| Summary: | Throughout history few things have mattered more to humans than their relationship with soil. This is a bold statement, but since the dawn of civilization, the use of soil to grow crops has been of central importance to mankind. Not only have past civilizations relied on fertile soils to fuel their prosperity and growth, but also neglect of soil, leading to its degradation, has in many cases led to their collapse. Unfortunately, soil neglect isn’t just a thing of the past. Today, at a time when the need to produce food for a growing world population couldn’t be more acute, vast tracts of once productive land lie degraded and struggling to grow crops or support livestock. The causes of soil degradation are complex, with population growth, poverty, poor delivery of information to farmers, conflict, shortage of land, and climate change all playing a role. Whatever the cause, the consequences are the same: soil degradation causes food shortages, poverty, and hunger. But I don’t just want to discuss the neglect of soil and its dire consequences for mankind. I also want to consider what makes a soil fertile and able to support healthy crops year after year, and how soil can leave its fingerprint on the quality and taste of what we grow. I also want to consider some of the ingenious ways that humans have devised to maintain soil fertility and boost crop yields, and how this knowledge can be harnessed to restore degraded soils. Before I do, however, an important point to make is that the concept of soil fertility is largely agronomic: it relates to the ability of soil to sustain the growth of agricultural crops through the continued provision of nutrients, water, and anchorage. Soils that support some of the most valued natural habitats on Earth, such as pristine tropical forests or expansive arctic tundra, are very infertile from an agricultural point of view; tropical forest soils are highly weathered and nutrient-poor, whereas tundra soils are wet, acidic, and low in plant-available nutrients.
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