Kitchen Garden Forum

This thread is at the point where it could rapidly deteriorate, so some clarity is needed.

No one has disagreed with the fact that soil erosion can and does occur, although I am minded to point out that it is rare on allotments or domestic gardens in the UK, being more common here on inappropriately cultivated slopes and de-hedged mega-fields in commercial farming aka agri-business.

Neither has anyone deplored any wish to do what can be done to both raise awareness and to combat it both now and in the future. Indeed it is apparent that there are many techniques to combat it that can be applied on traditional, experimental and intensive agriculture, forestry and gardening, as well as on a domestic scale if people so wish.

To move on can we also agree that in a logical discussion definitive statements should be provable by reference to facts, whereas opinions do not need factual qualification when declared as such.

Therefore can we assume from here on that the four foot topsoil is unproven, but that erosion occurs under various circumstances and the thread is about ways to maintain or improve soil depth and growing quality relative to its current levels.

SInce soil erosion started when the first soil was formed and the first rain fell on it#, I am not convinced by any such argument...

# several hundred million (billion?) years ago.

Masdafish, if you read the Defra document you would realise it is not natural soil erosion that is the problem, but the rate of soil erosion, due to intensive farming methods in the last 200 years. Nature replaces natural erosion with leaf litter and decaying plants. Some natural topsoil levels can be 10 feet deep not just 3 or 4 ft.

Perhaps Nature's Babe would like to think of the Ice Age - the last one.

About 20,000 years ago , where I write was covered by a layer of ice 0.75km deep and Nature had removed all the topsoil and was busy making clay . When the Ice Age finished, Stoke on Trent had lovely banks of clay we used to make pottery.

Man's effects on erosion as as nothing compared to what nature did.

Of course, this does not fit in with Gaia so is cheerfully ignored...despite being demonstrably proven.

Masdafish, that doesn't answer the point raised in the defra document that we need to address the rate of depletion, intensive agriculture is eroding the soil at such a rate that it will not be here for our grandchildren.
Yes sometimes nature has extremes like the ice age, but we need to double food production to feed the projected population increase now

NB

We could easily double food production .. but prices are far too low at present...

Could you explain your reasoning re the connection please masdafish, between production and low prices, do you mean farmers are not getting enough to warrent production ? We can all help this, I pay a fair price to the farmer through an excellent box scheme and bypass the supermarkets that get rich at the expense of their suppliers, quality and shelf life is better from the box scheme. Also how do you propose doubling production if there is further soil erosion which is already causing our conventional and organic farmers loss of production according to Defra?

Soil erosion is a real issue, and the DEFRA report (follow the links to the evidence paper) singles out the peat soils of East of England fens as a particular concern, and in particlar the loss of stored carbon by oxidation of the exposed soil.

I'd like to make clear that it is not the idea that soil is important that I took issue with. I'm an enthuiastic composter, though I don't think no-dig would be a good approach given the soil I have to start with. It is the Gaia-esque analogy I take issue with, and the comparison with a forest floor in the original thread.

madasafish wrote:We could easily double food production

I hope you can cite some evidence to back up that statement too. I don't think I believe it !

Only vaguely related I know, but how do you get living from not living. Or in other words the life must have emerged from inanimate matter which is logically speaking impossible. I for one am quite happy to review my definition of inanimate because at a microscopic level everything is just energy whizzing around and even solid objects are 99.9999% space. From our frame of reference what appears to be just a rock maybe something far more significant. It took a while for us to work out the earth was round, because it looked so flat.

Either way it makes sense to look after our big blue planet because we've got nowhere else to go. I order from my local veg box scheme over the winter then provide for myself over the summer it's not much I know but I do what I can to divert my cash away from irresponsible industries. It's a shame we are a nation hooked on white breads and meat - mono-diets = mono-culture which surely can't be helping the erosion of topsoil.

poppingjay wrote:Only vaguely related I know, but how do you get living from not living. Or in other words the life must have emerged from inanimate matter which is logically speaking impossible.

There are plenty of theories to explain this: start your reading here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesi ... .22_theory

alan refail wrote:

poppingjay wrote:Only vaguely related I know, but how do you get living from not living. Or in other words the life must have emerged from inanimate matter which is logically speaking impossible.

There are plenty of theories to explain this: start your reading here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesi ... .22_theory

Thank you

I've read a lot of theories, from the sublime to the ridiculous but as I say I'm still open minded to a wider connectivity

My initial letter to Nature's Babe, I had hoped, was going to be an exchange with regards symbiosis. The Symbiotic relationships between plants and mycelium in particular. How wrong I was!
I have been under the weather for the last fortnight and simply cannot get my brain in gear sufficiently to join the fray.
There is quite a lot I would like to say but I simply cannot get things sorted out sufficiently to make sense.
I feel that having initiated the posting I should be replying but do please forgive me but I simply cannot.
JB.

Johnboy, just get well soon, thank you for your courtesy in letting us know,
I sincerely hope things improve for you soon, and have enjoyed our discussions, there is nothing to forgive, hugs.
Perhaps someone here will read my last comment on Container-grown vegetables; organic or not ? Then take the trouble to read the first link on this thread which is an informative and entertaining you tube video, then they might be interested enough to read further links, by recent comments made I can see people haven't bothered to read the links, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Surely there can be little doubt that certain forms of farming, involving the widespread use of chemicals rather than crop rotation, the removal of hedgrows and monoculture cause the soil to become more dustlike and affected by wind and weather. I read long ago that this is what has happened on wide exposed fields in Somerset.

Nor can we doubt that topsoil was thicker than it is now. Given that broad expanses of farmland or small homesteads alike were formed by the cutting down of the ancient forest which covered most of England two thousand years ago, it is clear that the initial surface would have been a heavy thickness of leafmould in many areas [even if not in Stoke]. A lot of this has been used to spread on gardens over millennia or has been eroded into our rivers to form silt on river-beds and at estuaries. This would have happened without human influence, but the layers of leaf-fall would have been repleted from trees which have long since been felled to make room for farms, housing, playing-fields etc.

What all this has to do with the earth as an orginism or not I cannot say. That belongs - dare I say it? - in General Chatter. But it really mystifies me that with all the weight of scientific method now available for us to form an objective judgment on many matters, there are many people bent on rejecting the need for evidence or proof and reverting to unsubstantiated mysticism. I don't scorn such beliefs [wee, at least not in public!], but please remember that they are nothing but beliefs until underpinned with objective evidence. And, by the way, that does not include the statement of a politician, though it may well include the evidence on which such a staement is based.

On a pedantic note, the Greeks didn't "give the earth the name Gaia or Ge for short". The words "gaia" and "ge" are merely dialect forms of the same word and neither is the "name" for earth any more than "dog" is the name for a dog or "table" is the name for a table, or, for that matter, than "God" is the name for God.