![]() ![]() The lack of understanding of natural forest ecosystems, the soil in particular, is so deep that almost all sylvicultural practices use agriculture as a model, and forestry research has been directed toward managing an agricultural system in the forest (Lemieux). Humus production has declined since, and the precious mull has washed into waterways or gone with the wind. At the same time, forestry focused on growing conifers to feed paper mills. Then chemical agriculture appeared, ignoring time, contours and biodiversity, and destroying hedges. It has progressed at a rate of a few inches per thousand years since.Įarly peasant agriculture used slash and burn techniques to farm these deciduous forests, and later applied animal manures and rotated crops. Humus began to form on Earth when deciduous trees appeared 60 million years ago. The soil has four solid components: mineral, of geologic origin chemical, which is labile (easily altered), perishable and unstable, especially to heat biochemical, with its enzymes, molecules and aggregates and biological – trophic chains involving bacteria, protozoans, algae, fungi and animals in a matrix of polyphenolic compounds. ![]() This is an illusion of abundance most of this so-called food is artificial. Added to the declining health of oceans, famine is lurking for humanity – unless we save living agricultural soils.īut our supermarkets are full of food, you may say. So why not develop sylvagrarian biodynamic farming, which would have a good mix of fungal and microbial life and a good mix of short-lived humus and stable humus?Īs forests disappear under cities, highways, concrete and asphalt, good, living agricultural soils are vanishing at an alarming rate. Biodynamic systems integrate microorganisms and short-lived humus, while sylvagriculture is sustained by fungi and stable humus. If biodynamic agriculture integrated agricultural pedogenesis (soil formation) into its technical methods, we would have the best way to produce food worldwide while preserving soil fertility and ecosystem diversity. Because the lignin of prairie plants does not lead to production of highly stable, long-lived humus, natural prairie soils will always remain fragile and unable to support dense human populations. Prairie grasses have a different type of lignin than woody plants of climacic forests. We must distinguish between prairie and forest soils. The steppe ecosystems (the Asian steppe, the South American pampas and the central prairies of North America) are primarily grass, growing where precipitation is low. The processes involved in forming these soils have been at the heart of work done by Professor Gilles Lemieux and his colleagues at Laval University in Quebec since the 1970s. Good, living soil has evolved over millennia in only a few privileged areas of the world where deciduous forest soils evolved from rock to mull, a porous mix of humus and mineral soil, to support stable, long-lived humus. Let’s banish the word “dirt” from our vocabulary when we talk about soil. Humanity could not be sustained without the living soils and the living oceans. Soil is much more than “dirt.” Why is such a disrespectful word still used for one of the major components of life on Earth? Professor Gilles Lemieux, the father of pedogenesis applied to agriculture. ![]()
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