Why is fertile soil being allowed to wash and blow away?

 
"In a chapter on traditional soil-management techniques around the world, Handelsman and Cohen describe deep black “plaggen” soils on Scottish islands, made rich with cattle manure; rice terraces managed for 2,000 years by the Ifugao people in the Philippines; the milpa farming system of the Maya in Latin America, with its 25-year rotation of crops including trees; and compost made of seaweed, shells and plant material by the Māori in New Zealand. Each system yields rich agricultural productivity while maintaining deep banks of carbon-rich, fertile soil. “We know how to do this,” write Handelsman and Cohen.

Why is fertile soil being allowed to wash and blow away? The answer, not surprisingly, rests in the shackles of global capitalism. Farming’s profit margins are razor-thin, forcing producers to plant the highest-yielding variety of the highest-profit crop from field edge to field edge every season. Terracing, rotating crops and forgoing tilling enrich soil in the long run, but nibble into profits this year. And farmers can’t pay their mortgages or lease equipment with the aroma of deep black topsoil.


Handelsman and Cohen urge the world to demand real change in how mainstream agricultural production is managed. “The burden of protecting soil cannot be relegated to indigenous people and environmental activists,” they note. But their specific suggestions are a little underwhelming. They join the calls for international soil treaties, but given how poorly climate treaties have worked, I am cynical about the potential of such agreements. Countries seem likely to both under-promise and under-deliver unless there are costly penalties for failure. The same goes for the consumer-facing labels that the authors propose for food produced on farms that are working to improve their soil. Similar labels have not put a meaningful dent in climate change or other environmental problems — and many customers cannot afford to spend more on “soil-friendly” food.
 
 What farming needs is a top-down overhaul. Handelsman and Cohen gesture at this with proposed discounts on crop-insurance premiums for farmers who increase the carbon in their soil. More is needed. Governments must pay farmers to build soil. In the United States, farmers can apply for funding for anti-erosion improvements through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, run by the Department of Agriculture. Funding announced this month will increase the amount of land planted with cover crops to 12 million hectares by 2030 — but even that would represent only some 7% of US cropland. It is not enough.

 

We need to change how we think of farming. We have already begun to move towards a model in which farmers are less independent businesspeople growing and selling food, and more government-supported land stewards managing a complex mix of food production, soil fertility, wildlife habitat and more. Around the world, many farmers depend on subsidies, drought relief and payments from piecemeal schemes to conserve soil and nature. Such programmes — currently small-scale, ad hoc fixes for a broken system — should be the core of the agricultural sector.

 

 
Our land, our fresh water, our biodiversity and our soil are too precious to be destroyed by the market price of commodity grains and other foodstuffs. We must invest deeply and thoughtfully in our farmers so that they can invest deeply and thoughtfully in the land, becoming holistic landscape-management professionals. This is the future of farming." [1]

 

Of course, we need to preserve another value that we now have: the disciplining and inducing innovations  effect of the market on farmers' work. One possibility is to give farmers as much income for nature management as they receive for the food they sell. The second option is to make subsistence farming technologies so easy that the food market could be abandoned completely, growing all the food for ourselves and performing proper nature management. Good combination - to use the threat of the second option to get the first option realized.

 

1. A call for governments to save soil. Emma Marris, Nature 601, 503-504 (2022)