The importance of soil, plants and human health, organic gardening inspiration with Klaus Laitenberger

Great interview with the inspirational Klaus Laitenberger, organic gardener, teacher, writer, seed supplier. Nuffield 2018 Scholar.

What is your own background briefly?

I come from a small village in south Germany and after my civil service with the Red Cross I worked as a volunteer at a Camphill Community in Gloucestershire (UK).  It was a community where special needs people and their carers lived and worked on a bio-dynamic smallholding.  We milked cows, sheared sheep had chickens, ducks, geese and pigs as well as all the vegetables and fruit for everyone in the community.

I meant to stay there for only a couple of months before starting university in Germany, but stayed there for a couple of years and then moved to Scotland to train with one of the pioneers of the bio-dynamic movement.  I knew that I wanted to grow food – the best and healthiest food for people.  In 1999 I moved to the west of Ireland where I worked at the Organic Centre and then was in charge of the Walled Garden restorations at Lissadell House.

How was the last 12 months, what projects occupied your time?

My working life seems to become more and more diverse, just briefly – I work as an organic inspector for the Organic Trust CLG, inspecting organic farms and gardens to check if they comply with the organic standards.  I work as a consultant for two amazing organic horticulture projects, one in Co. Kilkenny which is a Georgian Walled Garden restoration and the other one an organic market garden in Co. Cork.

My busiest work at the moment is my consultancy work with Bord na Mona in their medicinal herb project.  I also write for various magazines and newsletters

For relaxation I’m helping out at the community gardens in Bundoran, Co. Donegal.

It’s important to keep your feet on the ground and get your hands dirty.

My wife Joanna spends her time running an online vegetable seed company www.greenvegetableseeds.com

I write a monthly newsletter for anyone who is interested.

Tell us more about soil health, plant health and why human health is all interdependent?

I wish that some of the knowledge about plants and the soil that has been discovered in recent years would have been available to me much earlier. There is really groundbreaking work out there and this should change the way we perceive plants, the soil and the environment.  If scientists could only communicate their findings in a more inspirational way we would look in awe upon nature.  In fact this is something we as a human species have lost – and maybe that’s why we don’t protect it enough.

The first pioneers of the organic movement – Lady Eve Balfour and Sir Albert Howard recognised that there is a direct link between the health of the soil, the plant and human health.  They realised that a sick soil produces sickness in people.

Unfortunately our soils (worldwide) are in great danger.  The UN WHO calculated that we have already degraded 25% of all agricultural land and this is increasing significantly and they reckon that we may only have another 60 harvests left before they finally collapse.

One of the main reasons for this is the increase in artificial fertilisers and pesticides.  Our soils have become lifeless, sterile substrates that are drip fed with an artificial fertiliser solution.  There are very few worms left on arable land – birds have stopped following the plough many years ago as many farmers will attest.

These sterile soils are comparable with our increasingly sterile lives – a life that even I have to adopt to in recent months.

Our soils are not meant to be devoid of life.  In one handful of fertile soils there are more living creatures than people on the planet – diversity is the key.  The more diverse the grassland or plants – the more diverse the life in the soil and as an end result – our gut mircrobiome.

Diversity is the key to all life on Earth.

Tell us more about the importance of growing your own?

We all know about the benefits of growing your own food – you can save money, it gets you outdoors, you’ll get good exercise and can harvest fresh, healthy nutritious food.  There is also a sense of pride for having grown the food that is on the table.

To me, growing food means a lot more – if I’m stressed – I go to the garden; if I have a backacke – I go to the garden; if I’m lonely – I go the garden.  The garden connects me with life and in some rare occasions especially while doing “boring” work like weeding or hoeing – as long as it is very repetitive – I manage to get this complete and utter feeling of connectedness, of belonging to this world, of feeling that everything is one.

Should  NPK fertiliser be highly taxed like cigarettes and alcohol if they are bad for soil?

Sometimes I wish I would be in politics and ideally being a dictator – the first thing I would do is ban artificial fertilisers.  They have done more harm in destroying our soils than anything else.  They provide a drip feed for plants and completely by-pass the soil.  The good old pile of manure is long gone and this was the key to building better soils.

So – obviously I’m not into politics, but yes I totally agree NPK fertilisers should be heavily taxed like all other dangerous and addictive substances.

What novel food crops could help us?

In 2018 I was lucky to have received the Nuffield Scholarship which enabled me to travel around the world in search of novel food crops.  I always had an interest in the ancient Inca food crops.  The Incas were one of the most amazing plant breeders.  As we all know they developed the potato, as well as quinoa, amaranth, corn and many others.  In fact there are dozens of other food crops that are still grown in the high Andes from this ancient time and many of them are suitable to be grown here in Ireland.  Have a look at my Nuffield report for more interesting crops.

The two crops I identified as the most promising crops for the future are YACON – in Inca crop that produces a large amount of fructo-oligosaccharides (healthy sugars) and Jerusalem artichoke – which origites from North America.  If you wish have a look at my short presentation which outlines why these two crops are so important.

What might farming in the future and carbon sequestration look like?

I think farming will change dramatically in the next few years.  Farmers are misled and fooled into buying expensive and useless inputs that are damaging the soil and the environment.  These costs are not recouped from the sales of their products.  One thing I don’t understand though is why farmers are still wasting their money and don’t just simply stop buying fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.  Any economist would tell them to reduce costs and inputs – it makes total sense.

Most future CAP payments will be made based on carbon sequestration.  I wish we would look at it in more detail though – which crops sequester more carbon than others etc. I find it unfair if scientists or politicians group everything into the same category.

No farm is the same and some farms can be quite amazing. There are extensive farms in Ireland that are carbon neutral – these are the traditional farms in the West of Ireland with small field large hedgerows and a low stocking rate of animals.

A Russian scientist found that a crop of Jerusalem artichokes can sequester more CO2 than a forest can.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

We have a website www.greenvegetableseeds.com where you can subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

I also write for the Irish Garden magazine, Clover and occasionally for the Irish Independent and Examiner.

If you are interested in growing your own food have a look at the books we self published: “Vegetables for the Irish Garden”, “Fruit and Vegetables for the Polytunnel and Greenhouse” and “Vegetable Grower’s Handbook” all available on our website and bookshops.

Who and where do you get inspiration from?

Joy Larkcom, Wendell Berry, Patrick Holden, Elliot Coleman, Satish Kumar, Rudolf Steiner

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 30,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles.

Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

---

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking