Are your roots in the soil or is your soil rooted?

Stunning things I have read over the Holiday Season...

Try this on for size: Proposition 1. "There is an indispensible agricultural link between the superstructure of a complex civilisation and the soil." That means all societies, no matter how sophisticated, will fail if their agricultural base is eroded. Farmers matter!
Proposition 2: "The chief product of the farm is the persons who constitute that link and they are the most important agricultural resource for our national health and good character." This means the people who live and work on the land are the key factor in the critical link between soil and society. Farmers matter heaps!
I just read these lines in a book I received thru express courier - a mint condition second hand copy of the book "Roots In The Soil: An Introduction to Philosophy of Agriculture" by Johnson D. Hill and Walter E. Stuermann. Signed!
This book was published in 1963 ad was meant to launch the Philosophy of Agriculture. Clearly it failed. But it is a valuable source of ideas.
Like this one: "Across the surface of the earth... the exists an intricate mesh of living beings: the biosphere. Plants, animals, and men, with their existence imbedded in this think skein of life, are critically interdependent... The mysteries of the biosphere are rooted in or dependent on a thin ribbon of top soil which averages not more than twelve inches in depth."
Top soil is the critical element in the chain of civilisation: the soil is the alpha and the omega of life. It is where life begins and ends and begins again...
At the same time I am reading "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" by Jared Diamond. It has a chapter on Australia and the way we manage our top soil resources. He makes this stark statement: "Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity."
He says that Australian farmers have been "mining" the renewable resource we call topsoil as if they were mining minerals. The soil is "being exploited at rates faster that [its] renewal rate, with the result that [it] is declining".
Australian soils are the oldest on Earth and have been leached of their nutrients by rain over billions of years. "Such nutrients as were present in arable soils at the onset of European agriculture quickly became exhausted. In effect, Australia's farmers were inadvertently mining their soils for nutrients. Thereafter, nutrients have had to be supplied artificially in the form of fertiliser, thus increasing agricultural production costs compared to those in more fertile soils overseas."
Scary stuff. He charts declining yields and rising salinity levels as outcomes of this mining mentality. (This could possibly be bullshit, of course, but it tallies with what I have observed so far.)
Johnson says farmers and government decision makers who have no philosophy of agriculture will tend to make msitakes as they use trial and error to solve problems. A philosophy of agriculture gives you the perspective and insight you need to see the implications and dangers of decisions before you make them.
The key to the grand puzzle that is agriculture is decision making - how can we make better decisions in the future? See next blog...