Understanding Boris Johnson - Jonathon Pie on BoJo
Let's Talk Dirt
When I was a child I went to visit my grandfather's farm outside Leamington. The fields that would soon deliver an abundance of tomatoes for Heinz or sweet corn and peas for Green Giant were freshly tilled revealing the rich, black soil that was the key to their productivity. I didn't think of soil very much until recently when I took a few online courses in global food security. That's when I learned how, in our quest to feed eight billion people, we have resorted to excessive industrial agriculture. Yale360 reviews a report on the decline of that once rich farmland across the American midwest. You hear many different numbers regarding that black Iowa soil. It’s often repeated that the topsoil — the nutrient-rich A horizon — was some 14 to 16 inches deep when the prairie was first broken, a fantastic depth of fertility rivaled only by some regions in the Ukraine . By the mid-1970s — roughly a century after the prairie was broken — it was reported that, in places, half o
Watch Pie's take on COP with George Monbiot!
ReplyDeleteTB
I'll see if I can find it, TB. Thanks.
Delete