, thereby exposing microorganisms to the sun, so they die. You add chemical fertilizers to the soil, which are fossil fuel-based, making the soil a bit more toxic every time, so more micro-organisms die, which don’t all come back because you’re creating a hostile environment. Then you apply pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, more fossil fuels, more toxins, more death. And the next year you do it all again. So progressively the web of life in the soil which all plants are symbiotically part of is eliminated and with it the capacity of the soil to sustain life.

 

 

Those ideologues thinking none of this matters, who think that it’s just about making sure the right chemicals are there, are wrong. And not just wrong. Once you have a better picture of how it works, the conventional approach seems like a downright psychopathic denial of life. They think the soil is just dirt, a place to hold the chemicals, but once the soil is truly dead, and therefore not soil anymore, but reduced to the dirt of their story, their whole system falls apart. They depend on the life in the soil without realizing it and they are destroying it. In this way, more and more farmland in the world is becoming unusable, after a steady decline in productivity. Whole areas are desertifying, and the number of harvests we have left in the more fertile areas is finite and shrinking.

 

 

It’s short-term thinking aiming for profit that has its inevitable downfall built into it. And if that isn’t enough by itself, it also happens to be a major contributor to climate change. On the one hand, because the whole thing is based on fossil fuels. On the other hand, because more plowing and more desertification, and more deforestation to clear more land for cultivation, equals less carbon sequestration. All the carbon that was sequestered, and all the carbon that could be with more regenerative practices, is released into the atmosphere.

 

 

And for those thinking that maybe I just don’t understand that we have no choice, that we need all this to feed the close to 8 billion people on the planet, you might be surprised to hear that industrial agriculture feeds roughly only 30% of humanity. That’s right: 30%! Let that sink in for a second.

 

 

Now not everything is doom and gloom.

 

 

There is a lot that can be done to restore the life in the soil, techniques that together allow you to restore the soil’s health. The thing is that it takes investment, labor, and time. You have to stop trying to profit from the dying land, at least for a while, and instead start investing back into it. But that of course means admitting that the story that brought you to where you are is seriously flawed. Within the capitalist framework that these businesses operate, there’s not a lot of room for that. Their profits would take a serious hit if instead of trying to find temporary fixes that allow them to keep going in the same direction for as long as possible, they stop doing what they’ve been doing, and in which they’ve been investing everything, to reorganize their approach and embrace practices that improve soil health instead of mining it to death. A lot of farms can’t afford the short-term revenue loss of this reorganization. They then tend to decline until they go out of business and leave a desert behind.

 

 

I spent a year and a half on a plateau in the southeast of Spain. It is an area that doesn’t get a lot of rainfall. The rain it does get tends to be heavy, coming down in a short time period. A lot of the year it’s dry and hot, so the growing season is not that long. People have been farming the region for a long time, and yes, there was a slow decline in productivity, but things accelerated after the introduction of the “Green Revolution” chemical and fossil fuel, big machine approach to agriculture. Now the region has about 600 000 hectares of farmland that are seriously degraded, a lot of it unusable. What is still usable can not compete with more fertile areas. Farming families have observed the productivity of their land steadily declining, and many accept that that’s just how it is. Small farms disappear. Villages shrink with lots of homes empty and some falling apart. The kids want to escape to the big city, and people generally feel there is just no future there.

 

 

How did it get so bad so fast? Well, because the climate there amplifies the processes I described. If it is generally much drier, and the rains are far apart, it’s hard to keep the moisture in the land, and the conventional chemical farming practices seem particularly suited to get rid of it ASAP. When you use big tractors, you compact the soil. This compaction compounds year after year. You end up with this really solid layer just below the depth that the plow cuts called a plow pan. This layer prevents the rains from penetrating deep into the soil, so most of it either runs off or evaporates. Furthermore, this plow pan prevents plant roots from going deep, so they can’t reach deeper nutrients. The plowing of the land does the whole exposing of micro-organisms thing I described above, which is more extreme here because of the harsh sun, so the topsoil turns to dust. Every time it does rain, a significant amount of the topsoil washes away, because the water can’t properly penetrate the soil, and there’s nothing to keep the soil in place. Every year the problem gets worse. Every year you have less to work with, and no amount of chemicals thrown at the problem will stop that. When you look at this soil under a microscope, there is almost nothing there of the life you’re supposed to have in healthy soil.

 

 

The funny thing is that you can have functional, healthy, thriving ecosystems there. Historically, the area was forested. The climax species is a type of hardy, evergreen holly oak. You find a larger one of those and go underneath, it is completely different. There’s hummus, there’s a wealth of micro-organisms, there’s moisture, and it’s significantly cooler than the dirt that’s roasting in the sun. There’s life. The trees moderate the temperatures, so other plants and creatures have an easier time surviving, and the root systems of the trees and the perennial plants that live there, hold the soil in place when it rains. Also, the soil is not compacted by big machinery, so the rain can actually be absorbed by the land, at least to a larger extent than on the fields.

 

 

Nature can make things work in a harsh environment. Remove nature because you need land for cultivation and the environment will get harsher. When you remove nature, you’re removing a functional system. It’s a system that works because of how the elements function together in a symbiotic web. If you remove the trees from a slope because you want the wood, you’re removing the root systems that keep the soil in place when it rains. So it doesn’t. The soil washes down, causing problems downhill, some places bit by bit, some places catastrophically, with mudslides causing immense damage. In the meantime, life gradually leaves the slope because there’s less and less there for plants to thrive in. If people are open to understanding it, it’s really very simple, but it’s a challenge if the profits depend on not understanding it. If a corporation has a lot of grease money to get the politicians to want to stay blind and sign the permits, they all get richer. Just not the people. They get to deal with the consequences.

 

 

Since the eighties aid to Africa has been inspired by the idea that better than giving a hungry person a fish is to teach them to fish for themselves. What they thought Africans needed (never mind how their situation got so messed up in the first place) was for us northerners to teach them how to do agriculture. The imperialism of pressuring hotter and poorer areas to adopt farming practices that were developed in and for temperate, wet, and reasonably flat fertile areas. Blinded by ideology and assuming the story is simple. It’s as misguided as the delusional colonial project of “civilizing and Christianizing the barbarians.” Or maybe it’s the same thing, maybe it never ended.

 

 

Bill Gates likes to talk about sustainability, but what the Gates Foundation has been doing through their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is exactly this. Under the guise of helping “hungry Africans”, they completely ignore the local voices in pushing for the “Green Revolution” to be adopted there. And they’re pushing hard, to the tune of 6 billion dollars, to get industrial agricultural techniques and contracts adopted, unsuited to both the land and the people working it, focusing on export and corporate profits. It’s been failing miserably. Productivity has been going down, not up because, with the climate conditions they live in, their soil can’t handle this level of invasiveness. A lot of the critiques, and there are many, fall on deaf ears because Gates is locked into the story. I guess you won’t be surprised to hear that the Gates Foundation also holds major shares in Monsanto, now Bayer AG.

 

 

And Gates is just an example. These things had been going on for a long time before they got involved. The same thing was done in India, where it’s not an exaggeration to say that the rate of suicide among farmers stuck in debt traps caused by this insanity has reached epidemic proportions.