Soil, climate and profitable farming

“The Nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself,” Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937.

The converse is also true; by building soil a nation can build itself. People such as national champion farmer Ms. Pratum Suriya who we visited today are nation builders and vital to the future of this or any other country.  (She is known as Kru Pratum, or “Teacher Pratum.”) She became inspired by the king’s vision of self-sufficient agriculture and changed from her career as a chemistry teacher to start farming. It seems unlikely, given her background, but she actually chose not to pursue chemical agriculture, but to instead explore organic alternatives. She took out a loan to buy land and was so successful financially that she had repaid the loan in five years. However the real success is in how she has built the soil on her farm and secured long-term sustainability.

She had her soil analysed when she began farming. Amongst other things, years of chemical industrial agriculture had left the soil very acidic and devoid of organic matter. Now the pH is around 6.5 which is about ideal for rice. The soil I examined was perhaps as much as 50% organic matter by volume. The soil was so full of decomposing roots that I wondered if it would be at all necessary to plough before the next crop of rice was planted; as these roots break down they would provide a network of pores and spaces that would make it very easy for new roots, air and nutrients to penetrate.

The increase of organic matter in the soil has far greater implications than the effects on local productivity; it has significant and far-reaching effects on atmospheric CO2 and therefore climate change. All of that organic matter represents sequestered carbon. Plants take energy from the sun and CO2 from the air and turn it into glucose, which is then turned into organic matter. An Australian soil scientist, Christine Jones, has developed tools and methods to measure soil carbon. Some of her early trials of pasture cropping methods have resulted in an increase of soil carbon by 8 tonnes per hectare. She calculates that Australia could completely negate its carbon footprint if 2% of the farmed land could increase its soil carbon levels by ½%.

The effects of increased soil carbon (organic matter) are well documented and well known. ‘Living soil’ contains mycorrhizal fungi, which in a symbiotic relationship with plants exchange glucose for nitrogen, phosphorous , potassium and minerals. Living soil absorbs and retains more water and doesn’t require big inputs of artificial fertiliser. Plants grown in them are healthy and less susceptible to pests and disease. It’s a win situation all round. Kru Pratum has successfully demonstrated this for more than a decade. She achieves high yields without expensive inputs so cost of production is down. She gets a premium price for her products because it is organically grown.

It is puzzling to see the fields next door, recently burned, depleted of organic matter, dependent on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Given the cost of production and the low price for their product, it is hard to see how the farmers can survive financially.   Yet they resist change. This is not just a phenomenon in Thailand amongst uneducated farmers. Dr Tony Fischer is a leading crop scientist with Australia’s foremost scientific organization, CSIRO. He had this to say about biological farming: ‘It is a nice idea that you can add things to the soil and build up organic matter and reduce the need for fertilisers and reduce the weeds; it is what I would call fringe scientific literature. They make all those claims but there isn’t any evidence in the published literature to support it’. Maybe people like Kru Pratum are too busy getting on with the process of building good soil and growing good food to publish supporting literature. Perhaps any literature that is published is dismissed as ‘fringe science’. Maybe it becomes a problem of identifying and categorising farming into systems that can be quantified and studied. How should we call what Kru Pratum does?

She has many and varied farm products, including tree crops, annuals and livestock. She adds value where she can, and innovates to reduce labour inputs and increase yields. She has used her knowledge of chemistry to develop alternative fungicides and herbicides. Her rice crop is direct seeded (saving time and labour) and alternated with a soybean crop and a green manure crop. The soybeans are planted with the aid of a planting tool invented on the farm, which makes a hole and drops a seed in, effectively halving the time it takes to plant. She seeds piles of rice straw with red millipedes which help break it down into compost and encourage crops of edible mushrooms. She has found that the deep roots of vetiver grass make it difficult for crabs to burrow through dike walls. She takes elements of  system of rice intensification (SRI), organic farming, permaculture, royal projects and her own ideas and creates something that works for her on her piece of land.

This type of farming is a departure from the repetitive hard labour which has characterised farming in the past. Farming becomes an intellectual exercise and those who are more likely to succeed are those who observe and adapt and are interested, with open, analytical minds.

The field will always lie open to intellect.