LAND NETWORK INTERNATIONAL

at the leading edge of recycling waste to land

 SEMS – the SUSTAINABLE EXCHANGE MANAGEMENT OF SOILS

The work done by Dr William Albrecht in the 1950’s and 60’s started around the observations that natural prairie soils in the USA gave very good crop yields when they were first broken out but yields progressively declined with cropping and whatever fertilisers farmers added.  What Albrecht did was to chemically analyse many thousands of soils and compare the original prairie soils with the declining soils.  He built an empirical model of the soils and showed that he could use that model to re-build the declining soil to the productivity of the original prairie.  All he did was look at the balance of chemicals in the prairie soil; and add the necessary chemical constituents to the declining soil.  It worked.  The problem was that he used nuclear adsorption techniques in the lab and some fairly complex calculation and interpretation.  The result was that academics world-wide said “very interesting” but found it too complicated and they often failed to produce consistent results.   Albrecht’s work was taken up by the renowned practical agronomist, Neal Kinsey, and is now built  into Land Network’s plans in the UK.  However, Land Network had to add something. The opportunity to recycle large quantities of wastes to land opens up further scope to change things for the better.  “Wastes” recycled through composting will offer large inputs of humus.  Humus is a complex black tarry substance which contains many hydrocarbons, carbohydrates and proteins.  These are insoluble in rainfall.  Also, humus will attract and hold major amounts of cations (3 or 4 times as much as clay) and it will hold anions (which clay will do little or none) including nitrates.  This humus and the nutrients it holds, is not soluble in water.  This is why natural ecosystems do no “leak” nitrates and cause pollution.  On the other hand, this humus is the feedstock on which mush soil micro-organism activity is based.  The soil fungi, mycorrhiza, feed on this humus and feed the nutrient direct into, repeat into, the crop roots.  Thus, this system does not leak either. So, here is the basic mechanism which can eliminate nitrate and phosphate leaching.   The Land Network SEMS program manages this potential.  We are interested in the size of the humus “bank” and what is in it in terms of nutrients, heavy metals and pollutants.  Most “heavy metals” are, incidentally, necessary trace elements which are vital to crop and animal health, including humans.  That balance, having the correct proportion of everything, is one of the targets of the program. There is a further bonus.  The SEMS program aims at lifting organic matter in soils in an organised way.  This will not only reduce and eliminate pollution from the recycling operations from mineral fertiliser application in farming, it will reduce soil erosion from wind and rain. There is another big opportunity; large quantities of compost to land locks up large quantities of carbon. Creating a carbon sink reduces global warming.  How far can we go?  Well, all oil, gas and coal reserves, the sources of carbon dioxide and its effect on global warming, they all came from plants. The opportunity is there to make a difference.

Land Network International Ltd 15 Kingsmanor Wharf, Devizes, Wiltshire  SN10 2ES Phone/Fax: 0845 130 6900 Mobile :  07950 037153 Email: info@landnetwork.co.uk