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There’ll be a lot of talk about green shoots this spring. As for the literal kind, I’ve never felt quite so excited about asparagus and carrot tops. It’s hard to imagine, then, that the ground they spring from is in serious danger. Soil erosion isn’t sexy. It isn’t wildfires or hurricanes. It happens imperceptibly: the leaching of nutrients, carbon and microbes from the soil through intensive agriculture and industry. The results of that damage are dramatic, though: floods; water shortages; crop failures; creeping desertification… The planet’s soil statistics will never make the front page, but they’re shocking. The world grows 95% of its food in topsoil. There’s three times more carbon in the soil than the atmosphere. It takes around 500 years for healthy soils to develop, and we’re losing soil up to 40 times faster than it can be replenished. In the UK alone, 3 million tonnes of topsoil is lost annually.
It’s a disaster - so why aren’t people talking about it? One problem is that few of us consider soil as living. It’s ‘dirt’ and - to the naked eye - boring. Yet a handful contains more living organisms than the world’s population: insects, fungi and bacteria that create essential nutrients and nitrogen for plants.
“We call it ‘dirt’, yet a handful has more living organisms than there are people in the world”
Chemicals, monocultures, regular ploughing and the destruction of habitats such as hedgerows destroy the soil’s healthy organisms and, with them, its structure. This makes the soil more vulnerable to erosion. When rain and wind strike, it’s washed or blown away or waterlogged, leaving the remaining soil less fertile. We’ve also seen declines in vitamins and minerals in our veg and in the meat from animals fed intensively farmed grains.