We Come From the Soil and We Will Return to the Soil

In the meantime, we're treating it like s***.

Photo by elizabeth lies on Unsplash

Climate change gets all the publicity, but one of the environmental catastrophes awaiting us in the coming decades is right beneath our feet.

Soil.

Benefits of Soil

Our humble soil provides us with so many benefits we don't even think about. Soil is at the center of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles that get those elements and other essential minerals where they need to be for us to live.

And soil naturally filters and cleans our water. Much of the water that we use comes from an underground aquifer that the soil has purified and cleaned for us. Soil also absorbs water to control flooding, often working with trees to ensure that soil remains intact. There are plenty of examples where forests have been clear-cut and rain washes the soil away because nothing's there to hold it together anymore. We also over-pave our world at our peril. Cement and concrete don't absorb floodwater. Soil does. Perhaps we need to be more judicious about what we pave.

Soil is the place where all our terrestrial food begins whether they are vegetables or fruits that we eat.  Soil is where we grow the things that we feed to the animals we eat. If soil isn't healthy, our foods can't be healthy, and we can't be healthy. Put simply, if the soil doesn't survive, we don't survive.

Soil also plays a massive role in containing climate change. After the ocean, our soil is the second largest carbon sink in the world. Healthy soil absorbs more carbon dioxide. But we're doing a good job of making sure our soil isn’t healthy and can't do that job.

What is causing the problem?

We are causing the problem.

Most of our modern agriculture practices which till the soil, place chemicals in the soil, and disrupt the intricate food web on the soil are detrimental to healthy soil. Tilling soil releases carbon dioxide, and increasing the use of pesticides and chemicals in the soil disrupts much of the life in the soil. These make soils weaker and more prone to erosion and loss of organic matter.

When we cut down forests, we lose their complicated soil biodiversity. When we cut down forests for farmland, the soil pays the price. There is a symbiotic relationship between the forest and the soil, and once the forest is gone the soil can't support life as well as it could while the forest was there. The soil also can't do its job of absorbing carbon dioxide. Modern farming with its tilling and heavy equipment chemicals and monoculture crops this steadily weakening our soil.

According to a 2006 study by Cornell University, topsoil in the United States is disappearing at a worrying rate. Soils around the world are being washed away 10 to 40 times faster than they can be replaced. According to the study, about 37,000 square miles of soil are lost to erosion each year around the world. Soil takes a long time to form, so this is not a trend that can be reversed quickly. The loss of soil in the Midwest and California Central Valley where most of our crops are grown can have devastating effects on our society.

In the American Midwest, the breadbasket of America, scientists have found that soil erosion is up to a thousand times greater than before modern agriculture's rise.

What will be the result?

If we continue down this path, fertile land will eventually become barren, and soil will be damaged beyond repair at least on any human time scale.

About 95% of the food we consume is dependent on healthy soils, but approximately 52% of the world’s agricultural land has already been degraded.

The World Bank estimates that about 37.7 percent of the world’s total land area was considered agricultural land, while approximately 10.6 percent was considered arable (suitable for growing crops).

When you break it down, not much of the land we have a suitable for agriculture. What is suitable for agriculture is used primarily to feeding livestock, which is an insanely inefficient use of land.

In the United States, over a quarter of our land is devoted to grazing, mostly for cattle. That figure doesn’t even include the feed for the cattle. If you include both grazing land and land to grow feed for livestock, those together take up over a third of our land in the lower 48 states in the US.

A diet that moves away from beef can have a huge impact on the planet. The cultivation of beef has an outsized impact on other environmental problems as well. Moving away from beef could have profound positive effects on land use and water conservation. But we’ll talk about water later. Today let’s talk about the soil.

Not only are we screwing up the planet with our diets, but we are pushing wild animals further to the brink, which has severe implications for biodiversity and ecosystems. These ecosystems need predators and prey animals alike to provide services we don’t think about. Animals spread seeds as they wander their territory. Predators keep the populations of prey animals down.

Take the example of wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park to see the myriad ways that wild animals improve our habitats. When wolves were hunted out of Yellowstone, the elk population exploded because they had no real predators. This led to overgrazing and a slowdown in natural forest regrowth, as the elk would eat or trample young trees before they could mature. When wolves were added back to the park, the health of the elk herd improved as the wolves targeted weak and sick elk.[1] The lower elk population allowed trees to grow, which provided beavers with a source of food, which resulted in more dams, and improved the health of the rivers in Yellowstone. Beavers damming rivers reduces flooding and wildlife damage, preserves fish populations, and conserves freshwater reservoirs. 

How do you protect soil?

One of the best ways to fight soil erosion is to plant cover crops when the land is not being used, or even alongside crops. Farmers in the United States have realized this and have nearly doubled the acreage of cover crops from about 10.3 million acres in 2012 to an estimated 20 million acres in 2020. These improved practices will help, but a lot of damage has already been done.

Other common practices to regenerate our soil include:

-        Leaving vegetation on soil to allow nutrients to return to the earth.

-        Farmers and corporations move to sustainable practices

-        Governments require sustainable practices that heal the soil

-        Demands from consumers for practices that rejuvenate the soil

-        Crop rotation to allow different plants to grow in an area of soil every year, so the soil can be replenished.

-        Agroforestry, growing trees and other plants around crops to provide a better microclimate and a more biodiverse landscape favorable to the long-term health of the soil.  

-        Decreasing our agriculture footprint and rewilding areas when possible. Countries with heavy beef and dairy diets can reduce consumption of those products and open up vast acreage of land for use more productive to the soil and more welcoming to biodiversity. A vegetarian diet or even just a diet with much less beef is vastly more friendly to the soil than most current Western diets.

Such changes in farming culture will face pushback because they involve change and likely come with increased expense. For example, avoiding monocultures (one single crop grown in a large area) would require increased costs to farmers and corporations as farming methods are changed. However, such monocultures are more costly in the long run, because they damage the soil to the point where that soil cannot support the crops currently grown there.

What you can do.

Plant something.

If you don't have a garden start one, even if it's just a tomato plant on your balcony. Get your hands in the soil, and teach your children to do the same. You're not going to replace all the fruits and vegetables you get from the supermarket, but you will have a better appreciation of where things come from and how they get to your table.

Consumers who have a better understanding of how hard it is to grow that squash, that eggplant, or that watermelon, understand what it means to lose crops to the first frost, or an invasive pest. If we are connected to the soil, even a little bit, we will be more informed consumers and better equipped to demand better for our soil.