"The Soil" in Haiku - series #1

Hi guys,

I started a new series of poems about soils. It is called "The Soil" in Haiku. 

Haiku is an ancient form of  poem writing that originated in Japan. Haiku poems have three lines. The first and last lines comprise of five moras (syllables) while the middle line has seven moras, giving the poems a 5-7-5 form. 

Haikus are typically about nature. This first poem captures one of the ways organic residues persist in soils. I hope you like it. Enjoy! 

    Trapped in micropores

    where damp and microbes can't reach

    I'm recalcitrant 

                                                                TSIH #1

                  

You can see ore collections of soil Haiku in the tab: "The Soil" in Haiku  

Soil health as an imperative for sustainable food production

The soil management efforts that steered the green revolution showed how proper management can increase agricultural productivity to meet the food demands of a growing population; but, to what extent can this productivity be expanded without damage to the wider environment?

Researchers have used various soil conservation methods to find scientific answers to this limitation of maintaining soil quality under intensive cropping system; of equal importance to the methods, however, is the shift in perspective on soils: to view soils as living entities teaming with billions of microbial life (NRCS) - hence, the concept of soil health as an apt descriptor of soil quality.

The NRCS web resource defines soil health as “the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans”. The indicators of soil health include soil organic matter (SOM) that supplies nutrients for plant growth and provide soil structure and aggregate stability, among other functions (NRCS). Our knowledge of what soils are and how successful we put soils to productive use depends on our understanding of what constitute SOM, and how well this information can be used to evaluate and predict moisture retention and nutrient cycling in soils, as well as how gas exchange occur in soils.

Retrieved, on 28 Feb 2020, from: https://natureconservancy-h.assetsadobe.com/is/image/content/dam/tnc/nature/en/photos/2017-03-15_cornerstoneoflife_1640x1025.jpg?crop=0,0,1640,1025&wid=1640&hei=1025&scl=1.0

Soil organic matter (SOM) is a heterogeneous mixture of organic compounds of plant, animal, and microbial origin at various stages of decomposition. Typically, the content of organic matter in soils is low, but it accounts for the function of soils for agricultural purposes. As the mainstay of soil fertility, SOM directly influences soil health by supplying energy for the microbes driving soil development, and other important soil processes- thereby determining the properties of soil, and other important ecosystem functions. Soil organic matter comprises two categories of chemical compounds: non-humic substances and humic substances. The “non-humic substances are the parent material of humic substances”; they are transitory in soils; and they decompose into humic substances: the dark colored, highly transformed, and amorphous component of SOM.

Humic substances contain many functional groups attached to a carbon backbone structure, and this accounts for the reactivity of SOM, and how it influences cation sorption, and the mobility and bioavailability of cationic nutrients and metals .

Organic amendments is a source of plant-available nutrients and organic matter supply to soils, and for these reasons they are applied to agricultural soils as a means of improving SOM content and maintaining SOM levels under intensive cropping system. When properly applied, organic amendments result in improvements of soil health indicators; however, inappropriate application increases the risk of impacting the environment adversely, resulting in nutrients loss that cause environmental pollution.

An understanding of the characteristics of organic amendments is required for their continuous application as a sustainable means of managing soil health.

Little Droplet and the Cycle of water

At noon we went out into a sunny beach. The droplet in the middle of the ocean caught my gaze. I called it Little Droplet. What would it be doing out there if it didn’t plan to escape the body of water; it was floating, rolling, and tumbling in the middle of the ocean, it was sunbathing!  

I watched it closely as the temperature kept on rising. Little Droplet rolled over its back as the sun hit it.  In an ecstasy of flight, Little Droplet became vapour. My companion was also watching. “It evaporated”, he screamed. We continued to watch Little Droplet as it rose in the air. It rose high to where the clouds are. Muttering to itself as ascended: “It's cooler up there”. I could feel the heat rising from where I stood in the sand. From the sand, hot air rose after Little Droplet which just turned vapour. “Updraft! Updrafts! Those are updrafts!” shouted my companion.  

Picture credit: here

The vapour of Little Droplet continued to rise until it caught unto strong winds. It rode with the strong winds hundreds of miles upwards, not looking back. By the time it looked back it was way over land; a stream of updrafts running behind, coming after it. The updrafts caught up with Little Droplet’s vapour and took it even higher. Higher to zones in the sky where the air is cold. It was so cold where the updrafts took the vapour that the vapour changed it state and turned liquid. “That’s condensation” shouted my companion, once again. Little Droplet’s vapour changed into liquid due to the cold air up there.  

Just about that time, tiny dust particles skid into the zone where the liquid water formed, and the liquid water settled on them. The liquid water became droplets again, and Little Droplet was happy to be back in his body, again as water. The dust-settled droplets continued to skid around, and so did Little Droplet. Soon, more droplets joined in, they combined to form larger drops. The drops grew bigger and bigger, big enough that gravity had to pull it down. Gravity! Gravity! That force that stops anything from escaping upwards. Gravity pulled it down, so did it fall. “That's precipitation” yelled my companion.  

The drops continued to fall as precipitation from where they rose to. Little Droplet fell too. When the drops eventually came to earth, some landed on leaves; some landed on the ground; some went back to the body of water in the ocean where they had escaped from.  

Little Droplet landed on the ground, but it didn’t stay there for long. From the ground where it landed, Little Droplet continued its journey down into an aquifer, a water body trapped underground. In the aquifer it joined the underground body of water. Little Droplet could have been trapped there forever but a farmer dug a well into the ground. The farmer pumped out water from underground and pumped Little Droplet too. The farmer used the water to spray his crops. Now above the ground, Little Droplet watched as other droplets got incorporated in the crops. It still hasn’t given up his ambition to escape. Little Droplet rode with the excess flow of water in the farmers field and escaped through run-off. The run-off led to a stream, the stream led to a river, the river led back to the ocean, back to where it started its flight.  

Back home to the body of water in the ocean things are still the same. Little Droplet came home to find other droplets sunbathing in the middle of the ocean, nursing the aim to escape. It was then the words of the Grand Droplet dawned on it: we are in a cycle kid. There’s no escaping. We must continue to go round, round this cycle: The Water Cycle.  

    

Changing minds: towards a new perspective on soils, climate change and the environment.

Out of Earth! That was the title of the book by the distinguished professor of soil science which captured how civilizations sprouted from soil. The soil is central to our survival on earth. The soil is important in purifying the air we breathe. Without clean air humans are affected. The biodiversity in the soil plays a significant role in supporting diseases e.g. the population of organisms such as anthrax and salmonella are kept low by soil organisms. Almost every plant and animal depends on nitrogen whose production is dependent on important soil microbes. Without our soils there will be no life on earth. However, “advancement” has bred high level ignorance about the very matter which sustains our life. Out of this ignorance has arisen the arrogance which allows some people to describe the soil as “dirt”. Our society is now breeding a new generation of children that believe that crops are grown in the supermarket since that is the only place they now encounter fresh food.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogeochemical_cycle

As though the aforementioned is not enough trouble, development /industrialization is leaving us with less and less land to produce more food than was required decades ago. This means the soils left must be maintained adequately to avert an imminent disaster. Climate change is real and Nature doesn’t care about the notions we hold of its element, but humans care! A future generation of people ignorant about the very processes that support life could be our undoing. Because of this looming possibility, this state of ignorance has become unacceptable, the responsibility of a sustainable environment is on everyone. By making people see in lucid and interactive ways the background reactions and processes sustaining our highly digitized world we could slow down the process of environmental degradation and climate change.

The Discovery of Clay Minerals, by Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling (February 28, 1901 - August 19, 1994) would forever be remembered in soil history for his discovery of the structure of clay minerals. Pauling was a winner of two Nobel Prices. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his work on the nature of chemical bond. He also received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his efforts to ban atomic bomb tests. Linus Pauling was the only person to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes (as at the time of writing). The great soil chemist, arguably the greatest of our generation, Garrison Sposito, considered Linus Pauling as the greatest physical chemist of the past century (Sposito, 2008). Pauling was only 28 when he formulated his rule for stable crystal structures (Sposito, 2008). In his attempt to stop the atomic bomb test in 1958, Pauling presented to the Secretary General of the United Nations a petition signed by over 9000 scientist from 44 countries. Pauling also established the foundation of clay science by his discovery of phyllosilicate structures in 1929-30. An account by Linus Pauling himself on the discovery of the structure of clay minerals is available here

…and the 2014 WFP Laureate is…

The 2014 World Food Price Laureate is the eminent Plant Scientist Dr. Sanjaya Rajaram for his scientific research that led to a prodigious increase in world wheat production – by more than 200 million tons – building upon the successes of the Green Revolution. Dr. Rajaram’s crossing of winter and spring wheat varieties, led to his development of plants that have higher yields and dependability under a wide range of environments around the world.

His breakthrough breeding technologies have had a far-reaching and significant impact in providing more nutritious food around the globe and alleviating world hunger. Dr. Rajaram succeeded Dr. NormanBorlaug in leading CIMMYT's wheat breeding program, and developed an astounding 480 wheat varieties that have been released in 51 countries on six continents and have been widely adopted by small- and large-scale farmers alike.

Realizing the importance of freely sharing knowledge to provide developing countries with the ability to grow more food, Rajaram launched efforts to expand the global scientific wheat network – a worldwide exchange of genetic resources, information and innovations among researchers – which had not been done before. This led to the accelerated development and worldwide spread of high-yielding wheat varieties, which has kept the expansion of global wheat production ahead of population growth and made wheat even more accessible to the world’s poor. He also realized the importance of nutrition to the poor and strongly supported research on micronutrient-enriched wheat varieties.

In 2007, Dr. Borlaug expressed high praise for Rajaram in a personal note: “You have developed into the greatest present-day wheat scientist in the world…have made and continue to make many important contributions to further improve world wheat production…have learned to work effectively in many different countries with political leaders of different ideologies…and are a scientist of great vision.”

Respect to this great Scientist#

Culled from 2014-Rajaram. The World Food Price. Retrieved from http://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm?nodeID=74183&audienceID=1 on 26, July, 2014.