Industrial agriculture is based on the premise that crops extract mineral nutrients from the soil which must be replaced by artificial fertilisers. According to Lønning, microorganisms are not part of this equation; ‘It is not about life and biology, but about chemistry’. Chemistry is thus defined as the independent variable:

 “

Soil has been defined as a kind of container of various chemical substances and bonds. A container that can run out if not what the plants take out, is replaced. But again. Why then can something grow outside the areas that man has cultivated. Why doesn’t that container empty? How can the plants continue to grow and produce bountiful crops year after year, generation after generation, yes, for millions of years in fact?

                                                                                                                                                             ”

Dag Jørund Lønning (2019:61): Jordboka II. Nærare naturen. Inn i det kompostmoderne.[Own translation]

 This is where Lønning asks the fundamental question:

“What if chemistry isn’t the independent variable at all? What if it’s biology? What if it is biology that determines chemistry and not the other way around?’  (Lønning ibid:61)

He attributes this conclusion (biology instead of chemistry) to the American soil biologist Elaine Ingham, who came to this conclusion in the early 1980s. For Lønning, this represents a fundamental paradigm shift, one that ‘effectively tears the bottom out from under modern industrial agriculture’:

“

The problem with soil that does not deliver is not a lack of chemistry, but a lack of biology. Ingham adds: No one disagrees that plants need a lot of mineral nutrition. But there is hardly a single piece of land in the whole world that does not have the minimum mineral nutrition required for plants to grow and thrive. However, what varies greatly, she continues, is how much of this nutrient is easily soluble and available. The more nutrients that are bound to other material in the soil and not directly available to the plants, the more important the microlife is. Because it is biology that retrieves the bound nutrients out and up to the plant roots.

                                                                                                                                                               “

                                                                             (Lønning ibid:62, own translation, emphasise added)

 

Practices that inhibit/damage biology and prevent photosynthesis from achieving its full potential

Keywords here are ploughing, lack of ground cover, artificial fertilisers and soil compaction. On the first two:

“Given that flourishing communities of beneficial soil microbes are the ‘key’ to plant production, what is the secret to ensuring the right microbes are present in the right amounts? Plants. That’s right. The most important factor for promoting abundant plant growth is to have green plants growing in the soil all year round.”

                                             Christine Jones, Phd (2013): From light to life: restoring farmland soils  . [Emphasize added]

“When we cut off this lifeline by removing plants from the soil, whether with herbicides, tillage, or smothering, we initiate a period of underground starvation and subsequent soil deg­radation. Conversely, by maintaining a thick, three-dimensional cover of living plants on the soil, we let nature do the work of feeding it ..”  Daniel Mays (2020:17): The no-till organic vegetable farm

With artificial fertilisers, the plant does not need to activate the soil microbes:

«It doesn’t need to support microbes that produce phosphatase enzyme, for example. Or it doesn’t need to support microbes that are able to fix nitrogen. And so it’s not excuding carbon into the soil. It’s not building soil.» (Jones 2021, ca. 1 hour video) Healthy Soil’s Impact on Carbon Pathways & Microbial Diversity by Dr. Christine Jones, see from 43:44 min.)

Monbiot 2022 adds:

 “Under certain conditions, when farmers apply nitrogen fertiliser, the microbes respond by burning through the carbon: in other words, the cement that holds their catacombs together. The pores cave in. The passages collapse. The soil becomes sodden, airless and compacted.”

George Monbiot, The Guardian (7 May 2022): The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future 

Furthermore, Laupsa-Borge 2010 explains what happens when plants supplied with a lot of nitrogen grow quickly and take up a lot of water:

“

The high water content causes the nutrients to be diluted and fewer nutrients are formed because certain enzymes are inhibited when the nitrogen level rises. This applies, among other things, to secondary substances (plant chemicals) that participate in the plants’ defense and give food color and taste. The result is that the plants contain fewer protective substances and taste less. Too much nitrogen thus predisposes the plants to disease and increases the need for pesticides.

In turn, several pesticides destroy important organisms in the soil. Among other things, Roundup (glyphosate), one of the most common herbicides, can kill Rhizobium bacteria that fix nitrogen from the air. These bacteria are very important because they form various nitrogen compounds that make it possible for other microbes, plants and animals to make proteins, the body’s building blocks. Pesticide residues in food are also a problem.

.. This vicious circle is the scourge of industrial agriculture and undermines the soil’s fertility over time because the beneficial microorganisms that are so important for good food quality disappear.

                                                                                                                                                ”

Johnny Laupsa-Borge (2010): Fruktbar jord-grunnlaget for din helse. Mat og Helse nr. 5, 2010 . [Own translation, emphasise added]

 

With regard to soil compaction, the following quotes will illustrate why this is of so much concern.

“

Soil compaction is among the most common causes of poorer crops. Using large machines in wet conditions leads to a higher risk of the soil packing also under the plow layer. It prevents excess water from draining away and air from reaching the roots. And this is important in order for the soil to dry up and for the plants to thrive and produce a good crop.

”

                                                       Liv Jorunn Hind, Forskning.no (2017): Hva gjør du når jorda pakker seg [own translation]

“

Soil compaction is one of the main reasons why crops have stagnated in many of the world’s largest grain-growing areas in recent years… The desire for improved efficiency leads to the use of increasingly larger and heavier machines, and this increases the risk of soil compaction.

”

                                                                                            Seehusen, Till: Jordpakking – årsaker, konsekvenser og tiltak [own translation]

It is, however, not only heavy machinery that is to blame, according to Mays, 2020:

“

 [It’s that plus] tilling, leaving soil exposed to the elements, a lack of living plant growth [throughout the year]-all will lead to compaction… Compaction is a symptom of inadequate soil care.

”

                                                 Daniel Mays ((2020:127) : The No-Till Organic Vegetable Farm [emphasize and text in brackets added]

But what is actually soil compaction? ‘The Minickmaterial blog 2019’ describes it as follows:

“

Good soil should be loose, with many pockets of air between its particles, so oxygen and water can circulate freely to deliver nutrients and facilitate chemical and biological activity. The balance of a good soil is delicate, and there are a number of reasons why a soil can get “crushed” and become denser, with significantly less air between the soil particles. This change (..) is what experts call soil compaction.

The main cause for soil compaction is putting weight on the soil, and this happens a lot in farmed lands, either as foot traffic, stock trampling or through the massive weight of agricultural machinery.

“

                                                        https://www.minickmaterials.com/blog/all-about-soil-compaction-causes-challenges-solutions-a-guide [emphasize added]

 Cox with White 2023 reminds us that reduced levels of oxygen has consequences for life in the soil:

“

Although we all have universal access to oxygen gas, we forget that soil organisms also breathe and require oxygen to thrive. Oxygen is drawn into the soil through capillary action as water infiltrates and moves through the profile, where the oxygen is stored or leached out. This action is crucial to growing the diverse communities of microbial life that mine and build soil aggregates. ^[*] These microbes also need to eat and drink, and it’s partly why soil disturbance that creates compac­tion—destroying pathways and spaces—is so detrimental.

”

 Dorn Cox with Courtney White (2023:116): The Great Regeneration. Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope [emphasize added]

* “Microbes make cements out of carbon, with which they stick mineral particles together, creating pores and passages through which water, oxygen and nutrients pass. The tiny clumps they build become the blocks the animals in the soil use to construct bigger labyrinths.”

George Monbiot, The Guardian (7 May 2022): The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future

 

Summarised, and according to Andreassen, soil compaction leads to:

• The soil’s air volume being reduced
• The soil’s ability to drain away excess water decreases
• Erosion increases – loss of soil and nutrients
• Microlife stagnates and can be more or less destroyed
• Loss of N and other nutrients in gaseous form, released to the air due to too little oxygen in the soil
• Crops are reduced

 

See more at the website The What and Why of Regenerative Agriculture.

 

A climate-positive agriculture

 The potential here is also discussed at the website The What and Why of Regenerative Agriculture. (See ev. also illustration of the carbon cycle at the first 5 minutes of this partly animated video).

 

Increase profitability in agriculture

The above website shows that regenerative agriculture can be extremely profitable compared to conventional agriculture. It may be argued that the reference here applies to smaller farms that operate market garden agriculture. However, another well-known reference, also from the USA, is Gabe Brown.

Brown has a very successful 5,000-acre farm with yields that are 20-25 percent higher than the average yield in his region. It has also given him the opportunity to increase the quality, values ​​and thus market opportunities for the farm’s produce. (Se websites here and here).

A question often posed is how are we going to feed the world without industrial agriculture and industrial inputs? Charles Massy in ‘From the Ground Up – Regenerative Agriculture‘ (2019 video; 13 min.) comments that ‘People forget that 70% of the world’s food comes off 5 acres and less of peasant farms.’ Many of these relatively smaller farms (often much smaller) are found in the countries of the south, and it is often here that the economy is most critical. Let us look at India which we referred to under ‘The Challenges of Agriculture’.

In response to the increasing debt burden on farmers, an Indian form of regenerative agriculture called zero budget natural farming (ZBNF) has been introduced. In 2018, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh was said to be ’pushing for a chemical-free agricultural practice of zero budget natural farming (ZBNF), which it plans to scale up from about 160,000 farmers currently to six million by 2024..’ (source).  Watch short videos here, here and here. See also FAOs Zero Budget Natural Farming in India (More about the methods used: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b82166c0-b770-4e84-8b92-2fcee184d84e/content).