Introduction

Abstract

In common with much of eastern and southern Europe, Moldova faces poverty, agricultural crisis, a flight from the land, and degradation of the soil. And yet, the black earth, or chernozem, remains amazingly resilient – thanks to its unique physical and mineralogical inheritance, thickness of topsoil and the way that it repairs itself like a living thing. Ecological agriculture can build on these attributes to maintain the soil’s resilience and increase its productivity. The following chapters highlight key questions of land use and the fundamental attributes of the chernozem that help, or hinder, their protection and restoration. Finally, we explore ways and means of accomplishing the much-needed conversion of agriculture to the ecological way. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus described the country between the Prut and Dniester when the virgin steppe was ploughed for wheat and wine, much of it for export to metropolitan Greece. Waves of nomadic tribes passed through during the first century AD and, again, at the time of the emergence of Moldavia as a feudal state but iron implements from the fourteenth century attest to highly developed agriculture and animal husbandry. The land was laid waste again by the Turks but travellers remarked “Although the country is ravaged, there is no other place with such soils. The Promised Land: grows everything!” and Cantemir’s Descriptio Moldaviae in 1715 records “The Moldavian fields are known from the oldest writers’ works as very yielding, excelling the treasure of the mountains.” The term chernozem was introduced into the scientific arena by Lomonosov in 1765. Various theories on its genesis were advanced: marine, marshy, and terrestrial. Only at the end of the nineteenth century was it generally accepted that the chernozem is a soil – after Dokuchaev visited the country in 1877, collecting material for his book Russian Chernozem which settled the issue and founded soil science. Under the Soviet Union from 1945, Dimo ushered in the modern period with detailed soil surveys and an array of fundamental information was compiled over the following decades. But the era of modern science coincided with the onset of a more exploitative farming system; the long grass fallow system at the turn of the nineteenth century gave way to intensive row crops and a consumerist attitude – exploiting the soil without taking the trouble to conserve it as a resource. The worldwide success of intensive row-crop systems was described at the time as the green revolution but the yields achieved through widespread application of fertilizers and broad-spectrum pesticides masked, for a time, a real decline in soil organic matter and soil health. Now this must be addressed.