Why looking after our soil can reverse climate change
Better soil means better crops, better health and better carbon absorption
Text: Shannon T
There’s little doubt that agriculture has played a massive role in building modern society as we know it. Farming and agriculture replaced nomadic lifestyles when our early ancestors learned to grow their own food without having to constantly migrate to find food. Stable food sources gave rise to sedentary societies and permanent structures, eventually expanding into villages, towns, and cities.
Kiss the Ground, a Netflix documentary explains the connections between land use, soil degradation, and the ongoing climate crisis. Based on a book of the same name and directed by award-winning filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell, the film shows how soil health is tied to the overall health of our planet and how innovative practices such as regenerative agriculture can help renew ecosystems and, when applied at a global scale, combat climate change.
But why should we care about our soil? Although urban farming technologies can help create sustainable food sources, the bulk of our food still comes from the ground. As we reap the wonders of Mother Nature, there is a need to strike a balance between agriculture and protecting the planet, and this is tied back to humanity’s own survival.
Read on for our key takeaways about why we should regenerate our soil.
Soil is essential for human health
Quality soil plays a huge part in yielding quality food and subsequently quality health. Microbes exist in abundance in soil and are essential for human health. Our bodies do not contain all the enzymes needed to digest our diet, and microbes in our guts help break down the food we eat, converting them into nutrients we can absorb. The human body contains trillions of microorganisms — outnumbering human cells by 10 to 1! Therefore, taking care of the microbes in soil is essentially taking care of our health.
Conventional agriculture damages soil health
Common practices in conventional agriculture such as tilling and spraying toxic chemical herbicides, insecticides, and pesticides actually kills these amazing microbes and permanently damages the soil, causing massive erosion and desertification. Kiss the Ground explains that all soil under conventional chemical agriculture is almost entirely devoid of micro-organisms.
Poor agricultural practices create a vicious cycle. When more tilling is done, the soil becomes weaker, making farmers feel compelled to use more chemical sprays to achieve a similar crop yield. While it took only six units of nitrogen fertilizer to grow a bushel of grain in 1960, it now requires 20 units to produce the same grain. Wow!
Topsoil is the uppermost layer of soil that contains most of the ground’s nutrients and fertility and essential for growing food crops. According to the UN, the world's remaining topsoil will be gone within 60 years. In other words, unless we find a way to save our soils, we only have 60 harvests left. This number had us in shock! We don’t have much time left!
Desertification will leave to mass poverty
Desertification of our soils is another pressing issue here, be it for our climate or our survival. When soil loses biological productivity and turns to dust, food sources and livelihoods are affected. The programme shares that about two-thirds of the world is desertifying, forcing some 40 million people to leave their land every year. By 2050, it is estimated that one billion people will be refugees of soil desertification. Poverty, social breakdowns, floods and droughts are subsequent problems that follow. Mass immigration also creates ideal recruitment conditions, leading to a rise in extremist activity and social unrest.
Healing our soils can heal our planet
While world leaders and business moguls are pledging carbon cuts and alternative energies, the truth of the matter is that reducing carbon emissions is not going to reverse climate change. Humans had pumped about 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1750 when the industrial revolution began. This carbon, known as our “legacy load of carbon”, is still here. Even if we stopped all emissions right now, this legacy load is expected to continue warming the atmosphere for decades, if not centuries, to come.
It turns out the key to preventing the worst is right underneath our feet. Drawdown refers to the turning point at which greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere peak and decline on a year-to-year basis. It is a milestone in climate change reversal and pretty much our only hope in reducing global average temperatures.
Paul Hawken, an environmentalist and the editor of "Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed To Reverse Global Warming", tells in the film that drawdown cannot happen unless we have biosequestration. Biosequestration describes the process of carbon being removed from the atmosphere by storing them in photosynthetic plants or bacteria. During photosynthesis, carbon dioxide pulled out of the atmosphere is turned into carbon fuel, and 40% of that gets stored in their roots and fed to soil micro-organisms.
It gets even better. The soil’s environment, built by soil micro-organisms, can hold more carbon than the atmosphere and all the plants living on the surface of the soil combined! If there is anything that can reverse centuries of damage and balance our climate, this is it. The planet's health and our survival could in fact be in taking care of the ground beneath us.
