Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |
 By maintaining larger and larger farms, using giant machinery that tills the topsoil and kills all but the planned-for crops, planting giant monocultures (identical crops), and soaking the land in pesticides, weed killers, and chemical fertilizers, industrial agriculture strip-mines the soil.
As cultivated topsoil is scoured away by rain, or blown away by wind, what remains is less fertile. What's more, the steady chemical beating topsoil across the United States has taken over the last fifty years has killed off many of the microorganisms that keep soil alive. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
 Before the era of continuous soil depletion, the topsoil consisted of as many as 90-100 different minerals. The great rivers such as the Nile in Egypt and the Ganges in India caused extensive flooding every year, bringing new minerals from the glaciers and mountains to the land, automatically fertilizing it. The people living in these areas were generally in perfect health and lived on average 120-140 years. The situation changed with the erosion of forests and building of dams. Today, there are merely 12-20 minerals found in plant foods. |
| Eighty-five percent of the topsoil lost in the USA each year is directly associated with the raising of livestock. In this way, 4 million acres of cropland is destroyed every year. In the same way, precious rain forests have had to give way to satisfy the demand for more meat in the world.
• To grow one pound of wheat requires only sixty pounds of water, whereas the production of one pound of meat requires a staggering 50,000 pounds of water. To produce one pound of chicken, 1,800 pounds of water are needed. |
Mark Lynas
See book keywords and concepts |
 Vegetation shrivels, and when heavy rainfall does arrive, it simply washes away what remains of the topsoil. It may seem strange that floods and droughts can be forecast to affect the same areas, but with a higher proportion of rainfall coming in heavier bursts, longer dry spells will affect the land in between. This, then, is the most likely forecast for the Sahel: whilst rainfall totals overall may indeed rise, these increases will come in damaging flash-flood rainfall, interspersed with periods of intensely hot drought conditions. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
See book keywords and concepts |
| For every pound of beef you eat, factory farmers must use 2,500 gallons of water and a gallon of gasoline to run machinery, and 35 pounds of topsoil is lost due to erosion.21 As long as we continue to eat meat, we contribute to the loss of our environment.
• Over 1 million animals are slaughtered for human consumption every hour.22
• A large portion of U.S. commercial milk cows receive a protein hormone such as bovine growth hormone (rBGH) to increase their milk supply, which has been artificially increased by a factor of 25 in some instances! |
John Robbins
See book keywords and concepts |
 Deprived of manure and continually doused with chemicals, our nation's soils are losing their texture and ability to retain topsoil. topsoil is the rich soil layer without which food production becomes seriously endangered. The amount of topsoil we are losing from Iowa alone would fill 165,000 Mississippi River barges a year. Losing topsoil, notes World-watch Institute's Ed Ayres, "has about the same effect on a terrestrial community as losing blood has on a person. Only so much can be lost. |
David Wolfe
See book keywords and concepts |
 United States' forests have been cleared for cropland to fuel the meat-centered diet; the percentage of U.S. topsoil loss directly attributable to livestock raising is 85%; more than half the water used in the U.S. is used for livestock production; 2,500 gallons of water is required to produce one pound (0.45 kg) of meat. Avocado trees not only provide food, they also create clean air, beautify topsoil and provide homes for wildlife.
Many raw foodists I have met have eaten one to three avocados nearly every day since they started on a program of natural nutrition. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Since the roots of sugarcane grow very deep, they are able to receive a pretty broad range of minerals and trace elements usually lacking in the topsoil. During the refining of sugarcane, the plants are boiled to a syrup from which the crystals are extracted. Then they're boiled two more times, both of which produce molasses. Blackstrap molasses, however, comes from the third and final boiling and is essentially the "dregs" of the barrel. |
Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |
| In what were once the thriving farm towns of America's heartland you can see what happens when topsoil is destroyed. You can see it in the fields themselves, in the dust clouds that blow through the region, and in the coffee-black run-off that swells the rivers with every serious storm. AS & EG
Prairielike Farms and Smart Breeding
To put a stop to the degradation of our topsoil, we must change the way we farm. Today, we grow most crops on mass monocultural farms of annual plants. |
Mark Lynas
See book keywords and concepts |
| In the toughest Dust Bowl years, between 1934 and 1940, millions of acres of Great Plains topsoil blew away in colossal dust storms. One, in May 1934, reached all the way to Chicago, dumping red snow on New England. Hundreds of thousands of people, including 85 per cent of Oklahoma's entire population, left the land and trekked west. All this took only an average 25 per cent reduction in rainfall - enough for ploughed farmland to blow away, but the giant dunes stayed put. |
Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |
| The highly fertile top layer of soil—the uppermost twenty centimeters or so—is known as topsoil. Like the air we breathe, this layer of earth is so ordinary and ever-present that it is easy to take for granted. But it is absolutely essential to our lives, health, and prosperity.
By maintaining larger and larger farms, using giant machinery that tills the topsoil and kills all but the planned-for crops, planting giant monocultures (identical crops), and soaking the land in pesticides, weed killers, and chemical fertilizers, industrial agriculture strip-mines the soil. |
David Wolfe
See book keywords and concepts |
| This plant matter then eventually falls to the topsoil increasing the mineralization of the soil for more vegetation to grow. Deciduous trees, which drop their leaves each year, strongly mineralize the topsoil.
The cooking of food is by far the biggest waste of resources on planet Earth. Viktoras Kulvinskas, in his classic book Survival Into The 21st Century, reports that cooking destroys 85% of the value of food. When I first realized this,
I was staggered. But I did not understand the full implication of this fact. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
 Heavy Metal Cleanse (Optional)
Since the Industrial Revolution, production and distribution of heavy metals have rapidly accelerated, so that the air, water, and topsoil of the planet have become permeated with them. These metals tend to persist and accumulate in the environment (and in our bodies!), for they cannot be degraded or destroyed. Today heavy metals are extensively used as components of countless consumer products, though the consumer is generally unaware of their presence in the seemingly harmless product. |
David R. Montgomery
See book keywords and concepts |
 Ever since, organic-rich topsoil has sustained itself by supporting plant communities that supply organic matter back to the soil. Larger and more abundant plants enriched soils with decaying organic matter and supported more animals that also returned nutrients to the soil when they too died. Despite the occasional mass extinction, life and soils symbiotically grew and diversified through climate changes and shifting arrangements of continents. |
| Over the years, new topsoil built up—a few inches per century—thanks, Darwin suspected, to the efforts of countless worms.
Curious as to whether his fields were unusual, Darwin enlisted his now grown sons to examine how fast the floors and foundations of buildings abandoned centuries before had been buried beneath new soil. Darwin's scouts reported that workmen in Surrey discovered small red tiles typical of Roman villas two and a half feet beneath the ground surface. Coins dating from the second to fourth centuries confirmed that the villa had been abandoned for more than a thousand years. |
James Howard Kunstler
See book keywords and concepts |
 Iowa prairie soils 150 years ago had about twelve to sixteen inches of topsoil; now they have only about six to eight inches of topsoil. The loss continues. The "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s was the coincidence of a periodic drought with a decade of zealous overplowing as tractors came broadly into use. The diminishing returns of mechanized plowing were not understood until a catastrophe had been set in motion. The human race had no prior experience with tractors. |
David R. Montgomery
See book keywords and concepts |
| Every second, North America's largest river carries another dump truck's load of topsoil to the Caribbean. Each year, America's farms shed enough soil to fill a pickup truck for every family in the country. This is a phenomenal amount of dirt. But the United States is not the biggest waster of this critical resource. An estimated twenty-four billion tons of soil are lost annually around the world—several tons for each person on the planet. Despite such global losses, soil erodes slowly enough to go largely unnoticed in anyone's lifetime. |
| Some soils are incredibly sensitive to this positive feedback that can rapidly strip topsoil from bare exposed ground.
Below the surface, extensive networks of roots link plants and stabilize the topography. In a closed canopy foresr, roots from individual trees intertwine in a living fabric that helps bind soil onto slopes. Conversely, steep slopes tend to erode rapidly when stripped of forest cover.
Soil scientists use a simple system to describe different soil layers— literally an ABC of dirt. The partially decomposed organic matter found at the ground surface is called the O horizon. |
| Virginia became a factory for turning topsoil into tobacco.
King James saw the tobacco business as an attractive way to raise revenue. In 1619 the Virginia Company agreed to pay the Crown one shilling per pound on its shipments to England in exchange for restrictions on Spanish tobacco imports and on tobacco growing in England—a monopoly on the popular new drug. Just two years later, new regulations mandated that all tobacco exported from the colonies be sent to England. |
| Blowing across the Dakotas, the wind kept picking up dirt until a third of a billion tons of topsoil was heading east at up to a hundred miles an hour. In Chicago four pounds of dust dropped out of the sky for each person in the city. The next day Buffalo, in eastern upstate New York, fell dark at noon. By dawn on May n dust was settling on New York City, Boston, and Washington. The huge brown cloud could be seen far out in the Atlantic Ocean. |
Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |
| What's more, the steady chemical beating topsoil across the United States has taken over the last fifty years has killed off many of the microorganisms that keep soil alive. Dead soil is no longer soil: it's just wet dust. In what were once the thriving farm towns of America's heartland you can see what happens when topsoil is destroyed. You can see it in the fields themselves, in the dust clouds that blow through the region, and in the coffee-black run-off that swells the rivers with every serious storm. |
| The panels of treated cardboard, each infused with appropriate local seeds, spores of topsoil fungi, and harmless fertilizing agents, would become very special compost: by tearing the panels up and watering them, refugees could start gardens, complete with mulch, fertilizer, and the microorganisms good soil needs. (Even clothing and blankets can be designed to be compostable when they wear out.) The entire transitional tent city could then be plowed into gardens as refugees settle in to stability. |
Marion Nestle
See book keywords and concepts |
 I'm raising a better soybean crop that helps me conserve the topsoil, keep my land productive and help this farm support future generations of my family."
?Rod Gangwish, farmer
Biotechnology is helping Rod Gangwish to grow a type of soybean thai requires less tilling of the soil That helps him preserve precious lopsoil and produce a crop with less impact on the land. Preserving topsoil today means a thriving farm for generations to come.
Biotechnology allows farmers to choose the best combination of ways to help grow their crops. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
See book keywords and concepts |
 Never before have we affected the natural environment to such an extent that we are losing our topsoil, our massive North American aquifers, and our world's rainforests.10 We are changing our climate so rapidly that many of the world's best-informed scientists fear the future. Never before have we been eliminating plant and animal species from the face of the earth as we are doing now. Never before have we introduced, on such a large scale, genetically altered varieties of plants into the environment without knowing what the repercussions will be. |
Leslie Taylor, ND
See book keywords and concepts |
 Rains come and wash away the thin topsoil that was previously protected by the canopy, and this barren, infertile land is vulnerable to erosion. Sometimes the land is replanted in African grasses for cattle operations; other times more virgin rainforest is destroyed for cattle operations because grass planted on recently burned land has a better chance to grow.
Grazing Land
As the demand in the Western world for cheap meat increases, more and more rainforests are destroyed to provide grazing land for animals. |
David Wolfe
See book keywords and concepts |
| Avocado trees not only provide food, they also create clean air, beautify topsoil and provide homes for wildlife.
Many raw foodists I have met have eaten one to three avocados nearly every day since they started on a program of natural nutrition. Most seem to never get tired of them! I know raw-foodists who have been eating one avocado nearly every day for five, ten, even twenty years.
One day I was at the beach looking for a place to surf while eating an avocado. A gentleman walked by, looked at me, and commented, "soul food." He was right. Avocados are soul food. They feed our essence. |
Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |
| AS & EG
Prairielike Farms and Smart Breeding
To put a stop to the degradation of our topsoil, we must change the way we farm. Today, we grow most crops on mass monocultural farms of annual plants. These farms require a huge amount of labor—including yearly plowing, which causes soil erosion—and huge quantities of chemical fertilizers and petroleum-based pesticides. To move beyond this type of farming, which locks us into constant service to compromised and degenerating land, we need to think of farms the way we think of prairies.
Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, knows this. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 One of the gardeners here, for example, describes his activities not as creating food but as creating topsoil, and the food that is grown out of the soil is really just a side effect. The key is to create new soil through soil probiotics. You activate the friendly microbes in the soil by composting kitchen scraps and treating the soil with love and positive intention. If the soil is respected, the earth will give back to the community by producing abundant plants that provide a sustainable, renewable food source. |
David Wolfe
See book keywords and concepts |
| Deciduous trees, which drop their leaves each year, strongly mineralize the topsoil.
The cooking of food is by far the biggest waste of resources on planet Earth. Viktoras Kulvinskas, in his classic book Survival Into The 21st Century, reports that cooking destroys 85% of the value of food. When I first realized this,
I was staggered. But I did not understand the full implication of this fact. You see, if 85% of the food value is destroyed in cooking, then, also destroyed, is 85% of the time, labor, resources and energy that went into creating the foods. |
Email this page to a friend
