BRINGING OUR SOIL BACK TO LIFE: SOLVING OUR OLDEST AND MOST RECENT PROBLEMS

Civilizations that failed to safeguard the health and fertility of their soil did not pass the test of time, becoming vulnerable to the pressures of a growing population and the vicissitudes of climate variability (e.g., droughts) and social interactions with neighboring peoples (e.g., wars). One need only look to modern Syria and Libya to see examples of unstable regions that remain impoverished in part due to a centuries-old legacy of soil loss and degradation. But this oldest of problems is not just ancient history. Today, the problem of global soil degradation is among the least recognized critical environmental crisis that humanity faces. A 2015 UN Food and Agriculture report summarizing the state of the world’s soils related that humanity each year loses about a third of a percent of our global agricultural production capacity due to ongoing soil degradation as a result of now conventional practices. Since colonial times farmland in the United States is estimated to have lost about half of its soil organic matter. Yet examples from farms around the world show that it is possible to profitably restore fertility to the soil through adopting a suite of practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture—minimizing soil disturbance, planting cover crops, and adopting complex crop rotations. In other words the problem isn’t that we farm, but how we farm. By cultivating soil life and building soil organic matter a system of farming based on practices grounded in these principles can rebuild soil fertility enough to greatly reduce the need for fertilizers and pesticides and yet maintain harvests, resulting in lower farm expenditures and greater profits. Restoring life and fertility to the world’s agricultural soils would help address some of the biggest challenges humanity faces—feeding the world, limiting climate change, reducing pollution, and stemming biodiversity loss. While the Anthropocene has, so far, been characterized by widespread soil degradation, adopting regenerative agricultural practices offers the potential to restore soil health on a global scale.