It happens: "Below our feet and behind our backs".. (2) Our earth, the wreckers and the wrecked.

I read that it can take a thousand years to build up three centimetres of topsoil. Currently we are losing the area of 30 football pitches of fertile soil every minute. One third of the world's arable soil is degraded and at least a quarter of that severely degraded. The good news is that organic farming can rescue around 720 million hectares of lightly degraded soil. This isn't a trivial matter; in the UK the Soil Association says that the countryside only has 100 harvests left in it. A global estimate given in around 2014 was that in 60 years' time all the world's topsoil could be gone if current rates of soil degradation continued. Spelling it out, that means no more food grown in the ground.
So what is going wrong? Well, have a look at these figures from an article written in 2009 by Grain.org and see what you think. "For each kg of nitrogen applied, 226kg of maize were obtained in 1961" (a time when global industrial farming was starting), "but only 76 kg in 2006." And it wasn't just maize. The figures were down from 217kg for rice to 66 kg. They had fallen from 131kg to 36kg for soya and from 126kg to 45kg for wheat.
Apparently, this has been known for years and to quote Grain again. "It is not uncommon to hear organic farmers say that they turned organic because their yields collapsed after years of heavy industrial fertiliser use".
From my searches, I discovered that synthetic nitrogen fertilisers can cause huge problems. Firstly, if applied liberally they can diminish the role of natural nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil. Other soil microbes, faced with a feast of fast food, are stimulated to multiply, eat all the soil organic matter they can, then, when supplies run out, they die. There is also an imbalance of minerals which affects plant growth. Secondly, the fertilisers can acidify the soil and this can kill off a lot of bacteria. Thirdly, even if they are slow release, they still aren't doing anything for the topsoil, they aren't providing anything to help its structure or maintain it. That lovely air-spaced, microbe-laced soil organic matter slowly disappears. Fourthly, there's probably a lot of stuff I don't know yet.
What happens then? The soil becomes compacted. It can't hold as much water. Roots grow shorter and absorb less nutrients. Surface layers of soil erode and water and fertiliser are leached away, affecting more soil and waterways and aquifers.
A study in 2015 linked nitrates with uranium levels which were way above the EPA guidelines, from water samples in two aquifers in the Midwest of the USA and California. The naturally occurring uranium in the rocks is said to be mobilised by excess nitrates. It's unlikely that they are the only aquifers where this is happening in the world. A number of illnesses, including blue baby syndrome, are cited as being caused by excess nitrate in drinking water.

The link between the fertiliser industry and fracking

What I hadn't realised was the connection between the fertiliser industry and fracking. According to a report by Grain in 2015, it takes a lot of energy to make fertilisers. In fact, the fertiliser industry is responsible for consuming over one to two percent of annual world energy. (Ammonia, NH3, is the basis for artificial nitrogen fertilisers. The inert nitrogen is taken from the air and the hydrogen, mostly from natural gas.) It is the fertiliser companies who, according to the report, were using most of the natural gas produced by the fracking boom in the USA. Incidentally, apparently, natural gas from fracked wells leak 40% to 60% more methane than conventional wells and methane is a greenhouse gas which is 25 times stronger than CO2.
That, however, is nothing compared to the N2O released once the fertiliser reaches the land. It is estimated that around 3 to 5% of global greenhouse gases are from N2O released by nitrogen fertilisers. This figure might even be too low, because farmers have to use more and more fertiliser every year just to try to keep yields the same and the rate of N2O emissions increases exponentially with the application of more fertiliser.
Stating the obvious, the more artificial nitrogen fertiliser they use, the more hydrogen is needed to manufacture ammonia and the more hydrogen is bought from the fracking companies.
Can organic farming really take out the problem? Yes, absolutely and it's been proved and is being proved...and I'm coming to it, honest, but there are other problems with growing food safely that can't be dealt with so easily. In fact it will take years and years...and years.

Long-term pollution

Can you imagine what over 9 million black bags of nuclear waste, each of one cubic metre, and mostly containing topsoil, look like when they are piled up in banks? That's the official September 2015 figure from the Fukushima Prefecture and the Environment Ministry....and it's still rising. The Ministry is quoted this year as estimating that it had bagged 3.5 billion gallons of soil and planned to collect much more. The trouble is, that it's an ongoing problem. They clean up an area then the rain washes more radiation down from the mountains.
In China, huge industrial expansion has come at environmental cost to the countryside and around one fifth of their farmland is, reportedly, severely polluted. The government is introducing an ambitious "soil pollution prevention action plan." People in China are being asked to report polluted waterways. Greenpeace, East Asia, has also started their own map of China's hazardous chemical facilities.
Meanwhile, the number of rivers in China has been reported to have halved, waterways and soil have become heavily polluted with chemicals such as Cadmium, Caesium, Chromium, Mercury and Lead, and there is a published list of "Cancer Villages".
Change can't come quickly enough for the little village of Liuchong, revisited by a journalist in 2016. He found that it was towered over by a 200 foot high hill of the grey ash of phosphogypsum, still being dumped daily by a local factory producing fertiliser. Phosphogypsum is radioactive and according to the EPA, contains chemicals like uranium, radium and arsenic....all cancer causing.
A doctor working in the village said that thirty of three hundred villagers living near the factory had already died from cancer and five more were likely to die soon. He spoke anonymously about the owner of the factory. “He has told us that if we say anything bad about his company, he’ll have us killed." He said that their only hope was that journalists got the word out.
China needs to feed its people. They are importing food. China has been buying swathes of agricultural land or entering food production contract in other countries.

Land grab

They certainly aren't the only country to have soil problems or to be buying up, leasing or entering land contracts in other nations. Some countries in Africa, South America and South East Asia, have been especially badly affected, but the problem is widespread. People who have farmed their land for generations can be suddenly driven off, beaten, even killed. The foreign companies can do a deal with intermediaries or governments and wait until the clearances have happened... and they do. It's not just companies from different countries or their own opportunist governments who are land grabbing. As might be expected, corporations are involved for profit and surprisingly, so are some pension funds. Your teacher's pension might come off the bruised back of any displaced farmer in the third world. You may say, "I know that they don't do that." Are you sure? Do you know that the assurances they give you are real? Do you know what is happening in the fields and pastures of once fertile areas of the world? Do you know how much scarce water is being guaranteed for these projects?
We are blitzed with information about how the world population will rise and how we need to feed them. Who are these hungry people? Apparently, they are mostly the very neighbours of the small farmers who are being displaced. What are some of the crops now being grown on their land by the new owners or leaseholders? Cut flowers and roses for the European market, (I am not joking) and especially flex crops such as palm oil, sugar cane, cassava and corn.What are they mainly grown for? Export.
Even where farmers keep their land, it can now be illegal for them to sell their own seeds. They may be pressured into buying patented seeds annually. Seed patenting laws are being resisted in countries around the world.
There are acres and acres of genetically modified mono-crops. In the southern cone of Latin America, there are over 54 million hectares of G.M. soy, according to Grain.org. Millions of peasants were displaced to achieve this, and thousands had to abandon producing local food, unable to co-exist with G.M.soy. Hundreds of peasants were criminalised, persecuted and murdered trying to defend their land.
Grain.org has produced a downloadable poster giving 20 reasons for opposing the G.M. soy crop. Two of them are that the land is being depleted and destroyed with an unprecedented loss of nutrients and that every study to date has found GM soy varieties to be less productive than conventional varieties.

Link to part three
The answer: small organic farms and seed sovereignty.

Petitions.

For Ethiopia: Defend the Oppressed Peoples in Ethiopia https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Defend_Ethiopian_peasants/?pv=105
Save Nallamala from Uranium Mining:
https://ecoterra.info/index.php/en/1043-save-nallamala-from-uranium-mining

Sources and Resources
Titles: Helpful organisations. The case for organic farming. History. Sources of material in order.