Confronting Agricultural Overproduction in Europe

As part of an international effort to address environmental problems resulting from agricultural overproduction, hundreds of thousands of acres of surplus farmland throughout Europe will be taken out of production in coming years. Restoring a natural balance of flora to this land will be difficult, however, because the nutrients in soil that of artificially accelerating the processes through which nature slowly reestablishes plant diversity on previously farmed land.

In the study, a former cornfield was raked to get rid of cornstalks and weeds, then divided into 20 plots of roughly equal size. Control plots were replanted with corn or sown with nothing at all. The remaining plots were divided into two groups: plots in one group were sown with a with fewer seed varieties. On the control plots that were left untouched, thistles have become dominant.

On some of the plots sown with seeds of native plant species, soil from nearby land that had been taken out of production 20 years earlier was scattered to see what effect introducing nematodes, fungi, and other beneficial microorganisms associated with later stages of natural soil development might have on the process microorganisms are “sown” systematically into the soil along with a wide variety of native plant seeds.