Marvelle Media continues to feature this company. Today we are focusing on Soil erosion and how Vesco can play its part.
Soil erosion:
The world is facing an agricultural crisis of pandemic proportions: the catastrophic loss of topsoil. After covering the earth for thousands of years, the world’s topsoil is being lost at an alarming rate. In reality, for the past 100 years, our land has been more ‘mined’ than farmed. Historically farmers used the soil, depleted the soil and moved on. Even with current farming methods more topsoil disappears each year than is created.
Such poor management of the topsoil is not the failure of a single farm or even a single region. It’s a problem of worldwide dimension. Across the globe, world agriculture faces a growing crisis. The world’s four top crop-producing areas (U.S.A., the countries of the former USSR, China and India) are all losing topsoil at an alarming rate of over 13 billion tons per year.
Sediment from soil erosion is the single greatest pollutant of the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers. Scientists estimate that before intensive agricultural cultivation began, approximately 9 billion tons of topsoil was carried into our waterways annually through runoff. Today the volume has tripled, exceeding 27 billion tons every year, and continues to increase.
“Our problem with erosion was very serious and it was very damaging to the environment to the extent that, in these crops, to produce one ton of grain in Brazil, we lost 10 tons of soil per hectare per year. We solved this problem by eliminating tillage,” says Almir Rebelo, grower advisor and president of Friends of the Earth, a Brazilian grower organization influential in the adoption of no-till farming in Brazil.
With conservation tillage, farmers leave the stubble or plant residue on the soil’s surface, rather than plowing or disking it into the soil. The new crop is planted directly into this stubble, and genetically modified (GM) herbicide-tolerant plants make it possible and practical for growers to control weeds in the crop by applying an herbicide rather than plowing.
“As a result of us keeping crop residue on the ground, we have a new foraging opportunity for wildlife,” says U.S. cotton, corn and soybean farmer Jay Hardwick. “So we’re seeing a new happening on the landscape in terms of wildlife emergence. Not only top of it, but underneath. Earthworms are coming back to play, and earthworms are strategic in getting water into the soil structure.”
The impact of no-till farming and soil erosion control has been just as significant to farmers in the developing world. “We do not have to burn the residue in our harvest anymore,” says Jerry Due, a Filipino corn farmer. “We just allow the residue to decompose in the field to become fertilizers.”
For more infprmation please visit: www.vescocanada.com
