At long last people are paying more attention to soil in the light of global warming. It is its carbon which is attracting people. Soil is seen as vast resource holding carbon - called sequestration. And that it could be capturing more.  But we forget that we have a lot of making up to do as we've lost over 3 billion (1000 million) tons of carbon over last25 years

In order to move forward we need to understand the underlying principles which affect what happens with soil. Having done that we need an even bigger discussion on how we turn these principles into practice

We see the various monetary (money supply) mechanisms in Economics which could relate with soil. We know our soil ecology and the best ways to use that knowledge to regenerate soils to make them healthier. Governments are there to is address such long-term issues,  they dont - either by fiscal (like tax/subsidies) means or direct regulation. If they are not working, then other organisations can step in, and to fill in the gaps, our own actions.

Government

As markets do not address soil, governments can step in with their own fiscal measures. Both EU countries & America spend over over 50b on subsidies.  Curiously these are the countries that herald ‘free trade’. The EU - following years of changes, its farmers about £100/acre to look after land. On leaving the EU the UK has struggled to work out what it is doing with around £2b paid out for environment schemes like ELMS 

 The US uses a lot of subsidies to help poorer people buy healthier food, and thereby help local farmers and the rural economy in the process. They provide over $50b to 40 million people on benefits with electronic vouchers to buy local healthy food in a scheme called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme - SNAP  While these will all impact the state of soil, more direct measures include the following:

UK

The government chose not to set targets for soil improvement, because ‘they have a plan’ according to the Minister Rebbecca Pow. “This would be a monumental shift in how soil is cared for in England. Intensive agriculture has slashed the amount of carbon soils store by 60% and put 6 million hectares across England and Wales at risk of erosion or compaction. But the plan doesn’t actually explain how sustainable management will be expanded. The only action proposed is to create a “baseline map” of soil health in England by 2028.”

The main instrument the government has chosen to shake up agriculture is the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme. SFIs are payments to farmers based on actions which benefit the environment, guided by the 150 page document. A farmer can receive up to £20 a hectare (1/10 previous Basic Payment Subsidy) for their efforts to improve soils on arable fields.

An integrated strategy for converting farmland to more sustainable management would mean increasing the diversity of crops grown, helping healthy soils regenerate and eliminating pesticides, all at the same time. Instead, SFI payments reward farmers for making standalone changes. Also lacking is any countrywide research and advisory scheme, as we would have had 40 years ago.

A Lords amendment during the Environment Bill, set up by an old colleague , now Lord, Larry Whitty that required the Government to set a legally binding target on soil health. However the Minister Rebecca Pow said “I would like to be clear with the House and the other place that we are currently considering how to develop the appropriate means of measuring soil health, which could be used to inform a future soils target. However, we do not yet have the reliable metrics needed to set a robust target by October next year and to measure its progress. If we accepted the amendment, we could be committing to doing something that we cannot deliver or might not even know if we have delivered. I am sure hon. Members and hon. Friends would agree that that is not a sensible approach.”

So let’s be clear. We in the UK do not even have measurements about the state of our soil. Yet this is 80 years after the first soil surveys carried out in Britain. These surveys carried on till 1987 when the team were disbanded and have now ended up in Cranfield, where they boast extensive data. I did write to ask them whether they thought the Minister was right in that we do not have sufficient data to set targets. I await a reply.

Instead she said: “we will be bringing forward a soil health action plan for England. It will provide a clear strategic direction to develop a healthy soil indicator, soil structure methodology and a soil health monitoring scheme” I have yet to see the plan I mid 2023. 

In 2022 the UK’s Climate Control Committee wrote to Rebecca saying “There are critical gaps in the extent and scope of the proposed targets. The proposals contain no targets related to soil health, despite this being one aspect of the natural environment highly vulnerable to climate change. An ambitious soil health target should be included as a priority in the Government’s forthcoming Soil Health Action Plan”

EU

“ The current mosaic of approaches can be overcome and replaced by an overall harmonised and comprehensive EU soil protection framework. This is all the more true as the United Nations' 2030 Agenda has set in motion a process that will have far-reaching implications for connected thinking: Sustainable Development Goal 15 and its target 15.3 stipulate that land degradation neutrality should be achieved by 2030, although this is not binding. This requires more than the envisaged revision of the 2006 Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection. In particular, possible legal instruments to protect soils from chemical, biological and physical threats need to be reviewed and further developed. The chapter also explains why elements of the European Green Deal are once again falling short of the need to protect Europe's soils. "(Heuser 2021)

The EU will propose a new law on ‘Soil Health’ with new tools to map unhealthy soil and have set  the Mission 'A Soil Deal for Europe' is to establish 100 living labs and lighthouses to lead the transition towards healthy soils by 2030. They are putting Horizon funding in to achieve that.  In 2023, the EU announced “ Our ultimate objective is to achieve healthy soils by 2050, so that harm to people and environment is avoided, in line with our Zero Pollution ambition. The draft Law we're presenting includes a clear definition of soil health and a framework to monitor soil quality. Those will enable a solid knowledge base, bringing together data from national, private and EU sources, including Copernicus” The new law would see member states monitor the health of soils, fertiliser use and erosion, but stops short of country-level targets for improving soil quality. This drew criticism from the European agri-food industry, in the shape of One Planet Business for Biodiversity (OP2B), which called for more ambition to improve the “worrying” state of soils.

“The proposal for the first-ever EU legislation on soils provides a harmonised definition of soil health, puts in place a comprehensive and coherent monitoring framework and fosters sustainable soil management and remediation of contaminated sites. The proposal brings several sources of soil data under one roof.”

Australia

Australia have a draft National Soil Action Plan, as a commitment under the National Soil Strategy. It  “ will outline priority actions over the next 5 years to improve Australia’s soil health and long-term security. We are now working with state and territory government representatives and key soil-related organisations to incorporate feedback from consultation. Once finalised and endorsed by governments, the Action Plan will ensure a nationally coordinated and locally adaptive approach to managing soil sustainably”

World

FAO World soil map

The legal protection of soil has mostly been left to national legislators, so confined national borders. Under international law, soil protection has “long been neglected in international agreements" (Ruppel 2022). There have been more recent developments in the context of desertification, land degradation and decarbonisation ambition.

Here, ‘soil’ is not synonymous with ‘land’. Soil ecosystems deliver services such as food and carbon sequestration. Therefore, soil is of transnational interest 

The World Soil Charter has been revised and was unanimously endorsed in June 2015, during the course of the International Year of Soils, by the member states of the FAO during the 39th Session of the FAO Conference.1Revised guidelines intend to ensure that soils are managed sustainably and that degraded soils are rehabilitated or restored, are targeted at individuals and the organised private sector, governments and international organisations, which triggered an international dialogue concerning the protection and rehabilitation of soils and sustainable farming practice. There are no ‘soil health’ treaties, instead various

“Soil protection has so far too often been neglected in international agreements. Despite this oversight, the climate goals cannot be reached without soil protection and conservation.. " (Ruppel 2022)

Practice

Land

If we could muster all those players to come up with schemes to improve soil, we come up against a major stumbling block. We may see and feel it ‘our’ soil, the trouble is that is usually under somebody else’s land. Virtually all land in US & Europe is already owned. If it isn’t it won’t be any good. As Mark Twain said ‘buy now there will never be any new land'.

The original reason much land has been ‘enclosed’ - in Britain in the 1600s - and made private, is so the land owners can get a return on their investment. In the early days it was for better & well fed cattle. The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ made out it was good for environment too. Originally the landowners did their own work, but increasingly rented out the land for somebody else to do the work, and they just picked up part of the profit as rent.

Rent is a major issue as it means whatever we buy to eat, some of it goes back to the landowner who does no work but collect rents from those who do. Rentier capitalism staggeringly complex, but underpins all we do. (any stats on % food prices = rent?)

And then we have to convince the landowner to adopt practices better for the soil. This shouldn’t be too onerous, and it will rest in better soil , for which the landowner can rake in more rent. This was a dilemma for Labour after war, when pondering the nationalisation of land. Eventually they settled for something along the lines , that if landowners did benefit from state subsidy they should give some back.  The present UK government has decided to give £1B of the old subsidies as Landscape Recovery to anybody who just happens to own more than 500 hectares, for re-wilding.

ELMS

The first country to trial the ideas of natural capital was the UK when ‘it left behind the EU regulations’, according to the then Secretary of State George Eustice. The talk, by his predecessor Michael Gove was of ‘public money for public goods’, meaning previous EU subsidies going to nature rather than just owning land. The package was called Environmental Land Management Schemes following about 5 years of debate, mainly between the Farmers’ Union and the green NGOs.

For five years there was talk of rewarding ecosystem services, introducing biodiversity net gain(BNG) and ‘stacking and bundling’. This referred to ‘stacking’ a number of environmental benefits together - say when you develop natural flood management you can ‘stack’ some carbon credits and BNG too. Bundling refers to groups of farmers working together to tackle environmental issues that individual farmers could not. This bought talk of ‘farm clusters’, and even farm cooperatives, which I was involved with, to work together to do this.

However the three main strands of new subsidies - the Landscape Recovery, Local Nature Recovery(LNR) and SFI proved very hard to implement. The LNR was ditched to be replaced by Countryside Stewardship plus (CS+) - the ‘plus’ to distinguish from the previous EU CS scheme. .

A lot of ideas were floated, with a lot of interest across farmers and green NGOs and a lot of consultants paid; but there was no plan. Things like this take years of trialling to monitor and measure what goes on, but without much of a state research base, it was always going to benefit the finance sector rather than the farmers. The intention of the government was to reduce its support in the expectation that private capital would move in. Involved in one of the pilots it was made clear by my Defra colleague that the funds were not actually to do anything, but attract new funding sources in. But despite much talk by various interested parties, there was little actual delivery.

cross-continental  collaborative 

There is a Soil  BON  Foodweb  Team,  based on The Soil Biodiversity Observation Network (Soil BON)  launched  in  2018. This was  part  of  The  Group  on  Earth  Observations  Biodiversity  Observation  Network  (GEO  BON),  a  United  Nations  initiative  that  aims  to  monitor  Earth’s  biodiversity. It is a  cross-continental  collaborative  network  that  aims  to  monitor  soil  animal  communities and food webs using consistent methodology at a global scale.  Central team using manual image annotations to develop a   computer-vision   pipeline   based   on   deep   learning   algorithms  (RCNN  This sets out to replace my tired old way of identifying and counting arthropods with “a tool to accelerate bulk arthropod classification and biomass estimates utilizing machine learning methods for computer vision”.

What is the contribution of these organism to various soil functions.

How can fungi improve the utilisation of phosphates and nitrogen

What is the difference between slurry and manure in improving soil health,

In a broader question about the functioning of soil organisms in aerobic and anaerobic conditions.

Education is the more formal process where we can demonstrate improvement in knowing and doing, like this practical observation for 7-8 year olds From these lessons we should be able to create a set of aims, adaptable to age and capability.

Any learning programme should aim to:

1.       Explore the inter-relations between the soil inhabitants in different environments.

2.       Assess the effects the multi-relations in soils may have on the society above ground.

3.       Determine how you can encourage improving soil health.

Personal

Many the debate I have heard about ‘personal and political’. Let’s hope the debate continues in relation to soil

Compost

If you want to do some personal stuff, and lucky enough to have a bit of garden, Composting is compulsory! Don’t cheat with a compost bag, which will give you a quick fix, but has been sterilised, so that all the bacteria, fungi and small creatures you want to build your soil have been killed off. Composting is a fascinating process that harnesses the power of nature, which we have seen build up over hundreds of millions of years, to recycle organic waste and create nutrient-rich soil additives Make your own with brown debris (for carbon) and mix with fresh green matter (for nitrogen) to make those essential molecules.

There are several stages, whose development we have seen over millions of years, beginning with the breakdown of complex organic compounds into simpler forms. Enzymes produced by microorganisms break down carbohydrates, proteins, and fats into smaller molecules. The next stage - Mesophilic stage - occurs at moderate temperatures (around 20-40°C ), where bacteria which like these temperatures dominate and  consume simple sugars, producing carbon dioxide (CO2) and heat. The compost pile thus heats up, and other bacteria which like the  higher temperatures (around 40-65°C) further break down the organic matter, releasing more heat and accelerating decomposition. During this stage, a variety of chemical reactions occur, including oxidation, hydrolysis, and fermentation. Oxidation is where microorganisms help organic molecules come in contact with oxygen and in the process loose an electron. This process releases energy and produces carbon dioxide. Other microrganisms help reactions without oxygen - called anaerobic - or fermentation. We saw this process, which can co-exist closely with the aerobic processes, develop about 300mya. This process produces organic acids, alcohols, and gases such as methane. The third process active in these conditions is hydrolysis, where enzymes break down complex molecules into simpler forms. Water molecules are used to break chemical bond in complex carbohydrates to make simple sugars.

The final - maturation stage - is cooler, and the composting process slows down. Fungi and actinobacteria, which have been around for over half a billion years, play a significant role in this stage; where they further breaking down complex compounds and stabilize the compost. Throughout these stages, mineralization occurs and that is where the decomposers convert organic compounds into inorganic forms, releasing nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that can be readily absorbed by plants.

Don’t forget to add your teabags and coffee grindings, each time reminding ourselves where they came from. That tea, grown on the slopes of Sri Lanka, or coffee from Brazil has taken nutrients from their soil to grow and sell on, so the least we can do is get some of it back in the ground.  I also set up compost heaps wormerry and comfrey, all ideal for getting nutrients into the ground, but not in first couple of years. So when I dug over the compacted clay soil I mixed it with leaves lying in  the roads in winter.

But in any garden we soon learn that it is the water which is vital.  It is the water that is ‘limiting’. Even in a climate like UK, the change from flooding to drought seems to be get closer. Elsewhere tis must be much more obvious. I had a friend at Agricultural College doing her research to prove ‘water was the most significant limiting factor’. I thought then: ‘that is obvious’. Yet it should be even more  obvious  now. We hear about all sorts of ‘climate change events’, about flooding one moment, then drought, followed by fires. Is this all about climate change or is a lot due soil management? Could our soil be more resilient to change, and thus control these extremes?

Just as our teabags represent soil from another land, then even more so does much of the fruit and vegetables we eat and the flowers we look at, represent water from elsewhere. It is estimated that is moved from Africa to the EU each year in the crops we buy from them Water..actual water moved from Africa to Europe.

Seeds

I remember pointing out to Pat Mooney in Canada in the mid seventies about how seed companies were being bought up. More recently he says “We went from roughly 7,000 private sector seed companies in the world when I first got into this work in the seventies, to where we now have really what, five or six at the most. In many ways, it’s really only three or four companies that really control all of commercial production of seeds and pesticides together. So it’s vastly concentrated compared to what it was." He goes on “Seeds used to be sold and owned separately from pesticides and from fertilizers. And farm machinery companies were stuck in the business of producing tractors. The traders and the Cargills of the world and the processors and the retailers were all different folks. With big data management and the ability to manipulate, not just digital information but also to manipulate digital DNA to actually adjust, technologically computer-wise adjust living materials makes it possible for the biggest companies with the biggest computers to step in and really try to govern the large chunks of the food chain”.

It is unlikely we’ll see an end to that anytime soon, so you may want to start collecting your own seeds. There are increasing numbers of organisations now collecting, saving and preserving local seeds. The first seed bank was set up by Vavilov in Leningrad, and became a target for Hitler in WW2.  It is estimated a dozen staff died of starvation surrounded by the seeds rather than let Hitler find them. They realised the power of seeds.

Landrace gardening goes in the opposite direction from rows of similar monocrops, where 5-6 crops now dominating the world. It is more of a plant orgy to let all your carrot varieties, or whatever, cross-pollinate with each other to create a diverse breeding population. My wild strawberries cross with the modern ones. It is a survival strategy that diversifies the gene pool, making it better future-proofed than something highly bred. 

I have found that it takes effort for the first few years, but then as time goes by, less and less. And more and more grows without doing anything. You don’t spend summer watering excessively. Got poor soil? I had compacted clay that the builders left. Yet now the plants just grow, as the deeper rooting types have oped up the soil for air, so it breathes better. And the tomatoes tastes of something but doesn’t mind a late frost? It’s all possible.

Sow all the named varieties you want, and let the insects cross-pollinate. Select and save seed from only the ones that do well in your soil. Start again next spring, sowing your saved seed. 

Once you see your garden as a trial area for regenerative gardening, the key question to keep asking is ‘how do I protect that invaluable resource?’ There are many littlel things to do - beyond the five main practices - no dig, cover crops, composting, and rotation and more perennials. ‘No dig’ is straightforward, but difficult for your veg crops? Cover crops are especially useful in winter to stop soil damage from weathering. I find cover crops like forget-me-nots and strawberries do a decent job. I found it took about five years before I wasn’t running round trying to get the slugs with bits of copper, beer traps, nematodes and even wires round the bed with a battery to sizzle the blighters. All to no avail. Then the hedgehogs arrived, with lots of places to snuffle round. No slug damage since. The trees are full of fruits, grapes in the glasshouse, and no fertiliser in years.

However the real point of doing all these things is to try and work out what any of these techniques do to the soil. That soil under your feet. Can you try to work out that when you put that spade in you don’t just stand a chance of cutting a worm in half, but loads of aggregates with their tiny creatures In a field, the gulls would be in making the most of the catch, but in the garden it is just a blackbird or Robin. But they are telling you about the life just under the surface.

We can do our bit. A few square metres at a time, which we’ll need to take over the planet. will make changes. Will they be enough? Or do we need to pull in our political bodies to take us forward.