Article writed by ISNIC (Institute of Information and Reference of the Ground on the Netherlands) published on National Geographic Magazine, September of 2008.
Huge and heavy machines, like the harvesters, knead the wet land and transform it in an undifferentiated and almost impermeable layer, this is the process known like “compacting”. The roots can not penetrate in the compacted ground; neither the water can penetrate well draining for the surface, causing erosion.
Some times, the compacting happens in depth being able to take decades to be reverted. Conscious, the manufacturers of agricultural implements install enormous tires in its machines, because this is a way to soften up the impact over the ground. Moreover, the farmers started to use GPS to keep the vehicles in specific trajectory, leaving untouchable the remaining portion of the land.
China is the biggest provoker of erosion in the world because in Maoist period the agriculturists were stimulated to use the Dazhai method – “removed mountains, fills with earth ravines and it creates plains”; “knocks down forests and creates new culture areas! “Look the Dazhai example”. The agriculturists felt down forests of the hillsides of the mounts and started plantations in terraces straits, where the rain and the sun degrade the nutrients and clean organic material.
Actually, the Chinese government, to revert the chaotic consequence of Dazhai, implemented the Gaoxigou method: the agriculturists plant in terraces only plants with long roots and trees, natural barriers for erosion. On the banks, (invaded by land, that comes of the erosion) the plantation is intense.
The government intent, for 2050, to conclude the Green Wall, a portion of trees that will extends by 4, 5 thousand kilometers in the north and northeast regions of the China, with intention to cool the winds that are responsible by desertification and sand storms.
Insert coal and carbon (in depth) in the land could help to rescue infertile areas or with flat fertility (like in Amazonian, for example); that’s a human decision: rescue, prevent or preserve the land.
By Luana Schreiner
Temma on Earth
