"If man cannot find a way to treat the soil in such a way as to preserve this source of life, and is unable to maintain it, we must expect the time to come when our human species, having squandered this vast inheritance, will disappear from the face of the earth..."
Evelyn Barbara Balfour, British pioneer of organic farming (The Living Soil, 1943)
Alena Malíková graduated from the University of Life Sciences in Brno. She worked at the Bioinstitut, ops, the Institute for Organic Agriculture and Sustainable Landscape Development in Olomouc. She is the administrator of the Moravian Gate regional center of the PRO-BIO Association of Organic Farmers in Příbor, where she lives; she founded, among other things, the VIKTORINA LOCA cooperative and a packaging-free store with local and organic food. She participated in the founding of the Association of Local Food Initiatives in Prague. She is a member of the Soil Foundation, the Pilgrim association and the Czech section of the Budapest Club. She deals with the topic of responsible human agricultural management in the landscape in various contexts. She is convinced that we can farm ecologically productively in rural and urban landscapes on the basis of careful work with soil and water, on the basis of caring for old and regional varieties of vegetables, herbs and field crops and old breeding livestock, and on the basis of developing close mutual relations between farmers and consumers. This is the text of the author's lecture, which was presented at this year's sixth seminar of the Mobile University of Nature / PUP "Becoming Native or the Search for Home" (August 2–8, 2021) in Nové Hamry; accompanying photos to the text by Jiří Zemánek.
Dear friends, I greet you warmly from northern Moravia, from Příbor, and I thank those who read this text of mine at the seminar. Finally, at least in this way I will try to describe what my mind and intuition tell me when I remember our intimate connection with the soil. This year's entire seminar, and in a way all the seminars of the Traveling University of Nature, are actually about the same thing, about the amazing variety and diversity of the forms of the Universe, about understanding relationships - about realizing what we are a part of -, about our mutual cooperation and our cooperation with the natural world around us, and also about learning gratitude together.
After we were able to see the devastation of the tornado with our own eyes in South Moravia, I expected a mention – if not a loud warning or outright warning – that we were doing something wrong. Or at least a question: Isn't it our fault too? And perhaps a suggestion: Let's find out what the problem is and take a new path. I don't know if this question and the desire for an answer appeared anywhere in the media.
Yes, people showed great solidarity, donated many millions of crowns to rebuild homes for families affected by the tornado, but we are still going the old way. For example, we adopted a decree stating that farmers can "only" drain 9 tons of soil from one hectare per year.1The Parliament of the Czech Republic has adopted a decree on the protection of agricultural land from water erosion, according to which the state allows 9 tons of soil per hectare per year to flow from the field in the case of deep and medium-deep soils, and 2 tons of soil per hectare per year in the case of shallow soils. It is sad that are we even dealing with the permissible amount of soil loss, and moreover, the decree only deals with water erosion, while there is also wind erosion, which also results in huge soil losses. The decree does not address that at all. Let's imagine that, for example, 270 tons of soil can flow away from a thirty-hectare field per year!!! We don't make soil, it's not just some mixture of living and non-living matter. Soil is a network of relationships, an ecosystem that we will never fully understand, soil is alive.
What is soil?
It's "just" soil, clay, ... soil, dirt... what are we talking about, where to start? The key to understanding the soil world is to focus attention on the relationships between the plant root and the living and non-living components of the soil. Thanks to the gift of energy from the Sun2Let us recall the words of Brian T. Swimm: “The sun gives itself up every second and transforms itself into the energy that we take in with every meal we eat. We very rarely think about this fundamental truth of biology, and yet it has supreme spiritual significance. The sun transforms itself into a stream of energy that, through photosynthesis, is transformed into plants that are consumed by animals. So for four billion years, humans have feasted on the sun's energy, stored in the form of grain, corn, or reindeer, while the sun dies every day as the sun and is reborn as the vitality of the earth. So these solar flares are in fact the very energy of tremendous human courage. Brian Thomas Swimme,The hidden heart of the cosmos. MALVERN 2019, p. 45. Photosynthesis takes place in the green parts of plants, during which simple sugars and subsequently much more complex organic substances are formed. How does the plant deal with these simple sugars? Some of them are consumed and some, up to 80 %, flow down to the roots, where another miracle occurs in the rhizosphere, in the immediate layer of soil around the root hairs, in this area teeming with life. The plant donates simple sugars, so-called exudates, to soil organisms and thus awakens them to life. It supplies them with energy and in return receives nutrients from them that it would not be able to obtain on its own, whether it is nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements. And the miracle of mutual exchange is joined by the thin filaments of fungi, which also participate in this economy of gift.
When we walk through a meadow or forest and when we look at a field, let us try to realize what is happening underground. Beneath our feet is an incredibly sophisticated alliance between roots, microorganisms and higher organisms and fungi, which together literally form an underground network, an underground internet. Plants themselves give to soil organisms and in return receive and are nourished by them, communicate with each other and help each other; there is constant connection and movement. And thanks to this, the soil is healthy, thrives, its structure is crumbly, allows water to soak in and clean, cools the landscape and generally supports life. In his farming, the farmer should focus on contributing to the formation of relationships between plants and soil. He should sow, plant as many crops as possible, support cooperation between soil and plants, and the soil should always be covered with plants if possible.
What happens when we use industrial fertilizers?
Industrial fertilizers disrupt the alliance that is formed in the rhizosphere, so the plant is not motivated to donate and as a result does not receive nutrients from soil organisms in return. It only pragmatically receives them in an easily accessible form from chemical fertilizers. Its root system therefore does not develop and consequently the crumbly structure of the soil is not formed. The soil disintegrates, ceases to live and becomes susceptible to erosion.3Anyone interested in this topic can watch Jaroslav Záhora's lecture "Drought begins where life in the soil ends", which was filmed by Karel Čtveráček.. And what about pesticides? With substances for "protection against diseases, pests and weeds"? In the case of their use, the situation worsens even more. Soil microorganisms are destroyed: springtails, earthworms and other organisms bound to the soil. The roots have no one to form relationships with and there is a problem - again the soil structure is disturbed with a whole range of specific manifestations, be it erosion, inability to retain water or declining biodiversity. The landscape is withering. So what happens in the case of practicing chemical agriculture? Relationships are disturbed and collapsed. And here is the core of the problem - a person with a cold mind, with chemical crutches and heavy mechanization, who sees himself as a dictator rather than a co-creator of the processes taking place in the landscape, blindly deepens the destruction of ecosystems.
Our efforts to preserve and increase soil fertility should therefore be based on integrity and comprehensiveness.4The crumbly structure of the soil/soil crumbs are round (author's note)., that also means more on feeling and intuition and less on the analyzing and deadening reason. Only in this way can the soil begin to become sacred for us again. It will be fertile, healing and revitalizing for it, for the landscape, for the food and for us. For we are the soil.5See Vandana Shiva's article "We are the soil". In: Healthy, vibrant, fertile soil (edited by Radomil Hradil). Fabula Bioinstitut, 2015, pp. 252-254 (translated by Alena Malíková).
How can we specifically express our conscious connection to the land? Each of us has a choice.
What can a farmer do?
He can decide to learn to perceive the place where he farms, to tune in to it, to communicate and cooperate with it, without industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides.
What can the landowner do?
He can decide to whom and under what conditions he will rent the land. He can monitor the quality of land management and can discuss it with the farmer.
What can the person who procures food do?
Because the word consumer is a very vague term for someone who buys food. They can decide who to buy food from based on how the farmer farms (organic, biodynamic, conventional), how far the food has traveled, whether and how the food has been processed, whether and how it is packaged, whether it is real or has a lot of flavorings, preservatives, colorings, etc.
It depends on each of us what kind of soil, water, landscape and climate we will have.
The most important thing, I think, is whether we can realize that the soil, water, and landscape are not "things" outside of us, but that they are ourselves. And we can remind ourselves of this every moment when we breathe, when we drink water, or when we eat... As the great Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes: "All our food comes as a gift from Mother Earth. When you bite into your bread, you should be aware of what you are doing. Your mind should not wander anywhere else. You should not be thinking about your work or making plans for the future. If you can look into the nature of the bread, you will see the wheat fields and the beautiful landscapes around them. You will realize the work of the farmer, the miller and the baker. Bread did not come from nothing. It came from grain, rain, sun, soil and the hard work of many people. The entire universe brought you this little piece of bread. If you stop your mind and look carefully at the piece of bread, within a few seconds you will be able to concentrate and see that the bread is a real miracle. It is the messenger of the entire universe. If you eat the bread without being fully aware of what you are doing, you will get some nutrients from it. But if you really touch that bread with your mind, the entire universe will nourish you. In every bite of food you eat, you are taking in the entire universe. How beautiful!”6Thich Nhat Hanh, A Love Letter / A Loving Message to Mother Earth from Her ChildrenMetaphor, Prague 2014, pp.34-35.
Until we perceive every moment the miracle that is constantly happening within us and at the same time before our eyes, until we understand ourselves, we will not be able to take care of the Earth. The soil is a network of relationships, an ecosystem that we will never fully understand, the soil is alive and one cubic centimeter of soil takes a hundred to a thousand years to form. So what can we do for the soil? We can be grateful to it, because when we are grateful to someone, we cannot hurt them.
