Vesco Agricultural Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clean Seed Capital Group, a Company that is at the forefront of an ecological movement that strives to balance productivity with sustainability.

 

Clean Seed is uniquely positioned to contribute to and benefit from a rapidly emerging market opportunity in the sustainable agricultural sector.

 

A major environmental concern known as topsoil erosion occurs when the topsoil layer is blown or washed away. Without topsoil, little plant life is possible. Historically, farmers used the soil, depleted the soil and moved on. Even with current farming methods more topsoil disappears each year than is created. The estimated annual costs of public and environmental health losses related to soil erosion in the US alone exceed $45 billion per year.

 

Conventional agriculture encourages the depletion of topsoil because the soil must be plowed and replanted each year, while sustainable techniques attempt to slow erosion through the use of cover crops in order to build organic matter in the soil. The United States alone loses 2 billion tons of topsoil per year, a great ecological concern, as one inch of topsoil can take 500 years to form naturally.

 

 

Such poor management of the topsoil is not the failure of a single farm or even a single region, but a problem of worldwide dimension. The world's four top crop-producing areas (U.S.A., the countries of the Eastern Bloc, China and India) are all losing topsoil at a rate of over 13 billion tons per year.

 

Sediment from soil erosion is the single greatest pollutant of the world's oceans, lakes and rivers. Scientists estimate that before intensive agricultural cultivation began, approximately 9 billion tons of topsoil was carried into our waterways annually through runoff. Today the volume has tripled, exceeding 27 billion tons every year, and continues to increase.

Soil management techniques that can reduce or reverse topsoil depletion include:

 

No-Till Farming

 

Keyline Design

 

Growing wind breaks to hold the soil

 

Incorporating organic matter back into fields

 

Protecting soil from water runoff

 

"Our problem with erosion was very serious and it was very damaging to the environment to the extent that, in these crops, to produce one ton of grain in Brazil, we lost 10 tons of soil per hectare per year. We solved this problem by eliminating tillage," says Almir Rebelo, grower advisor and president of Friends of the Earth, a Brazilian grower organization influential in the adoption of no-till farming in Brazil.