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Food
production and climate change
The world’s
population grows exponentially but despite many people fears there has
been no overall food shortage. Far from being in short supply
there is an overall abundance of food and the amount of food wasted runs
into billions of dollars each year. Food production has continued to
outpace population basically because of wider use of fertilizers, better
genetics and plant breeding and the wider use of irrigation.
Despite the short term success they lead to long term degradation of our
ecological resources, particularly the destruction of soil structure.
Many people, like me, have been concerned that these agricultural
systems are unsustainable in the long term and have worked to develop
food production systems which are genuinely sustainable.
In the long term
these sustainable practices, largely based on building up soil quality,
can be economic but in the short term there is a financial cost.
Typically growers are under great price pressure and cannot afford this
short term cost of change. The result is that unfortunately these
sustainable techniques have only been adopted by ecologically sensitive
growers with financial resources. The
wicking bed system stores significantly quantities of water and reduces
water use, in some cases by up to 50%. This reduces the
frequencies of irrigations and in the case of rain fed crops increases
the length of productive growth after a rain.
The moist conditions
inside a wicking bed are conductive to the growth of mycelium (the
network of long hyphae which form fungi). This network of hyphae
adds structure to the soil increasing its water holding capacity.
They can also be symbiotic to the plants roots. The mycorrhizal fungi
may actually penetrate the root system, effectively extending the reach
of the root many times and increasing the capacity of the plant to
extract water and nutrients from the soil.
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