The only thing that stands between us and extinction
is six inches of soil and the fact that it rains.
That's Anna Krywoszynska, she's a Faculty Research Fellow
at the University of Sheffield and what she's saying there blows my mind,
that most of the processes that maintain all life on this planet exist in six inches of soil.
And I know it sounds crazy but the thing is soil is alive, and we're killing it.
And that's problematic for a number of reasons.
One big problem being that 95% of our food comes from the soil.
So no more soil, means no more food.
But don't worry, I'm not gonna guilt trip you with another climate horror story
because this is a problem with solutions, and we've already made a start.
And if we keep it up we might be out to help some of the other
scary climate issues we're facing as well.
Countries can withstand amazing thing.
Horrific things.
What no country can withstand is the loss of its soil and its fertility.
And therefore there is an emergency.
To understand why people are using language like emergency.
You have to know that the world is losing 30 football pitches of soil every minute.
But before we even get into that, what exactly is soil?
Here's environmental scientist Lindsay Blake to explain.
What amazes me about soil is it looks so simple but really it's very complicated.
So it's a mix of materials that are kind of broken up from rocks and minerals combined
with organic matter,
that's all broken down and water but it's also filled with living things
from the very small microorganisms invisible to human eye like bacteria,
archaea, fungi, to easily see things like insects and earthworms.
One gram of soil can be estimated between 4,000 and 50,000 different kinds
or species of micro-organisms.
Something so rich in life, something so vital for our survival
is something we barely even think about.
Which is probably why we're doing such a crap job of protecting it.
Life is at risk ultimately.
And that's because all the things that we take for granted,
resources, they're more at the top of people's minds like water
and air, healthy air, etc are related to healthy soils.
Unfortunately because we've not been looking after soils
we've been taking out more than we've been putting in.
But if we year on year don't return 30% of all organic matter
that we take out the soil, we don't return it to the soil,
then we see soil degradation because that organic matter
is the glue that holds the little bits of rock the minerals together.
When Karen says 'taking out' ultimately she means farming, growing crops for stuff like
food, fuel and textiles.
And that uses and damages all that good stuff in the soil.
We're taking it out but we're not putting enough back.
And In terms of farming
that has a lot to do with the way the practices and methods have changed over the last 70 years.
Here's Graeam Willis from the Campaign to Protect Rural England to explain.
Farms have got bigger, machinery's got bigger, fields have got bigger
and farmers shifted to relying on machinery and out of the bag solutions
and by that I mean using chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
If you use a chemical and you don't add back organic matter
then the soil has less life in it, the soil breaks down its structure goes
so it doesn't stick together, you can lose it to water and wind eroding it
so it just blows away or ends up in the river
and you also lose carbon as well so that goes up into the air where we …
It's the last place we need it.
Oh yeah I forgot to mention, soil is a really effective carbon sink.
But it can only capture carbon when it has a decent amount of organic matter in the soil.
But I come back to that.
So what can we do?
How can we not kill the soil?
Well in terms of farming one technique is pretty straightforward.
Just stop digging up the soil.
No more ploughing.
Which sounds pretty strange because when you think of farming,
you think of ploughing.
Here's Graeam again.
I think we're all familiar with seeing ploughed fields, aren't we?
Ploughing's been around for an awful long time.
But the problem with ploughing is it disrupts the life in the soils.
One calculation is it kill about 90% of the worms in the soil.
Now, earthworms obviously do a huge job in churning the soil but earthworms also pull in material
from the top of the ground and pull it down deep into the soil
and they process it through their guts and add make all the nutrients in that organic matter
like dead leaves and dead plant material and make it available to the plants.
So in ploughing you are throwing away one of nature's great helpers.
OK but how do you actually grow things without ploughing?
This is John Cherry, he's a farmer.
He walked me through the basics.
We're mimicking nature.
We just make a little slot in and plant the seed.
We keep the ground covered at all times we don't like to see bare soil.
And the third crucial thing is the diversity in the rotation lots of different types of plant.
So you're getting a variety in the root system so the soil is constantly being fed
and that puts fantastic amount of fertility into the soil.
This method it's called conservation agriculture or no till farming and it's nothing new.
It's based on centuries old techniques but it's making a comeback in a big way.
So when it seemed like we were simplifying farming by making everything bigger
and seemingly simpler, we're actually making everything more complicated and worse.
Turns out the old ways were much better.
We spend much less on it and fewer sprays needed less fertiliser,
the ground's getting more fertile all the time without being disturbed.
This is rye behind us.
As tall as I am hardly any fertiliser.
What's not to like?
Conservation agriculture is not the only solution.
There's different types of soils all over the world and they all need different approaches.
But this one is working in the UK and the Americas.
Now, I'm not a farmer and you're probably not farmer either
so this might seem like one of those problems that's completely out your hands.
And I used to think that too.
But it's not true.
We can all help protect the soil.
I think what's missing is that local activism.
Anybody who's got access to a garden and our gardens are such a wonderful wildlife habitat.
You know there's a lot of biodiversity going on there
and we can we do actually add organic matter.
There's quite a lot of healthy soils in gardens but there's also a lot of people
who are sealing their soils, you know, paving.
And all of that concrete thing of our precious green space in cities is leading to more flooding.
So I think what people can do locally is make sure they are keeping soil surfaces
and adding in organic matter.
Now I said I'd come back to this because there's even more good news.
Not only is healthy soil good for growing food,
protecting against extreme weather
and boosting wildlife numbers, it's also a massive carbon sink,
hoovering up huge amounts of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere.
And if we increase the amount it could store by just less than half a percent
we could actually help the build up of CO2 in the air.
So we have more carbon in the soil, living soils,
those soils can be part of the solution
to climate change problems and it's also part of sustainable farming in the future.
So if the climate changes for the worse, those soils will perform better.
Farmers will be able to make a living and we will be able to rely on the supply of food.
Soil is a massive subject.
There's loads we could have talked about.
So we've only really scratched the surface in terms of soil protection,
because there's tones of different methods and conservational agriculture is only one.
So if you're interested in finding out more, there's links to our sources in the description
and there's further reading.
There's also links to different organisations that are doing great work for soil protection.
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