How does food security succeed?
In global food production, there are natural variables that determine agricultural yields: Soil fertility, water supply, nutrient supply, climate conditions and energy, as well as genetics. Socio-economic variables including peace, freedom, prosperity, education, knowledge and health are also included.
Still, those producing factors alone just explain a part of the whole story. Food security as a whole is based on the four pillars of
- Availability
- Access
- Utilization
- Stability
All pillars are influenced by a wide variety of factors and stakeholders represented therein (see chart below). They are directly and indirectly related to each other. This makes explaining and solving problems in food security topics particularly challenging. Approaches to solving them often cut across disciplines.
The inclusion of soils represent a solid point of reference in holistic approaches to effectively resolve food security issues. Soils and their use serve as a model, yardstick, and problem solver for many food security issues. From this perspective, new approaches and starting points for transdisciplinary development processes on a broad scale are opening up for food security projects.
The meaning of soils
According to current knowledge, the agricultural use of soils reaches back as far as 20,000 years into the past – most likely even further. Historical transcripts and traditions make believe, that the active use of soils by humans may be as old as mankind itself. For example, by the creation of the Garden of Eden and the first man who lived therein. According to Jewish scripture, this man was created out of “red earth” [אֲדָמָה : adāmā] and therefore called “The Red One” who prepared the land.
Soils and their transformation into cultivated soils have played a civilizing role eversince and in all cultures. This hasn’t changed to this day. Only by achieving food security, which includes not only mass but much more quality, there is capacity for culture and innovation.
In line with our socio-economic development, we also strive to improve our cultivated soils. Not only to allow crops to grow in their optimum; by making our soils work for us we lessen our own workload and thus regain time for other activities. For a few decades now, the optimization of soils has also been about maximizing output and profit.
Are we using our source of prosperity or do we exploit it? To use it means to cooperate with it, to make oneself common with it – and this in its very wholeness.
With the development of simple growing systems (monoculture), custom-fit plant substrates, or through highly engineered hydroponic systems, we continue to move away from the complex system of soil, which is difficult to control, towards reduced complexity and maximum controllability for our primary food source – which are crops.
More than ever before in human history, long-term food security is coming to the attention of an increasingly close-knit global community. The living soil is well equipped for this challenge precisely because of its complexity. Within soils, there is an unimaginably great potential for all living things – more than any human technology, no matter how sophisticated it may be, is capable of. If we get involved with the essence of our soils, learn to really understand them and trust their carrying capacity, we thereby honor them and at the same time the one who brought them into existence with their manifold tasks. The promise to us in turn is sustainable provision of food, in abundance and much more beyond. That is my deep conviction. There is meaning in the tradition of the Adāmā which holds one of the greatest mysteries of mankind that is directly linked to our origin.
Shifting seasons, erratic rainfall patterns in space and time challenge today’s rigid farming methods and practices.
Global food security has never been a question of food availability. It is a matter of distribution and quality of food, in the right place and at the right time.
With the help of a rock-solid, regionally supported market, the basic conditions for prosperity are in place. And with it, the leap to crisis-proof food security.
My offer includes support of R&D projects providing services of general project management, quality management according to ISO 9001:2015, marketing and sales support, workshops, trainings as well as product validation according to scientific standards.