The Beall Greenhouses served as the location of the inaugural SEEDS weekend of public talks and workshops, held August 3-5, 2007. Nancy Foster and Scarlet Moss, the current owners, have invited input from SEEDS on restoring the property and creating a demonstration project on bioremediation from toxic soil contaminants, soil restoration from invasives, enhancing local biodiversity, and integrating soil restoration/remediation with architectural restoration.
Beall Greenhouses circa 1928
Beall Restoration: An Introduction
A recent National Geographic feature article (September 2008, pp. 88-90) commented on the issue of soil degradation and its relation to food shortages:
This year food shortages, caused in part by the diministhing quantity and quality fo the world’s soil, have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today’s toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratcheting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. ‘Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt,’ says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Rapid climate change is widely predicted to add to the problems of soil degradation and food production, as climate alters faster than crops and food systems are able to adjust, and new arid areas are created. Many writers on food policy have warned of the need to move globally from a reliance on massively funded agricultural mono-crop production to locally grown sustainable food systems.
Just as in the North, the people in the South need to return to the land. They need policies in place that make it financially viable to become what people the world over should be — self-sufficient stewards of their local environment. (Craig Mackintosh, Permaculture Research Institute of Australia)
The increase in food production needed to cover the increased population size cannot come from recruiting new land for agricultural purposes. Most land suitable for agriculture is already in use. (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
In this context models for restoring land formally used for agricultural purposes, including the use of bioremediation techniques for highly contaminated soil, becomes of prime importance. The SEEDS Beall Restoration program aims to establish a demonstration project wherein students can learn techniques to take back and adapt to sites in their home communities.
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