ABOUT |
| Bill Liebhardt is a soil scientist who has focused his research on soil fertility and farming systems comparison and analysis. He is the former director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program at the University of California, Davis and the former director of research at the Rodale Research Center in Pennsylvania. Doctor Liebhardt was an associate professor at the University of Delaware and worked as an agronomist for Allied Chemical Co. in the southeastern United States as well as for Standard Fruit Co. in Honduras. Raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, Dr. Liebhardt received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in soil science from the University of Wisconsin. |
| INTERVIEW |
| You have to start with good soil organic matter management. No matter what other kinds of technology are brought into the picture, if you do not have good soil management, there is probably very little hope. |
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| "Africans will be much more secure with respect to their own food supply if they take into account that the soil is the number one thing that needs to be changed." |
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| We need to deal with the soil as an entity which needs to be improved. All other things are secondary to that proposition. If we do not have good soil organic matter management or good soil management, we are not going to produce yields which are needed in Africa. Africans will be much more secure with respect to their own food supply if they take into account that the soil is the number one thing that needs to be changed. |
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| "Good soil management is particularly crucial element in Africa because of the lack of water." |
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| Good soil management is particularly crucial element in Africa because of the lack of water. If you have good organic matter soil management, you are going to have soils which are more able to take in the rain when it comes, particularly if it comes at a rapid rate. You will preserve more of the water in the soil profile so that when you do grow whatever crops you are growing, they will do better. |
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| "Nitrogen is probably the most limiting element to growing food in Africa." |
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| Another very critical factor is the nutrient deficiencies. Nitrogen is probably the most limiting element to growing food in Africa and so it goes back to the whole theme of good soil matter management. |
| We need to incorporate legumes into the growing rotations because they add nitrogen to the soil. It is a free deal; it does not have to be transported in. And not only do you get nitrogen, you get all kinds of nutrients, you improve the soil structure and water infiltration. If the soil needs phosphorus, there are lots of deposits of rock phosphate in Africa, which can be used to improve the phosphorus status of soils. |
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| "We have to have self-sufficiency at the village level." |
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| Crop rotation and phosphorus are resources for poor farmers who have very small farms, an acre of two, maybe five acres. They often do not have the capital to purchase lots of expensive inputs like fertilizer, and so it is important that we develop farming systems which take that into account. We have to have self-sufficiency at the village level, because often the infrastructure is not there to move expensive inputs. |
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| "Dumping huge quantities of American produced grain depresses prices and makes it more difficult for the local people to grow their own." |
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| It is extremely important that policies be developed to help Africa deal with that particular issue. We often do not see that in many of the countries in Africa. The agricultural sector, in many instances, is almost on its own without very much help. If they are going to improve their lot, we need to encourage them to be as self-sufficient as possible. Dumping huge quantities of American produced grain depresses prices and makes it more difficult for the local people to grow their own. |
| It is also extremely important to devise cropping systems that will improve the soil management, improve the organic matter of recycling so that we get better water filtration, more water into the system. |
| If you look at the yields of say, corn, which is a staple in many of the countries in Africa, they are somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred to one thousand pounds per acre, very meager yields due to lack of water and nitrogen. Yields in the U.S. would be somewhere between seven to ten thousand pounds per acre. |
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| "Polycultures - numerous crops planted together - will give you efficiencies of production that you cannot get with the monoculture." |
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| Putting legumes into the system increases the nitrogen brought into the system several fold and, assuming you have the water to grow the crops, your yields have the potential to rise. Though it is not easy, I think this is about the only way you are going to increase the yields in these areas. Any other approach that does not take into account what the soil is doing, how it is behaving and how it is managed, simply is not going to work. |
| You can use a practice called agro-forestry where you plant trees to fix the nitrogen and in between, you grow some other crop like corn, millet, or sorghum. You can use polycultures where you inter-plant crops like corn and beans. The beans provide nitrogen and help control the weeds. So polycultures - numerous crops planted together - will give you efficiencies of production that you cannot get with the monoculture, which is used in most of the industrialized world. |
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| "You hear a lot of rhetoric about the use of biotechnology. I cannot see how it is going to make a huge difference." |
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| Good seeds and a diversity of species are important. We all know the benefits of having good germplasm. What is needed in Africa is a diversity of legume species which they can use on their farms to grow the nitrogen they need for their crops. |
| You hear a lot of rhetoric about the use of biotechnology. I cannot see how it is going to make a huge difference. If you do not improve the soil, the varieties are not going to perform. It is probably more important to have a wide diversity of crops. Crop diversity helps, particularly where rainfall is not very predictable. |
| You have to remember that, if these people make a mistake and their crops fail, we are not talking about less food, we are talking about the difference between life and death. Therefore, they are not going to take any risks in terms of what they might grow; the consequences are too drastic. |
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| "There probably are some things that biotech could help with." |
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| There probably are some things that biotech could help with. My problem with the biotech approach or the biotech industry as it now operates is that there seems to be a lot of hype, and I have not seen much in terms of results. |
| The biotech crops in the United States tend to be herbicide tolerant, which is not appropriate for Africa. These crops do not yield any more than the traditional varieties so from that standpoint, there's nowhere to go with that particular approach. |
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| "We need diversity in ecology that provides strength to the system. " |
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| The other problem I see with biotechnology is a tendency to homogenize agriculture. Whether it is a biotech crop or not a biotech crop, if it is a variety that performs well, then everybody seems to go to it, resulting in a lack of biological diversity. We know from experience that that is not the way to go. |
| The Irish learned that in the 1800s. In the United States, we learned in the early 70s when all the corn hybrids were a certain type and there was an outbreak of southern corn leaf blight. Had we not been able to go back to the old, standard way of producing hybrid corn, the following year's corn crop would have been at huge risk. We need diversity in ecology that provides strength to the system. |
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| "If the biotechnology companies really wanted to do something worthwhile to help the hunger situation, they could produce nitrogen fixing mechanisms." |
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| Corn, wheat and rice are three crops that feed millions of people around the globe. If the biotechnology companies really wanted to do something worthwhile to help the hunger situation, they could produce nitrogen fixing mechanisms into these crops; this would go further than all of the stuff they are presently doing. |
| I cannot imagine that the biotechnology crowd is going to give away their products for free. They cannot exist that way. If they really want to address the hunger situation and be honest about it, they would move into addressing the issues that really do make a difference rather than creating herbicide tolerant this or that, which is not going to address this issue at all. |
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| "The problem of hunger is not necessarily going to be solved by producing more food." |
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| Anyway, the problem of hunger is not necessarily going to be solved by producing more food. We produce sufficient amounts of food. The problem is that it is not distributed in an equitable fashion and this is why the poor people in these countries do not get enough food. |
| I have limited experience in Africa. I have been to three countries in East Africa and what you generally see is that the farmers have very small operations, an acre or two or three; they tend to be women; and they tend to be overwhelmed by the labor that they have to do. Anything you propose has to be a manageable workload for just one person. |
| You cannot just go in there and tell them to do something new if it is going to boost labor by twenty-five percent. It just is not going to happen. These women are stressed out with all the duties that they have: taking care of the animals, finding wood, cooking, taking care of the children. |
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| "We have to look at who the hungry people are, what their resources are and deal with them as they are." |
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| How do we help the people of Africa make the change? One thing that the Rodale Institute is doing is creating a new website called "The New Farm" (www.newfarm.org). The information on the website will available in numerous languages and will be presented in ways the local people can understand. It will teach about the model of good organic matter soil management, good ways of managing the farm and good ways of managing the local resources. It is most important to be able to manage the internal resources in a place like that. They do not have the resources to buy a lot of external resources. |
| We have a program in Senegal. Once we have created the content, we will set up training sessions in the local villages. There will be schools and training sessions conducted in the local language. |
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| "If we are going to try to address the hunger problem in Africa, conceptually it has to address village level self-sufficiency." |
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| We have to look at who the hungry people are, what their resources are and deal with them as they are. You have to start where people are, not where you think they need to be. And if we are going to try to address the hunger problem in Africa, conceptually it has to address village level self-sufficiency. If you think you are going to move all kinds of materials all over the place to these people, history says this kind of approach just does not work. The industrialized agriculturalized system does not work in those places. |
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| "There have been all kinds of critiques of the Green Revolution." |
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| There have been all kinds of critiques of the Green Revolution. The yields went up substantially but it required a very expensive group of practices: fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. Not all farmers have access to those resources. |
| The other thing we know is that use of some of those materials, in particular pesticides, resulted in some very negative impacts to the environment and to the health of the individuals who used it. |
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| "You can pile on fertilizers and/or pesticides until hell freezes over, but if you are doing something to damage the soil, you will pay the price." |
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| The other thing we know is that the yields in rice in Southeast Asia have plateaued and actually are dropping, suggesting that something with that set of practices is negatively impacting the soil. You can pile on fertilizers and/or pesticides until hell freezes over, but if you are doing something to damage the soil, you will pay the price, and that appears to be the situation in Southeast Asia. |
| Now people are concerned, perplexed and do not know exactly why this is happening. The Green Revolution probably has provided a lot more grain but it tended to be to those people who had the resources to start with; it did not help the people who are the very poor. |
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