In which we praise - wildly laud - George Monbiot

Rather than just complaining George Monbiot has gone out and done something. We approve, mightily. It’s worth reading his piece but the base point is that he, with colleagues, has developed a method of truly measuring the soil in the fields. How deep, how compact, the total volume, the porosity, carbon content and so on.

This is, absolutely, an advance. It is truly useful - well, assuming it all works like George tells us it does. This is entrepreneurialism even - that taking of extant bits and bobs lying around the economy and combining them into achieving some new task, solving some human want. This is also how society advances.

Good on ’im and don’t let anyone say different:

We’ve also been able to measure bulk density at a very fine scale; to track soil moisture (as part of a wider team); to start building the AI and machine learning tools we need; and to see the varying impacts of different agricultural crops and treatments. Next we’ll work on measuring connected porosity, soil texture and soil carbon; scaling up to the hectare level and beyond; and on testing the use of phones as seismometers. We now have further funding, from the UBS Optimus Foundation, hubs on three continents and a big international team.

Go for it.

It might even be possible to test that contention of Freeman Dyson - loudly condemned by George - that pasture used to farm ruminants fixes large amounts of carbon into the soil. If it turns out that Dyson is in fact correct in this we will, of course, laugh like drains. But rather more important than any such snark or schadenfreude will be that we will actually, wholly, now know. Which is good.

We wish you all the luck in the world Mr. Monbiot for it’s a brave man who goes ahead with developing the tools that might prove one of his central contentions incorrect.

Tim Worstall