Blog Post 7

Kristina Silvia

Prof. Santos

English 102-037

23 March 2018

            This week in class we continued our discussion about food and agriculture. We started reading the book The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka brings up topics I never thought about before. He discusses intelligence and how it is thought that “there is nothing more splendid then human intelligence” (4). Upon reading this for the first time I didn’t quite understand it because I believed humans were more special than other species because of everything we can do. After discussing this in class I learned that he was not saying that humans are not intelligent he was saying that our accomplishments and creations are not as special because other species can accomplish and create things too. He discusses that some of the things we have created as being unnecessary because if we had never created one thing we wouldn’t need this new thing. An example of this is soil and all the new things being created to preserve it.

            On Friday we watched another episode of Food Forward. This episode was all about soil and what is going on with it. In today’s world, because of all the climate change and other environmental issues, soil has lost the carbon that is supposed to be in it. This Carbon is what helps fruits and vegetables have all the nutrients in them. Because of this soil loss fruits and vegetables have a significant loss of the amount of nutrients. For example, one study found that an orange eaten by our grandparents had 8 times the amount one has today. This is such a huge problems that farmers have been forced to try and put carbon back into the soil. Some farmers have found that manure seems to be the best solution. By adding in a little bit of manure the soils carbon levels have been increasing. There are many other farmers who are trying new ways to add carbon back into the soil and out of the atmosphere. Some farmers are using this new type of soil called humus and another farmer is using a technique of using a gas fire to mix poultry feces into the soil. So far all of these techniques seem to be working. If Fukuoka were around he would say that if humans had never destroyed the Earth we would not need this new soil, and he is not wrong.