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No Life in our food without life in our soils

Without soil organisms our planet has no future, because all vegetations on land depend on THEM for the production of humus, and not on bags of fertiliser. On the contrary, pesticides and chemical fertilisers are a prime cause of faulty humus formation, with dire consequences for the quality of our food and the state of our health starting to deteriorate.

Because they virtually ignore the link between eating wholesome food and (the improvement of) people's health, industrial types of agriculture are major obstacles when it comes to exposing and countering the effects of our ever increasing health problems. To protect their turn-overs, the big food, farmaceutical and agro-industries have a joint interest in keeping the average consumer (and the average doctor!) ill-informed about health and food quality, in relation to
  • the importance of humus availability in soils,
  • the essential role that the organic carbon cycle plays in maintaining those humus levels,
  • the devastating effects that pesticides and chemical fertilisers have on soil organisms and thus on humus formation over longer periods of time.

The bad news is that the inexperienced eye does not easily notice the 'erosion' of our health at first, because it all starts with creeping disruptions of our DNA. It may even take up to 3 generations before the decline of animal and human health becomes clearly noticeable, unpleasant and finally alarming! The good news is that those 3 generations have almost 'expired' and that many people are now starting to feel the burn to their own health and even more so to the health of their children. It's time for a humus-centered agriculture that turns out healthy food, not compromised by all sorts of industrial interventions only for profits' sake!

Humus and soil organisms are key elements in the organic carbon cycle, requiring that all produce from the land must either return there or be compensated for with (clean) organic materials, in order to be broken down to a fresh shift of organic nutrients again. Whenever this carbon cycle is disrupted, agriculture is at risk because the available humus starts to run out from then on and production starts to suffer: first in quality, then also in quantity. Adding more chemical fertiliser initially helps to keep up the quantities, but the quality goes down even faster. The reason is that trace elements (necessary to make enzymes etc) can only be beneficial to plants when they are built into organic nutrients first, by micro organisms. That is why the application of chemical fertiliser causes the remaining humus to be cannibalised faster and faster, until the last trace element is gone and the remainders of humus components AND MICRO ORGANISMS have all vanished into the atmosfere as CO2. The whole process of humus depletion may take several decades. This poses exactly the same problem as with the deterioration of our health mentioned earlier: it goes unnoticed for a long time. See the Hoeksche Waard en Flevo polder cases.

Therefore cultivation techniques and agents that frustrate soil life must be avoided; they represent a real threat, both to soil conservation and to the production of enough healthy food, in each and every region of the world where the need arises. Producing food for the world should not be a task or privilege of a few big multinationals, because their only concern is feeding their bank accounts. That a handful of corporations would have to be in charge of 'feeding the world' is a very arrogant proposition anyway. The production of food must be the prime responsibilty of every local community that needs health and wants to monitor how it is produced in order to be healthy. therefore we believe in short connections between consumers and producers of wholesome food, with as many people as possible involved around its production. This means that we are in favour of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a reliable way to produce food and at the same time to achieve and monitor its quality, in line with our perception of the standards applicable to the term 'wholesome food'. It signifies food that contains all the substances required for a full digestion of the food stuff into components beneficial to health. That is to say, without accumulation of residues or ballast that the body cannot cope with or dispose of. In brief: the natural food that our grandparents could still recognise as food. To produce it, we need to co-operate with nature, in a way that some people would call agro-ecology, and others would equate to permaculture. Either way, it produces fair food on fair grounds, with lots of community involvement to safeguard the quality and the continuity.
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