Capitalism is broken, get back to basics: low-impact farming

by Matt Levine

These are turbulent times in the financial markets and a lot of investment managers are yearning for the simpler life of corn and cows rather than corn futures and deals structured by cows.

Talk to Jeremy Grantham of GMO, who is looking to get you set up in the growing field of no-till farming.

... starts from the premise that capitalism is fundamentally broken:

Capitalism does not address these very long-term issues easily or well. It seems to me that capitalism’s effectiveness moves along the spectrum of time horizons, brilliant at the short end but lost, irrelevant, and even plain dangerous at the very long end.

What is capitalism not doing so well at? Energy? A problem, but “current capitalist responses to higher prices should get the job done.” Metals? A bigger problem, but “If we respond to increasing price pressures, as I’m sure we will, with a greater emphasis on quality and small scale along with an increasingly sensible and non-wasteful lifestyle, then we can push these serious constraints out for well over a hundred years.”


Finally, there is the real bugbear: soil erosion. The Earth is a wonderful place that obligingly creates new soil from bedrock, using the wear and tear of weather plus bacterial and microbial action. Perhaps even more remarkably, this new soil arrives with a good complement of phosphorus and potassium. This is pretty good treatment from a very generous planet.

But earth is through playing nice.

A group of scientists from Cornell University writing in Science magazine summarized their findings as follows: “Soil erosion is a major environmental threat to the sustainability and productive capacity of agriculture. During the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the world’s arable land has been lost by erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year … In the U.S. an estimated 40 billion tons of soil … are lost each year.” Unfortunately, Cornell’s Agricultural School has high standing in its field – reading their summary, one’s instinct is to say, “Well that’s it then. In a hundred years, everyone starves.”

Grantham thinks that “erosion is perhaps the single largest threat to our long-term well-being.” But there’s hope:

No-till farming, developed in recent decades has, after a slow start, been spreading very rapidly in South America. … In the U.S., the adoption of no-till has very recently accelerated and it now accounts for more than 35% of farmland according to the U.S.D.A. In general, it is growing elsewhere, albeit slowly, and hardly at all in Africa. … Just as it sounds, no-till leaves the crop residue on the field and the following year, instead of plowing up the ground, a rotating wheel pierces the ground every few inches and plants a seed, sometimes together with a precisely measured dose of fertilizer. After a few years, the mat of ground cover massively reduces the erosion caused by heavy rains: the average academic study reports more than an 80% reduction, with the highest being 98% and the lowest 50%. In one fell swoop, the erosion problem can be effectively resolved.

All in all, no-till is like a gift from Ceres and single-handedly would remove or long postpone most of our longterm productivity problems.

Working in finance is no way to solve any productivity problems so we’re thinking that a lot of you will be interested in giving this a go. We assume that part 2 of Grantham’s letter (due out in 2 weeks) will include instructions for how to get started in this exciting field.

Deal Breaker

Can fertilizer subsidies grow Africa's Green Revolution?

by Yasmine Ryan

Earth-shaking change doesn’t come from good ideas alone. Just as important are the people who have the power and courage to rise above the drone of skepticism to transform words into action. This is what Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika did when he defied the advice of some of the world’s most powerful institutions in a bid to save his country from famine after famine.

A group of scientists had been arguing that funding fertilizer was crucial to elusive food security in sub-Saharan Africa. Until Mutharika came to power, however, no one was willing to turn their words into policy.

Professor Pedro Sánchez of the Columbia University’s Earth Institute was one of the scientists Mutharika chose to heed despite resistance from most of Malawi’s international donors.

“We had a meeting with the newly elected president, Bingu wa Mutharika," Sánchez recalled in an interview with TakePart. "The guy told several of us, ‘Hey, I didn’t get elected to be a beggar nation, and right now we’re begging for about 45 percent of our food. Do you have any suggestions?’

“We said, 'Yes, sir. Subsidize fertilizers and hybridized seeds.' And he did it.”

Within two years, Malawi went from famine to food exportation. Now the fertilizer subsidies have caught on among neighboring countries—10 are testing similar policies, including Tanzania, Nigeria and Zambia. Faced with the evidence of success, USAID, the World Bank, and many European donors are putting their support behind subsidy programs.

“The dogma was that you don’t subsidize African farmers, even though we subsidize American, European and Japanese farmers to the tune of 1 billion U.S. dollars a day,” Professor Sánchez says. “Things have changed. It was basically the political will from one president.”

Based on the "Malawi miracle" and projects in other parts of the region, Sánchez, who has also served as co-chair of the U.N. Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, penned an article titled "Tripling crop yields in tropical Africa" in this month’s edition of Nature Geoscience.

Fertilizers and hybrid seeds, he writes, offer a means of wiping out hunger in tropical Africa. A Green Revolution, like the one that revolutionized agriculture in India, is also possible in Africa, he writes. What is needed is to nourish soils stripped bare of nutrients from decades of farming without fertilizer and manure.

Success, he stresses, depends on a country’s relative stability, education to empower farmers and adequate infrastructure. Enriched soil could help protect crops from climate change, too.

Synthetic fertilizers may well increase food production, but over-enthusiastic use can have a significant impact on land and waterways. Still, the soil scientist doesn’t advise exclusively organic agriculture for Africa.

“Organic doesn’t work when the soils are depleted of nutrients,” he explains. “It works when the soils are enriched with nutrients from many decades of inorganic fertilization.”

Sánchez does support a balance between synthetic and organic fertilizers. Rather than using a blanket approach, nutrients should be adapted to each field.

Nitrogen-fixing trees are ideal for many parts of Africa, but would need governmental support to truly grow.

“The science [on the trees] is very clear, but the adoption is very limited because of a lack of financial incentives,” he says.

A major criticism of the Malawi model is that it encourages farmers to turn to a single staple crop (and yes, it's corn, in case you were wondering...). Horticulturist Linda Larish notes that the traditional Malawian staple, a taro-like plant called manioc, has largely been abandoned by farmers switching to imported hybrid corn.

“Even though they are self-sufficient and can grow their own food, they are at the mercy of the seed and fertilizer companies,” Larish says.

Not by coincidence, Malawi’s policies gave Monsanto a foothold for its hybrid maize in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it philanthropy, PR, or simply shrewd business?

Some critics suggest that African governments just don’t have the resources to support subsidies. Sánchez counters that Malawi's program has already lasted five years. He points to a study from the Chicago Council for Global Affairs, which found that food aid was six times more expensive than subsidies.

The idea has certainly caught the attention of the Obama administration. A few years ago, 90 percent of USAID’s food aid to Africa was in the form of food imports, while only 10 percent was offered as agricultural development. Now, Sánchez says, the breakdown is half and half. He hopes the trend will continue to gain traction.

“Things look good for a major scale-up,” Sánchez says.

Take Part

ICRISAT develops techniques for soil reclamation in West Africa

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has developed an innovative technique of reclaiming severely degraded, abandoned farmlands in Western Africa successfully bring them back into profitable agricultural production.

This accomplishment is significant for the semi-arid Sudano-Sahelian region, whose few arable lands are under extreme pressure to produce more food for a growing population in the backdrop of climatic variations that threaten the region’s fragile agricultural production, and food security.

Additionally, the recovered degraded lands, which had been allocated to women in a moribund state, are giving back Niger’s largely marginalised women their socio-economic rights to making a livelihood through agriculture.

“In dry West Africa, studies have shown that between 13 and 15 percent of children are suffering from acute nutritional deficiency”, says Prof Dov Pasternak, a scientist at ICRISAT. “By working with women to grow indigenous vegetable and fruit trees, we have not only restored the self-worth of women but also enabled them to better care for their children and families as well as make some money on top of it all.”

According to Prof Pasternak, more than half of the Sahelian soils are severely degraded, continuously losing nutrients and organic matter through wind and water erosion resulting in hard-to-plough encrusted lateritic soils that characterise many abandoned farms across Niger. Droughts account for crop failure in two out of every five years.

Extremely adverse weather conditions in the Sahel and growing population pressure are adversely affecting agricultural production in the Sahel. In Niger, population pressure has progressively led to highly fragmented farm holdings whose ownership and farming rights are generally vested in men. This has in turn systematically edged women out of farming leaving them without means of adequately caring for their families, or making an income.

“(Some areas of Niger) are witnessing emergence of a first generation of women who do not work the land. This process begins when a woman’s gamana is cultivated by her husband because it is so small that her labour is only required for certain types of harvest. In Jiratawa, we found a second generation of landless women who have never farmed because they never had the opportunity to help their mother in her gamana as she was landless too. They don’t even know how to sow seeds!” a study undertaken by the International Institute for Environment and Development says.

In an effort to keep women farming and to avert their impoverishment, the Government of Niger, in 2004, enacted a Rural Code to govern access to and use of land and other natural resources. Land tenure is governed by a variety of unsynchronised laws ranging from customary, Islamic and civil laws. The Rural Code is envisioned to enable women to directly own and use land as they wish. But initial trends show that more often than not women are being allocated the least productive, often abandoned, lands that men cannot put to any use.

ICRISAT is developing a range of techniques to help Niger’s women transform their erstwhile unproductive, impenetrable crust-lands into productive farmland. The techniques present an integrated system to food production and include rebuilding the fertility of the degraded soils, water management for this semi-arid zone and general land reclamation using drought-tolerant tree species.

ICRISAT scientists have taught women how to create a favourable medium for planting crops that will enable effective rooting, as well as how to manage the soils to prevent water-logging. Farmers have learnt how to harvest rain-water on-farm using micro-catchments or planting pits known as zai holes, which are able to hold water for prolonged periods after the rains. The zai holes also hold soil and compost to support the growth of locally adapted, deep-rooting and highly nutritious fruit and vegetable trees such as the Pomme du Sahel, Ziziphus Mauritania, and the Moringa, Moringa stenopetala.

The Pomme du Sahel fruit is rich in iron, calcium, phosphorus and has ten times as much Vitamin C as the regular apple, while the Moringa leaves, Niger’s most popular vegetable, has seven times as much Vitamin C as oranges, four times as much Vitamin A as carrots, four times as much calcium as milk, thrice as much potassium as is found in bananas and twice as much protein as is found in milk.

These and other crop trees under test for reclamation of Western Africa’s degraded farmlands are typically tolerant to drought, high soil salinity and water-logging. They hold the promise of transforming vast swathes of degraded land in West Africa into Africa’s new horticultural front. ICRISAT estimates the value of fruit and vegetable produced from these indigenous tree crops at about USD1, 200 per hectare.

About ICRISAT: The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a nonprofit, non-political organization that does innovative agricultural research and capacity building for sustainable development with a wide array of partners across the globe. Its mission is to help empower 600 million poor people to overcome hunger, poverty and a degraded environment in the dry tropics through better agriculture. ICRISAT, is one of 15 centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

ICRISAT

Rwanda tackles soil erosion

Over the years local residents of Rebero in Gicumbi District north of the Rwandan capital of Kigali, watched as their soil was washed away by rain.

They also had to contend with landslides. Until a local group, the Rebero Emergency Response and Mitigation (ERDM) committee, started to reclaim the land in 2004, mainly through terracing.

"After being trained in risk management we came up with a community disaster preparedness plan," said Eugene Habyarimana, the committee chairman.

Working with the NGO World Vision, ERDM's activities aim to reduce the risk of disaster and increase agricultural productivity among the predominantly farming population of Rebero. Formed in partnership with the government, the ERDM represents the administrative unit known as a sector - part of Rwanda's administrative structure that comprises provinces, districts, sectors and cells split into groups of 10 houses.

Some results can already be seen. "We are teaching the community how to construct different types of terraces," said William Ngabo, a humanitarian emergency affairs manager with World Vision Rwanda. "We are starting to see some improvement. Previously, the soils from the hills would cover the crops growing in the valleys, these days that has reduced."

Rebero is just one area in Rwanda experiencing problems related to land, in a country with a population density estimated at 310 people per sqkm. With about nine million living on 26,338 sqkm of land, Rwanda supports the densest population in Africa, most of who are engaged in subsistence agriculture.

According to the agriculture ministry, the lack of enough arable land for Rwanda's population is exacerbated by the country's small territory, which does not offer many alternatives to increased land use. Apart from being small, the land is degraded. Erosion is responsible for soil nutrient losses estimated at 945,200 tonnes of organic materials, 41,210 of nitrogen, 280 of phosphorus and 3,055 tonness of potash annually.

"We estimate that erosion affects [our] ability to feed 40,000 persons per year," the ministry said in a recent statement. Erosion was directly responsible for the leaching of arable soils and indirectly for increased transport of solids through waterways downstream.

At least 37.5 percent of the land in Rwanda needs to be managed before being cultivated, and overall an estimated 39.1 percent of the land has a high erosion risk. So far, few measures against erosion have been implemented and losses from erosion per year average close to 14 million tonnes of soil, according to the ministry.


IRIN

Despite rhetoric, little sign of agricultural committment by African governments

Despite numerous statements by African governments on their efforts to improve the food security situation in the continent, a report commissioned by the World Bank and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) gives a different picture. Low crop production and rising prices of staple foods in Kenya and other African countries are not about to end any time soon.

The report, an outcome of months of research by some of the world’s top scientists, points a finger at the governments of sub-Saharan Africa for allowing poor land use practices that have compromised agricultural production. Practices such as deforestation and opening up of marginal lands for agriculture are cited as some of the reasons why African countries have remained net importers of food.

“Expansion of agriculture into marginal areas has resulted in nutrient and biodiversity losses, water and soil degradation and loss of pasture,” says the report, which assessed the status of the world’s agricultural knowledge, science and technology.

The research also laments that application of fertiliser, both organic and inorganic, in sub-Saharan Africa is on the decline. The finding fits well with the current situation in Kenya which has seen fertiliser application decline sharply due to prohibitive prices.

The cost of fertiliser in Kenya has risen by more than 400 per cent, a factor that has been blamed on the escalating oil prices and its by-products. Natural gas, a primary component in nitrogen fertiliser production, represents 75 to 90 per cent of the production costs.

The report entitled International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) warns that without increased application of fertiliser, many countries in sub-Saharan African will not produce larger harvests to match their increasing population growth rates.

Though agriculture accounts for an average of 32 per cent of the region’s Gross Domestic Product, the overall per capita yields have recorded a sharp decline since 1970. Crop yields are currently below the world average, leaving most of the countries net food importers.

The story is no different in fisheries, which apart from a means of livelihood for millions of inhabitants, is also an important source of foreign exchange earnings. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where per capita fish supplies are falling as a result of stagnation in capture coupled with a growing population.

Lake Victoria, which is shared by the three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, is one of the water bodies which has seen its fish stocks decline due to pollution and over-fishing.

According to the study, fish supplies in the region declined from nine kilogrammes per person in 1973 to 6.6 kilogrammes in 1997. It is even feared that this may have declined further due to invasion of the water hyacinth.

Though it is an option to increase fish production in sub-Saharan Africa, aquaculture only contributes two per cent of the region’s total production compared to a global average of 38 per cent.

The UN and the World Bank have already warned that Kenya is one of the countries that will be hardest hit, if the spiralling food prices continue.

Cereals like maize, rice and wheat have reached the highest prices per tonne in the past five years, affecting the net importers of food negatively, which have to spend more money on the importation of the foods.

Proper environmental management, the study argues, can reduce declines in yields by maintaining the soil moisture, which affects more than 80 per cent of Africa’s agricultural land. Loss of soil moisture limits nutrient uptake, affecting the quantity and quality of the harvest.

Use of conservation methods that retain soil moisture and organic matter are still low in many African countries, explaining why soil erosion still remains a major problem in the continent.

Another concern raised by the report is the genetic erosion of some of the continent’s traditional crops. The report mentions staples like teff, yams and other traditional crops as species which are currently under threat of extinction. Though considered unimportant globally, the staples are still critical in preserving food security in the continent.

Problems bedevilling the continent aside, the report sheds a ray of hope, saying that Africa can exploit its potential in agricultural knowledge, science and technology to reduce the hunger and poverty affecting millions of its inhabitants.

One of the notable successes that can be attributed to the wise use of agricultural knowledge is the development and adoption of improved crops and livestock breeds. Others are bio-control of pests and integrated management of natural resources.

Adoption of new techniques is important given that 30 per cent of Africans are chronically hungry. There are also similar levels of malnutrition among children under five. The study says the situation is worsened by the lack of micronutrient-rich foods for improving health.

However, to improve the micro-nutrient content of foods, the region needs to make prudent use of both surface and ground water, improve on livestock breeds and stop relying solely on hardy and disease-resistant indigenous varieties with low productivity. This is important because half of the region’s internal renewable water resources are already below the minimum threshold for development, which is 500 cubic metres per person per year. Even worse, some countries have begun using the region’s large reserves of ground water without concluding any formal agreements with their neighbours. This may bring about conflicts in future, further compromising the continent’s fight against hunger.

The production of biofuels also poses a threat to food security. Though Africa has been touted as one of the continents with the potential to produce first-generation biofuels, the study cautions countries not to rush into it as it is likely to put pressure on forests and marginal lands. In fact, African governments are still divided over the issue.

According to Energy PS Patrick Nyoike, the Ministry of Energy has developed a strategy for the development of the biodiesel industry under the stewardship of the National Biofuels Committee.
Mr Nyoike says plans to initiate a Jatropha pilot project at Yatta in Kitui District of Eastern Province are ready. However, he insists that caution will be taken to ensure that food production is not compromised.

To ensure that farmers increase production, African governments must come up with incentives and reduce uncertainties and high risks associated with farming.

Though a profitable venture in the developed world, agriculture in Africa is yet to be a gainful investment, especially for small scale farmers. Investments in the sector, by African governments, are negligible despite the major role it plays in employment and food production.

As a result, the study urges African governments to help speed up regional knowledge, understanding and uptake of new agricultural technologies which, the authors maintain, are patchy.

“Education still focuses on learning facts rather than developing problem-solving skills. And the region is unique in having governments and formal education working largely in languages not spoken as first languages by most of their people,” it adds explaining other reasons for the poor agricultural production.

As such, the approach to imparting knowledge must change. Scientists have already warned of the danger of losing the rich reserves of traditional knowledge in areas such as water harvesting and animal breeding. Insufficient cross-border co-operation also limits the opportunities to share experiences.

Prof Bob Watson, the Director of IAASTD, calls for more equitable policies that do take the interests of the poor into account. “To argue, as we do, that continuing to focus on production alone will undermine our agricultural capital and leave us with an increasingly degraded and divided planet is to reiterate an old message. But it is a message that has not always had resonance in some parts of the world,” adds Prof Watson.

The study also urges developed countries to chip in through modern technologies and increasing trade and marketing opportunities.

However, the assessment laments that liberalising agricultural trade does not appear to have helped small farmers or rural communities in much of the world.

“Opening national agricultural markets to international competition before basic infrastructure and national institutions are in place can undermine agriculture,” the research says.

All told, the study says Africa’s agriculture needs urgent reforms if the trend of declining yields is to be reversed.

Daily Nation

Poorly terraced land causes top soil losses in Rwanda

Rwanda's Ministry of Agriculture plans to triple agricultural production next season, the Minister of Agriculture Christopher Bazivamo has said.

He said that 31 percent of the terraced land in the country is not productive. “This land is not very productive because most of the farmers lack the necessary skills to ensure effective productivity,” he explained.

He added that there was no clear strategy to address the poor skills of the farmers in the country. The minister also told members of the Senate that close to 15 million tonnes of soil has been swept away by soil erosion.He attributed this to poor maintenance of terraces.

Bazivamo said that the ministry plans to reduce soil erosion to zero by next year. This he hopes will help to increase on the productivity of agricultural land.

The Senators were informed that the Ministry of Agriculture would increase the amount of terraced land from 193,735 hectares to 1,000,400 by next year.

New Times

Bad farming practices blamed for infertile soils

The urgency to restore soil fertility in Africa stems from the fact that more than three-quarters of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa has been so depleted of the basic nutrients that crops need to survive, leading to reduced crop yields.

The soils are also low in organic matter and have poor water holding capacity. Experts warn that until these conditions are reversed, food production in Africa will remain depressed. They also say that unsustainable land practices are contributing to massive erosion and deforestation.

According to experts, much of Africa’s soils are ancient, derived from granite weathered over millennia. But soil conditions have worsened in recent decades. Driven to meet the food demands of a growing population, African farmers have steadily abandoned traditional practices that restore soil nutrients.

It is estimated that continuous cultivation without soil revitalisation causes the loss of eight million tonnes of soil nutrients each year.

Today, there are 95 million hectares of degraded land in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to greatly reduced farmland productivity.

In the past, traditional farming practices maintained soil fertility by allowing fields to lie fallow for a few years. But population growth and pressure on land have led to a sharp decline in fallowing. Today, fallowing is practised on less than 25 per cent of land in 29 African countries and is expected to disappear entirely from 20 of those countries in the near future.

On the other hand, few small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are able to use fertilisers to restore soil health — because they either cannot get or afford it. Today, sub-Saharan Africa uses one-tenth of the fertiliser commonly applied on farms around the world.

In addition, there is an art and science to the efficient and environmentally responsible combination of fertilisers, organic inputs and cropping techniques to get a maximum return on investment. Finding the right combinations requires good farmer knowledge and technical knowledge.

Statistics show that during the 2002-2004 farming season, 85 per cent of African farmland, most of it in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced moderate annual losses of at least 30 kilogrammes of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, and 40 per cent of farmlands experienced high losses of more than 60 kilogrammes per hectare.

It has also been confirmed that nutrient losses are higher in particular regions. For example, annual losses on farmlands bordering rivers and on the dry savannahs of Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya can be as high as 100 kilogrammes per hectare.

And agriculture lands developed on coastal sediments in Senegal, Gambia, Benin, Somalia, Kenya and Mozambique are losing up to 120 kilogrammes per hectare.

The East African

Agricultural practices causing global loss of top soil

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

"The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture. We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington.

On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains. "We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," he said. Aeschliman is one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.

Montgomery has written a popular book, "Dirt," to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as "soil mining" to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth's natural rate of restoring topsoil.

"Globally, it's clear we are eroding soils at a rate much faster than they can form," said John Reganold, a soils scientist at Washington State University. "It's hard to get people to pay much attention to this because, frankly, most of us take soil for granted."

The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.

The United Nations has warned of worldwide soil degradation -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where soil loss has contributed to the rapidly increasing number of malnourished people.

Healthy topsoil is a biological matrix, a housing complex for an incredibly diverse community of organisms -- billions of beneficial microbes per handful, nitrogen-fixing fungi, nutrients and earthworms whose digestive tracts transform the fine grains of sterile rock and plant detritus into the fertile excrement that forms soil.

As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. Very slowly.

Ron Myhrum, state soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's office in Spokane, agreed that global soil loss is a huge problem. But Myhrum said erosion rates in the Northwest region have improved recently because of better conservation farming practices, including federal payments to farmers to leave some natural ground cover in highly erodible areas.

"We don't have the kind of dust storms here we used to have," Myhrum said. "What's more alarming to me than erosion is conversion of farmland to urban use."

That is indeed another way to lose soil -- paving it over. Judy Herring, manager of King County's farmland preservation program, said the county has lost 60 percent of its farmland since the 1960s. In 1979, Herring said, voters approved a bond program that buys back farmland to protect it from development (and has done this for 13,200 acres so far).

But while some land is lost to development, pollution or changing weather patterns, Montgomery, Reganold and others say global soil loss is a crisis mostly rooted in agriculture.

"Erosion rates have improved here, but that doesn't mean they're good," Reganold said. Topsoil clearly is still being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated, he said.

Aeschliman, the Palouse farmer, a stocky and energetic man who doesn't seem to notice that he's in his 60s, stood on a dirt road looking at the difference between his land and that of a neighbor. Because most neighbors are relatives, he did not provide any names here.

"Just look at that!" he bellowed, pointing to a series of water-carved cracks and gouges running down a recently tilled field of wheat. Every year, he said, these fields are tilled and the rains come, washing the soil down into the road so deep the county routinely has to dig it out. The rest of the soil runs off ... eventually to the Pacific.

"Here, look at this stuff," Aeschliman said as he held up a handful of the fine brown silt that had eroded off his neighbor's hillside. "Now, look over here."

He walked across the road to his no-till wheat field. Unlike the rolling hills of loose dirt on the tilled field, Aeschliman's field looks more like a shag rug, with its rows of dead wheat stubble. He reached down into the dirt and pulled out a coarsely textured, much darker clump of dirt, roots and debris.

"This soil is full of worms, bacteria and all sorts of life," Aeschliman said. "And it stays put. That stuff over there (waving his hand back behind him) is just powder, brown dust. It's dead. There's no worms, no life in it."

Thirty years ago, Aeschliman was one of the first in the area to grow his grains using no-till farming methods. He's an ardent no-till proselytizer today, but he didn't abandon tilling the fields based on some organic epiphany or desire to save the world.

"I just got tired of all the mud," Aeschliman said. The family home, built in the 1880s, sits at the base of a long drainage off the rolling wheat fields. Every spring, with the tilling and the rain, his home would be a foot deep in muddy runoff.

No-till farming could do a lot to reduce topsoil erosion, Reganold said, but it's not without its downsides. Switching to no-till farming requires heavy upfront investment and learning new techniques, he said, and also tends to depend more on herbicides because the weeds are no longer controllable by plowing them into the soil.

Organic farming methods also can reduce soil loss, Reganold said. He cited his own research, which has shown a marked increase in soil health, water retention and regrowth when organic methods are used rather than the traditional methods.

A regional association of farmers and other proponents of no-till agriculture, also known as direct-seed farming, is holding its annual meeting in next week. Aeschliman is one of the founders of the organization, the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association, and is happy to see that no-till farming is growing in popularity.

"It's both good for the soil and good for your pocketbook," he said.

Seattle Post Intelligence

Land degradation takes its toll on Lesotho

Overgrazing of marginal land by cattle is a main contributing factor to the reduction of plants that retain topsoil when the rains come. Flash floods are common in the summer. Incorrect farming techniques also contribute to soil erosion, a greater conservation threat to the environment than drought: seasonal rains come and go but soil erosion never ceases.

Only 10 percent of Lesotho's 30,000sq km of mountainous terrain is classified as arable, according to the June 2007 report by the Lesotho Meteorological Services.

"Much of the land of Lesotho is vulnerable to extensive soil erosion," noted the 2007 Lesotho Drought Flash Appeal made in July by UN agencies. Several of them are involved in conservation programmes, without which agricultural production would remain compromised and food assistance from international donors would become a perpetual necessity.

According to Lineo Mdee, Sustainable Development Advisor at the UN Development Programme in Lesotho, continuing degradation of the natural resource base and the impoverishment of the soil are key factors in food insecurity. Two long-term developments have contributed to soil degradation: a region-wide process of desertification, which has turned stretches of arable land into marginal land, and a decades-long mismanagement of land.

"The original vegetative cover has disappeared, and invasive species that cannot retain moisture and which deplete the soil are increasing," said Mdee. "These are plants originating from outside Lesotho and Africa. Now, with the drought and Lesotho's usual fierce windstorms, the topsoil is blown away. When we do get rain it comes in torrents, and it makes gullies and dongas."

Harvesting scarce indigenous trees for firewood also poses a problem, exacerbated by people's poverty. Other fuel sources are unaffordable, and few people in rural areas are connected to the nation's electrical grid.

"This is a cold country. People need fuel; people are burning wood, and also crop residue. The few trees are going and, instead of ploughing back into the earth the crop residue to assist the next year's crops, there is nothing left," said Mdee.

Counteracting land mismanagement tops the conservation programmes initiated by UN agencies. "We need to find crops that really suit the soil types of this country and weather. Because of traditional customs, people grow maize and sorghum, though these are not the best crops for our conditions. We have declining productivity of the land as a result," Mdee commented.

Hassan Abdi, Programme Officer for the WFP in Lesotho, said training farmers to make the most of their land would boost harvests and preserve the environment. "We are advocating conservation agriculture as a way to halt further soil erosion and make more productive what farmland there is. We are encouraging people to get into environmental management."

Rather than burning crop residue, like maize stalks, during winter, or using it as cattle fodder, conservation agriculture requires farmers to leave it on the ground to nourish the soil.

"We assist communities to build earth dams and, in some cases, concrete dams, and at the same time we are reducing runoff by building retaining structures," said Abdi. Throughout the lowlands, barriers in dongas and hillocks of stones or layers of rocks held by wire mesh are built to retain soil.

In another WFP-sponsored programme, communities plant trees in dongas to rehabilitate the environment. "These are able-bodied persons who are unemployed, and because it is a community initiative the people have a sense of ownership of the project," said Abdi. "We give them some food as an incentive so at the end of the day they do not go home with empty stomachs."

IRIN

Land management, agro-productivity falter in Benin

For many people, the importing of tomatoes is probably not a topic of great fascination. But then, they're not Sylvestre Fandohan. This Beninese agricultural engineer sees in his country's consumption of tomatoes from neighbouring Burkina Faso an indictment of poor natural resource management by the Cotonou government and its citizens. As national co-ordinator of the Conservation and Natural Resource Management Programme (Programme de conservation et de gestion des ressources naturelles, ProCGRN), a joint Beninese-German initiative mainly carried out in the north-western Atacora and Donga regions, he is also working to change this state of affairs.

Recently, Fandohan sat down with Michée Boko to discuss ProCGRN, which got underway in January 2004 and is scheduled to wrap up in December 2014; the project aims to help communities make better use of natural resources, to increase their income. Ultimately, it also works to fight desertification in Benin.

Q : What agricultural practices have you come across that are bad for the land, but which subsistence farmers persist in carrying out?

A : For example, farmers create large mounds to grow yams, often in low-lying areas that they could use to produce rice, for instance, helping to conserve water and land. The cultivation of yams is also very destructive for natural resources. It's land-extensive, slash-and-burn farming. It's a crop that is always raised on cleared land,abandoned after three years, at most, for new bush land. People set fire to the bush on this new land to clear, and late in the dry season intead of earlier as we often advise them. Late fires severely degrade the soil and kill animals and plants.

Other dangerous practices are uncontrolled forest exploitation, especially of timber, with chainsaws; tools which are banned because they enable an exploitation that is too rapid and that leads to wastage of wood. This also compromises good management of natural resources, and is a factor in "Sahelisation" and ultimately desertification.

Q : Are you saying that natural resources in Benin are under threat?

A : Absolutely! Benin has fine laws that protect the environment and natural resources, but they are not implemented at all, or are poorly implemented. Unfortunately, Benin has not yet developed all the instruments of good governance that are necessary for resources to be better managed. Today, people exploit what they want, as they want, with assistance from all ranks of forestry officials.There are people who export forest products of Benin and pass them off as products of Togo or Nigeria.

Taking Burkina (Faso) as an example, I would say that in the area of water resource management, Benin is considerably behind some neighbouring countries. Benin has more water than Burkina, but it consumes many tomatoes from Burkina Faso, which is a dry, Sahelian country. This is strange and shameful, as compared to Burkina, Benin is better endowed by nature. That we do not know how to manage these resources better than people who are less endowed by nature, I find very serious. It's very important for us, as Benin is an agricultural country; making water available in all seasons is a fight that we must continue to wage. This could solve many of the problems concerning pressure on natural resources and desertification.

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