Did you know that 95 percent of our food is directly or indirectly produced on the soils? Yes, it is. This is according to estimates by the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
Soil is a living ecosystem storing more carbon than the atmosphere and the planet’s biomass combined. This is according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
It’s been four weeks of anticipation, but finally, I am at Forschungszentrum Jülich a massive and multi-disciplinary research Centre within a small town.
It is located at the heart of Stetternich Forest in Jülich – a medium sized town with approximately 33,000 inhabitants – in the district of Düren, federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia west of Germany.
It’s on a Monday morning at about 11 am; we arrive in Hamburg – German’s port city from Berlin. The weather is dull, uninviting and promises to be catastrophically cold. It’s bad news since I have my swimming suits packed in my suitcase.
There is a beach where less than a week ago locals were swimming. The last one-week has been rainy, windy and extremely cold making it difficult to understand summer in Berlin. Am wondering if it’s going to shine and stay so anytime soon.
It’s one thing learning a language in class and another speaking it with a native outside the classroom. Mixed reactions with some encouraging you to speak more while give you facial expressions exclaiming, “that was so wrongly pronounced.” But all in all, the last one-week has been a sehr gut “very” good experience.
The first question I asked Nicole Reuter – the warm, smiling host from Germany’s International Journalist Program (IJP) – waiting to receive me at the historic Berlin Tegel Airport was “Aaah was I not supposed to go through customs first?” she smiled and said “Ooh yes, you did so at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol”.