2023-03-01
From a small organic farm, through industrial agriculture and then back to organic farming
By Beata Stasak, an Art and Eastern European Languages Teacher from Eastern Europe with upgraded teaching degrees in Early Childhood and Education Support Education
In the late 1960s I grew up in my grandmother’s house that was surrounded by a small organic farm that fed our whole family. All of us helped her to turn the soil early in the spring when snow disappeared and roll the fresh manure in it. Then she divided the field into a set of parallel strips each for a different crop. Some of the field was left to rest so the soil had time to rest to give a better harvest the following year.
My grandmother had no formal schooling she just followed instinctively the wisdom of her forbearers who looked after this small patch of land on the crossover of two rivers and three countries for hundreds years. She joked with us children that the black fertile land we stand on is rich with phosphate from the bones of fallen soldiers as all wars in Europe ended up here moving the border lines back and forward.
We watched her with awe as she walked slowly across her land sprinkling it with potash from her precious little bag of potassium mineral salts from Prussia while speaking softly to it: “Wake up the earth from your winter sleep and adorn the world again with all shades of green.”
And soon enough my grandmother’s garden sparkled with flowers and buzzed with insects in all its enormous variety. I did not know it then but I know it now, variety of my Grandmother’s garden was revived again and again thanks to what its soil then lacked: nitrogen.
In the late 1970s while attending local primary school all students were required to spend their holidays helping on a local state farm. I watched a farm manager handing us a bag of nitrogen fertiliser each to sprinkle on endless fields around us.
“Treat it as a gold, anyone who spills it will be beaten, I will be watching,” a state manager pierced us all under his bushy brow: “This is the reason you are not starving twenty years after the last war and be thankful to our communist leader who made boosting food production our national priority.”
At the end of the day we were each given a small bag of nitrogen fertiliser to take home. When I presented it to my grandmother she chased me out of the house with a broom: “Take that poison back to the state farm.”
I stood outside the house confused when my grandfather cycled in with a handful of communist posters and red Russian flags poking from his pockets: “Help me to decorate the house to keep the communist party happy.”
I left the bag in the middle of yard and went to help my grandfather. In the middle of the night there was a ruckus outside. When opened the back door to see what is going on through the outpour I peeped behind her to see the bag of nitrogen spilled over the muddy backyard and our pigs feeding on it. The next day one of them died.
“I told you it is a poison, it does not belong to the earth,” my grandmother muttered when she buried the dead pig and the remnant of the fertiliser with it.
I hurried back to the kitchen where my grandfather was reading Pravda, the communist newspaper of the day: “Is nitrogen fertiliser a poison?” He put his glasses down and sighed: “No, nitrogen makes up 78 percent of our atmosphere and chemical engineers fixed that nitrogen from its gaseous form to a more reactive compound fundamental to agriculture so we have forever abundant harvest and never be hungry again, do you understand?”
I nodded and he patted me at the back turning back to his newspaper: “Study hard, our communist country needs more clever engineers in the future.”
Spring was finally here again and when the time has come to feed the land with seeds my grandmother saved from the last harvest I followed her little perfect lines she made with a stick and carefully placed each seed into the ground.
“Grandmother you do not know what progress is, we need nitrogen so we do not go hungry,” I uttered watching her wrinkled hands patting the soil around each seed lovingly.
She sighed and pointed at me to kneel next to her: “There is already nitrogen in it can you see it?” I shook my head and she picked a fresh black wet clump of soil into her hand for us to study it: “My own grandmother taught me that billions of years ago bacteria like creatures evolved that take nitrogen straight from atmosphere to enrich this soil. Phosphate and potassium are in abundance here too because of the rich rock from which this soil is made. We are lucky, this soil does not need anything only our care and love.”
In the late 1980s my grandmother’s house with her tiny organic garden was swallowed by ever expanding state farm. We moved to the city where the most of population lived now and I watched my grandmother’s silent figure waving me from one of the hundreds of tiny windows of ever expanding identical grey block of flats communists built hastily to accommodate all the villagers whose properties were confiscated when I moved away to study chemistry at university.
When I returned to visit her she begged me to take her to the place where her tiny organic garden once was. We stood at the verge of the dusty field lined up with blue bags full of ammonium-nitrate pellets ready to be fed to the soil. I pointed at one of the bags: “Ammonia has many uses grandmother, it cleans our water supplies and toxic gases from exhausts of our cars, it is used in explosives and do not forget cyanide which chemical industry uses to make polymers such as nylon,” I laughed pinching her swollen ankles in nylon stockings: “Very useful and not so poisonous after all.”
Grandmother sighed and picked up a handful of dust: “We are doomed my grandmother, we are truly doomed.”
I shielded my eyes to encompass huge fields covered with tractors and combine harvesters busy at work and I turned to the grandmother: “It is called progress, grandmother.”
In the late 1990s most of our male family members died of cancer before reaching the age of 60. All of them worked on state farm with fertilisers without any protective gear from very young age. After the fall of the Berlin Wall I migrated with my young children and my husband to Australia to meet my father I never knew. When I arrived on my father’s farm the well-known blue bags of the British-brand instead of Russian brand ammonium nitrate fertiliser pellets greeted me. He greeted us enthusiastically and they spent late nights with my husband discussing how the crops using nitrogen drives demand for nitrogen and other fertilisers. Abundant nitrogen drove demand for crops better at using it. It was vicious cycle. As new strains became available yields increased and nitrogen use climbed ever higher. My father claimed that 80 percent of the new varieties’ impressive yield on his farm was down to nitrogen fertiliser.
I shook my head adding with an alarm in my voice that human industry like agriculture now fixes about 150 m tonnes of nitrogen every year more than all the bacteria in all the soils of all the world.
My husband, an agricultural engineer waved a hand at me: “Without fertilisers half of the world’s harvest would be lost, it is fundamental to feeding the world’s 8bn people. Like electricity and the internal combustion engine, it is one of the preconditions of modernity.
My father died of cancer ten years later.
In late 2010 me and my husband took job as a caretakers for newly formed organic olive grove. My young children learnt to attend to little olive plants and cover their tiny stems with cotton strips gently as possible to stop bugs reaching the leaves. The constant weeding and attending to small trees was the way of life. They have become part of our family, thousands of trees and natural cycle of life that has been at work for billions of years just like my grandmother once told me. I remembered picking potato bugs from the leaves and drowning them in the buckets of water with grandmother in her garden when a state farmer remarked passing by: “Why don’t you just spray them with chemicals, it saves you all that work?”
My grandmother waved him away and smiled at me: “Remember biological ways of doing things will always be more important than chemical ones.” She stood up and spread her arms encompassing her small organic garden and the whole world: “Remember that mankind can only survive in the world where the environment is treated as part of us, not just a resource to strip and a dumping ground for what has not been used. To destroy is easy but to rebuild will take many lifetimes, I do not envy the world you are born into my little one.”
It has taken more than ten years for the trees to produce their first harvest at the time when the world was caught in pandemic and war. Russia which the world despises for attacking Ukraine is a fertiliser superpower, the source of almost all the hydrogen used to make ammonia as well as phosphorus and potash. These fertilisers no longer flow west to Europe. Fertilisers now cost more than the crops so farmers often choose to use less or none.
It is about the time, in our eagerness to fertilise the land we made sure fixed nitrogen is building up in the planet’s soil and waters as carbon dioxide is building up in its atmosphere.
Heated internal combustion engines burn some of the nitrogen in the air they take in with their fuel. Forest fires and biomass burning put nitrogen from plants back into the air too. Airborne nitrogen oxides increase the concentration of ozone which at ground level is a treat both to human health and to the health of crops.
Was my grandmother right?
Or do we have still time, farmers, citizens, consumers, scientists, politicians of this world to reverse the damage, to enlist the bacteria my grandmother praised so much as allies, reverse the Anthropocene nitrogen cycle we live in from an industrial to a more natural one.
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]