All the World's an Egg

Don’t take it from me OR Shakespeare: various cultures throughout history believed that the world originated from—or was contained within—a cosmic egg. Similarly, there are a variety of ancient myths that describe different godly figures emerging from eggs: Ra (Egyptian), Ishtar (Babylonian) and Mithras (Roman), to name a few.

Castor & Pollux, the celestial twins that comprise the Gemini constellation, were also said to have “hatched”, along with their twin sisters Helen and Clytemnestra.

But my favorite of these is the Hindu myth of a seed that turns into a golden egg. The Hindu god Braham meditated in this seed-turned-golden egg for a year, before he finally broke through the shell to create the heavens and earth. I like this tale because the Hindus also saw the connection between these three incubators of life—seeds, eggs, and the earth itself.

But scrambling all these egg stories together on a rapidly heating planet begs the question: are we cooked?

Yes. No. Maybe.

Most people know by now that some of the major contributing factors to rising global temperatures are modern agricultural practices, which release a variety of hot gases into our atmosphere.

Factory-farmed livestock poop releases methane.

Synthetic fertilizers? Nitrous oxide.

Fossil fuel-operated machinery used to clear and plow land? Carbon, carbon and more carbon—not just released from the machines, but from the land that had previously stored it.

And all this fails to mention the soil degradation that results from these methods.

A 2014 article published in the Scientific American asserted that all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 50 years. That means no more harvests after 2074—which means no more humans, effectively—unless we reverse course.

In this sense, you can say that Industrial Agriculture has been at war with Mother Nature since the 1800s…and she needs a properly equipped army to fight back before our life-sustaining ecosystems are permanently destroyed.

But what kind of weapon can take on Industrial Agriculture?

Enter the seed bomb: a small ball, approximately an inch in diameter, that has been described as a microcosm of the earth itself. A seed bomb is packed with all the ingredients that make plant-life possible: seed, compost, clay and water. They were used for centuries across a variety of civilizations to sow crops, but the technique was lost over time until a Japanese farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka brought it back to the mainstream with the publication of his 1975 book, “The One-Straw Revolution.”

Fukuoka’s recipe for seed bombs* was comprised of 1 part seed mix, 3 parts compost, 5 parts red clay and 2 parts water.

Incredibly easy to make in large quantities, and spread over a large area, seed bombs boast multiple advantages over modern sowing methods. Consider a famous field study conducted on American midwest rangeland, which concluded that 80% of traditionally sown seed spread across 1 square yard was lost to harvester ants within an hour.

Seed bombs, on the other hand, are safe from birds, mice AND insects because the biotechnology behind seed bombs mimic that of an egg: the encapsulating effect of clay forms a shell-like barrier to protect the seed, while compost nourishes the seed to induce germination, much like egg white—aka albumen—feeds the chicken embryo contained within the yolk.

Industrial agriculture is clearly no match for Mother Nature’s design, perfected over eons.

And the ultimate goal of farming is, according to Masanobu Fukuoka, “the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” So that one day, humans will emerge as godly beings from this egg we call earth...and do right by Mother Nature, finally.

What a relief that would be.

*Masanobu Fukuoka called them seed balls, and that name stuck until Guerrilla Gardeners adopted the recipe and renamed them seed bombs…but that’s a story for another blog post!