Everyone understands the importance of clean air and water, but we often overlook the soil beneath our feet, which is a major oversight. Soil is the cornerstone of all civilizations, and even life itself; we cultivate 95 percent of our food in the soil. Healthy soils are also necessary for preserving clean water sources and reducing the effects of climate change. "The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself," Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said.
Everyone understands the importance of clean air and water, but we often overlook the soil beneath our feet, which is a major oversight. Soil is the cornerstone of all civilizations, and even life itself; we cultivate 95 percent of our food in the soil. Healthy soils are also necessary for preserving clean water sources and reducing the effects of climate change. "The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself," Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said.
But soil degradation doesn't have to be our undoing; in fact, if we take the correct steps, soil can save us. The recent reThink Soil Health report (and executive summary), produced by an interdisciplinary team of Nature Conservancy scientists, economists, and agriculture experts with support from General Mills, makes the case for investing in sustainable soil health practises that can increase agricultural yields, increase farmer profit, and reduce negative environmental impacts. In fact, we estimate that implementing soil health measures throughout all corn, soy, and wheat croplands in the United States may provide approximately $50 billion in annual social and environmental benefits. GreenBiz named the report as one of seven that made an impact in 2016.
1. 25 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions are avoided, which is the equivalent of taking 5 million passenger cars off the road for a year.
2. Reducing nutrient loss to the environment by 344 million pounds.
3. Soil erosion was reduced by 116 million metric tonnes.
4. In farmland soils, 3.6 million acre-feet of usable water capacity was created.
We've been ignoring the vital resource beneath our feet for far too long. It's past time to treat dirt as the foundation of the universe.
To produce these estimates our interdisciplinary team had to make a number of assumptions and choose a single value for costs and benefits that in reality vary considerably across the United States. The team believes that this approach is reasonable for the purpose of coming up with rough estimates of potential impacts and benefits around soil health in the U.S. However, the estimates should not be used at a local or regional scale (e.g. to calculate the aggregate impacts of changes made at the farm scale, or for a farmer to determine what their specific experience will be).
