‘Food sovereignty’ is fast becoming a lost concept; the right to have the knowledge and resources to grow our own food is an essential right. If we don’t have access to nutrient dense organic food, then where do we get the essential energy to heal our body, mind and spirit certainly not from the supermarket where the average ‘fresh food’, in Australia food often travels more than 1000klms from farm to plate? The value of the ‘sprout jar’, the home garden, or locally grown organics is vastly underrated, these are some of the rare places where we get not just food that fills but food that heals.
Organics combined with living soils works to redefine ‘sustainable agriculture’ as: ‘Our ability to build fertility as we improve production and reduce input costs’
One of the major global demands we face today is the heavily depleted state of our soil. The past few decades have seen an unprecedented demand on natural resources from modern agriculture, and this demand has proven to be unsustainable. Modern agriculture is artificially stripping the soil of its long-term nutrients to such extremes that we are essentially eating our grandchildren’s food and leaving behind an agricultural wasteland as a primary burden for future generations.
Current modern agricultural practice is based on a military approach where the first response to imbalance in the productive system is to kill something. In a biological system our first response is to add life, so that ‘Nature can do what Nature does best’, create balance in our productive systems.
One of the primary ways to do this is through the production of specialist compost that is rich in plant nutrient and has a high diversity of beneficial soil microorganisms. This diversity and richness supports the balance and vitality of the growing system by empowering the natural processes rather than overriding them.
Living soil is rich in soil microbes that have multiple benefits for growing food sustainably, the power of living soils are massively underestimated here are some of the benefits of living soil micro-organisms.
Soil microorganisms are responsible for the following benefits:
• Growing nutrient dense food
• Building soil carbon as humus
• Building soil carbon in association with beneficial fungi
• Building soil structure
• Decomposing organic matter and building topsoil
• Increasing the soil’s ability to hold and store water
• Making mutually beneficial relationships with productive plants
• Balancing soil pH in the rhizosphere (root zone)
• Increasing soil fertility
• Storing plant available nutrients in non-leachable forms
• Enhancing natural nutrient cycling processes
• Building the soil food web (the balanced diversity of organisms required to achieve nutrient cycling and sustainable management)
• Protecting productive plants from disease and insect attack
• Reducing soil toxicity
• Reducing weed impact
• Protecting productive plants from pests and disease
Natural principles apply to all systems. Whether you are growing food in your own backyard or in broad-acre production, it is simply a matter of scale. In part 1 of this manual, we demonstrate how to make specialised compost as the source of the beneficial soil microorganisms needed to achieve sustainable soil management on any scale.
Trust Nature’s Bio-Vital System has been carefully developed over many years; it is the synthesis of the complex sciences of soil microbiology and plant nutrition combined with organics, traditional knowledge, and Permaculture Principles. This system takes the mystery out of complex sciences and delivers knowledge in an easy understand, easy to apply form.
Paul Taylor is running a 5-day dynamic learning experience where you will learn how to maintain and restore soil vitality, how to make our organic fertilisers, how to grow more food for less cost and less effort.
This course redefines ‘sustainable agriculture’ as “our ability to build soil fertility as we improve production and reduce cost and labour”.
For more information about the course or to book, please click here.
