Healthy soils

It’s time to take soil seriously. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with very high confidence in its latest report, land degradation represents “one of the biggest and most urgent challenges” that humanity faces.

It is a fact that we have destroyed our soils to crisis point. If we don’t change the trajectory we are on, our planet will eventually be uninhabitable.

Turning crop waste and discarded paper into a material called biochar could help to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil while also helping to enrich farmland.

Replenishing and protecting the world’s soil carbon stores could help to offset up to 5.5bn tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, a study finds.

Healthy soils-Soils help sustain life by fulfilling our needs for food, feed and fiber plus a number of critical ecological services.

Our soils are in trouble. Over the past century, we’ve abused them with plowing, tilling and too much fertilizer.

"Phenomes" isn't a term in most Americans' working vocabularies. But connecting healthy phenomes in soil, crops and people can benefit all three, an agricultural scientist says.

Our soils are in trouble. Over the past century, we have abused them with ploughing, tilling and too much fertilizer.

Reversing soil degradation is vital if we want to feed a growing global population, protect biodiversity and help address the planet’s climate crisis, the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), QU Dongyu, today told a meeting of agriculture ministers in Berlin.

Did you know that the equivalent of one soccer pitch of soil erodes every five seconds? Yet it takes 1 000 years to produce just a few centimetres of topsoil.

Global warming is likely to cause a decline in the number of species of microbes that live in tropical soils which could threaten the biodiversity of rainforests and increase carbon emissions, according to new research.

Until recently the use of silicon compounds in agriculture was limited, because ‘silicon’ was not included in fertilizer legislation.