The importance healthy soils play in helping save the planet
Dirt is what you sweep under the cabin rug, but soil is a living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans. Soils just don’t happen. Soil is formed from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks. It is made up mainly of mineral particles, organic materials, air, water, and living organisms. It can take over 500 years to form an inch of topsoil on the surface of the planet.
With today’s global challenges, such as climate change, and the growing human population, farmers, ranchers, scientists, and policy makers, are focused more than ever on soil health. A few generations ago these same types of people focused on soil health after the devastating “Dust Bowl” that occurred in the High Plains during the 1930s. They learned what caused the Dust Bowl, and how to prevent another large-scale reoccurrence. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the land grant universities made great strides in understanding how to better manage soils and make them healthier. Following those years, the scientific knowledge gained from the human effects that helped create the Dust Bowl served farmers and consumers well for decades.
But now, we face new challenges and we must move our scientific understanding and farming practices forward again to create, manage, and preserve healthy soils by creating a more sustainable environment that supports a healthier and thriving ecosystem. We must again make giant strides, like we did after the Dust Bowl era. We all want soils that are sustainable for future generations. Farmers in the High Plains and elsewhere have been converting to no-till practices in combination with using cover crops. Grazing is often rotated in for short-intensive periods. Farmers are attending Soil Health Symposiums to learn the latest scientific tillage approaches and the advantages of using annual cover crops. Our local Western Slope (Colorado) orchard and vineyard farmers are practicing sustainable methods by adding organic amendments to their soils each year and using efficient irrigation practices. Much is being done to learn alternative methods to reduce inorganic fertilizer applications. Healthy soil can be a sink for carbon, meaning it actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. I don’t believe this fact is being disseminated to the public sufficiently!
According to Steve Woodruff, an agronomist at the USDA East National Technology Support Center, “the world population is estimated to be 9.1 billion by 2050. To sustain this level of growth, food production will need to rise by 70%. And, between 1982-2007, 14 million acres of prime farmland in the U.S. was lost to development.”
We can all play a part in making the world a more sustainable, healthy, thriving ecosystem and to start, one of the easiest ways is right under our feet.
—Don Metzler lives in Debeque, Colorado.
