Breaking Ground

When Jenny Sabo first came to Montana to start a new life in agriculture, knowledge was a major obstacle. There were plenty of people to talk to for advice, university courses to take, books to read, and trade associations to join for an aspiring rancher. But at every turn, the answers to the questions she posed, from weeds, to animal health, always involved more chemicals – chemicals she didn't want to use because they would harm her soil. There was simply no obvious path to learning how to being the soil-first rancher she wanted to be, raising beef cattle with a minimum of agrichemicals while keeping the soil as rich and productive as possible. To get there, Jenny pulled articles from old books and magazines, some dating back to before the advent of chemical agriculture. To connect to other people, she also formed a Yahoo group called Women of the Dirt to trade ideas and give each other advice. Today, the group is an essential resource for soil-conscious farmers and ranchers in need of technical advice.

“We share what works and what doesn’t when it comes to living off the land,” Tanda Cook, one of the group’s members, told us. “Farming is challenging and having a group that, no matter what, has your back through life, death, birth, and harvest is one of the greatest gifts we can wake up to every day.”

With about 200 members, Women of the Dirt has a limited reach. But its powerful role in the lives of members like Cook speaks to a larger reason why practices that degrade soil are pervasive in the global food system. For people who don’t farm, it can be hard to appreciate how complicated making food grow out of a piece of land for a living can be. There is a lot to know just to get started, and the learning never really ends. From the markets to the weather, the conditions farmers work in are always changing, so knowledge has to be constantly added and adapted.

“Agriculture is a science which is done spontaneously here, without following any rules,” Emil Nersisyan, a fruit grower in Armenia said. “That’s why knowledge and innovation in agriculture sector is needed.”

If a farmer’s methods of cultivating the land and adding fertility degrade the soil over time, it may be because he or she knows no other way. So how do farmers learn their craft? And how do they balance the health of their soil with the productivity of their land? These are questions we wanted to ask farmers, not just in Brazil and Montana, but all over the world.

To do that, we hired correspondents – mostly professional journalists – in eighteen countries on six continents to talk to farmers in their area. We gave them a list of questions about soil fertility and agricultural practices to ask farmers, and had them to send the results, including photos and video, back to us. The result is a kind of global read on the soil management practices all over the world.

In their interviews, farmers often spoke of soil degradation in their own areas. “Exhausted,” is how Lam Kam Ying, a farmer near Hong Kong, described the soil in his area after years of intense use. “Tired” is how Jesús Parrao Bolaño in Colombia described the effect of years of intense farming. In Tanzania, Anderson Daniel, a maize grower, said he had seen the soil in his area lose fertility because farmers used “the same seed on the same farm” over a long period.

“I’ve noticed a huge change from a long time ago until now in the health of the soil, from all the drugs [fertilizers] and ‘failed things’ they come and put in the ground,” said Ahmed Saif, a farmer in Egypt. Ismail Mahmoud, another farmer in Egypt, added that the ground became tired from heavy use. "Just like we get tired from all this work, the ground gets tired, too," he said. "You'll find that its harvest becomes less... It's just like if you become tired and you take a little rest, then it goes back to working. Using too many chemicals can make the ground tired a little bit."

Farmers listed a number of sources for information, including their parents, other farmers, non-government organizations, websites, and books. Felipe Iñiguez Pérez, a farmer in Mexico, said he learned ancient methods working with Mayan and Chontal people. Joshua Allen works full-time as a corporate banker in Sydney, Australia, and often picks up ideas from the agribusiness companies he works for.

In many countries, government extension programs also play a role in bringing knowledge into the field. “Extension services serve as the intermediary between modern technology and the farmers in the field,” said Tunde Arosanyin, a farmer in Nigeria. But, he added, in recent years, extension has gone into “extinction” in Nigeria.

Where the government does not provide assistance, private companies sometimes fill the void, but the help they offer may not prioritize soil health.

Elizeu Didione, a Brazilian soil scientist, says that in his country, farmers wanting advice often buy it through a package of agricultural inputs from a big chemical or seed company, like Monsanto, BASF, or DuPont. A typical package includes fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and assistance from a company technician.

“The so-called ‘technical assistance’ is considered a bonus,” Didione told me when I was researching soy production in Brazil. “Needless to say, the technicians are more worried about pitching their products and increasing yield than soil conservation and erosion. The farmers don’t see soil conservation and erosion and as an immediate concern, and the technical assistance they ‘hire’ when acquiring products frequently assures them it’s more of a nuisance than a real problem that needs to be dealt with."

Liam Dunne, a grain farmer in Ireland, says he tends to ignore a lot of what chemical and seed companies have to say.

“I’d listen to them but I’m not sure I’d actually go looking for their advice,” he said. “A lot of farmers around here, we would tend to sit together and consult one another and decide ourselves what we think is the best advice.”

Not everyone is in a position to reject a company's advice. Rajendra Prasad, a sugarcane grower in India earns about $700 per year farming three acres of land. Years ago, he said, cows and oxen were plentiful, and farmers used their manure to fertilize the land. But some farmers traded their oxen for tractors, and others, wanting to put their children into school, could no longer afford to keep their cows, so manure became scarce.

Ten years ago, a mill opened in the village and monopolized the cane market. Representatives came to Prasad’s farm and tested the soil, and advised him to use urea, a common nitrogen fertilizer. Prasad says he knows the urea damages the soil (the compound has been shown to negatively affect soil biology at doses commonly applied to Indian farms), but without dung, he has no choice but to use it.

Not every farmer we spoke with used a chemical-intensive approach. Having learned some different methods, some had adopted approaches which used scarcely any chemicals and prioritized the health of the soil.

It would be too easy to say that sustainable farming is simply a choice a farmer makes, or fails to make. Whatever options a farmer has to choose from are shaped by conditions he or she works in. Like in Europe or the United States, In Australia, approval from an organic certifier can bring a higher price for a farmer’s crop. But to be certified, a farmer has to follow certain rules, and those rules, says Bill Shields, an apple farmer near Sydney, are complicated by baseless assumption about what’s good for soil and what isn’t.

“'Sustainable' is a definition that people interpret as it suits themselves,” he said. By the standards of the National Association of Sustainable Agriculture, an organic certifier, sulphur fertilizer is allowed because it’s “natural”, even though it can be harmful to soil, he said, but synthetic compounds that dissolve in the soil are not allowed because they’re man-made.

Certification is, for many, a far off concern compared to the more immediate problem of soil degradation. Yet even for farmers who want to grow by doing less harm to his or her soil, the path forward is not always obvious. It can take knowledge not easily acquired and money, which can be even scarcer.

"I would benefit from more information – courses, trainings, meetings – about the newest ways to preserve soil using modern technologies, proper agricultural equipment, less harmful biochemical impact, using more organic fertilizers,” said Gandrabur Petru, a farmer in Moldova. If he could get his crops to market more easily, he said, he might have more money to invest in his farm.

“I think on the environmental management side, [farming] can be improved by using less herbicide, less insecticide, and less chemical fertilizer,” Antônio Edson de Souza, a coffee grower in Brazil, said. To get there, he is applying for fair trade certification with some other farmers. With that, he said, they’ll be able to fetch a higher price for their coffee “and invest even more in the land.”

“I think, in the past, they harmed the soil too much with insecticides and herbicides,” de Souza said of past farmers in his area. “Today we have a different understanding. We are acting to preserve the soil.”

See the next part in this series:

Common Ground
What can Cuba teach the world about preserving its soil?

Did you miss a part of the series?

From the Ground Up
Though we don’t think about it, soil is a finite resource—a living ecosystem that’s way more complex, important and fragile than you think.

Where the Grass is Greener
A global soy boom has turned Brazil's grasslands into a farm. Now the farm is under threat.

Holding Ground
What does it take to raise beef on the edge of American agriculture?

The Ecology of Knowledge
How do farmers learn to be soil stewards? We asked some from all over the world

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