Jenny Hopkinson, while working at media company Politico, spent some time researching the American soil health and if modern agriculture techniques were damaging the extremely important soil microbiome. The article essentially breaks down the most popular modern farming method, tillage. Tillage is extremely problematic because when this is done, the soil gets broken up, turned and hit with some form of chemical fertilizer which extremely damages the soil microbiome. By destroying the microbiome in the soil, you are destroying the many microorganisms inside the soil which are directly related to soil health. Without those microorganisms, the crops suffer resulting in lower yields and poor quality. This is becoming more and more common every year in the United States, resulting in less and less healthy soil at an alarming rate.
Now this is extremely alarming information, due to the fact that once the soil is unusable, all life struggles to exist in that space. If agriculture methods stay the same as they have been, we are looking at a grim future in terms of food and oxygen which are both essentials to life. There are solutions that have been researched and tested: one of those is known as cover-cropping. Cover cropping is essentially just rotating crops and making sure to plant secondary plants like legumes and vegetables on exposed soil between the main crops.
Humans in the agriculture industry are often forced to plant the same crop over and over, year after year due to the government subsidy program that the government pays out for production of a specific crop. This gives the farmers a monetary incentive (While a low one), this has made it hard to get farmers to change their methods that their families and friends have been doing for decades. Also many rely on this money from the government to make a living, so it is a sort of pit farmers have fallen into.
Image of a tractor tilling soil, taken by Keith Weller from the U.S Department of Agriculture
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Deforestation is another major environmental issue that is plaguing many beautiful places across the globe. Deforestation is the act of removing all the natural trees and brush in an environment to clear it out for business purposes, logging purposes or natural resource gain. Oil drilling is one of the most common reasons for deforestation in the modern day as it is one of the most sought after resources on Earth. This is becoming a major problem that is getting worse and worse every day in the Amazon Jungle. The Amazon Jungle is an amazingly biodiverse place and one of the most beautiful but dangerous places in the world, but is cherished and loved by many. Large corporations come in and clear the land of the Amazon for oil, and at the same time completely destroy and pollute the local ecosystem with no regards to life or the people living there in the Amazon Jungle. The combination of the unregulated logging and incredibly messy oil drilling, completely destroys the natural balance and leaves a huge impact on the environment. This is just the beginning, and over time without a solution or a stop to this it will continue to get worse, to an irreversible level.
This problem is a very large one in the same way that the farming methods in the United States are, and they are surprisingly similar as they both completely destroy key components of the environment. As the soil tilling breaks down the soil microbiome and prevents life, the oil taints everything it touches, and seeps into the ground and local ecosystem causing serious repercussions.
Although, much like the farming methods, there are much more sustainable ways to clear land and not completely destroy the ecosystem. There are entire groups that are dedicated to this practice known as “Sustainable Forestry”, which consists of applying and educating about sustainable forestry practices and key ideas like how to maintain forest health. This article was written by James C. Finley, a professor of forestry explains what sustainable forestry is, and how it may be interpreted to different people.
Image of deforestation of a rainforest taken by Danielle Gidsicki on wikipedia
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New Hampshire, where I am from, is a relatively small state with massive forests and many local farms. These issues that I have discussed in this post are extremely important, and even in a small state like New Hampshire, we can do our part to not contribute to the problems and to actively find solutions to better sustain our local ecosystem.
In New Hampshire there are many local farmers in nearly every town, and purchasing goods from them directly at a local farmers market is a fantastic way to give back to the local economy and support farmers that are growing their own vegetables without using massive machines or huge amounts of pesticides. But that does not mean that there are not some farms in New Hampshire that use these farming techniques, so the best thing you can do is educate yourself a bit on your local economy and where your food is really coming from.
Another excellent way to promote farming techniques is something that is a little different, but is a brilliant idea. UMass Amherst, a college relatively close to New Hampshire, started an initiative on campus to create permaculture gardens around some of the empty spaces on campus. Permaculture is essentially where you focus on building the soil that you plant your crops in, through one of many different environmentally friendly ways such as composting. The food produced in these gardens on campus end up being used in meals on campus! I think this is an amazing idea, and more places should look into doing something such as this. There is an excellent documentary about this, which you can find below this post. Overall I believe that if more colleges started doing this, it would set a massive standard for environmental health and lead to many young people heading into the future with a positive outlook on sustainability.
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