Christian Ecology Link Prayer for Today

A Soil Association report comes out this month on the role of soil carbon and organic farming in mitigating the effects of climate change. Graham Harvey, author of “The Carbon Fields”, points out that putting excess carbon back into the soil would be ridiculously easy. “Simply making sure our meat and dairy products come from pasture-fed rather than grain-fed animals would do it. Not only would we enjoy healthier foods, we’d be going a long way to averting climate catastrophe . . The gaping flaw in our food supply that has been so damaging to our world is that it’s overwhelmingly based on annual plants especially wheat, rise and maize. To get such crops to harvest takes massive amounts of oil energy in the form of nitrate fertilisers, pesticides, diesel fuel and heavy machinery. Perennial crops by contrast hit the ground running. Once they’re established, their extensive root systems survive from year to year and are much more efficient than annual crops in pulling up water and nutrients from deep down in the soil . . Ploughing up grassland to grow cereal crops to feed to animals is, in energy terms, a singularly pointless thing to do, particularly as it produces poorer foods at the end of it.”