The Dirty Way to Feed More People and Help Stop Climate Change

Author: Tove Danovich 

Modern agriculture has not been kind to the soil. Since intensive agriculture took off in the 1950s, farming in the United States has emphasized harvest yields over environmental (or taste) concerns. Then, with the Green Revolution in the 1960s, we exported those ideas around the world. Yet over the last decade, it’s become apparent that treating the soil to maximize yield can strip both our food and the soil of important nutrients.

On average, 70 percent of all land has degraded soil, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. In an overview on land degradation, the NRCS wrote, “The productivity of some lands has declined by 50% due to soil erosion and desertification.” In Africa, poor soil may have caused yield reductions of as much as 40 percent. Globally, loss caused by degradation “costs the world about $400 billion per year,” according to the NRCS.

But in the fight against climate change and global hunger, lowly soil may be our greatest resource.

Schoolchildren learn that trees and plants turn “bad” air into “good,” and adults know that deforestation exacerbates rising levels of greenhouse gases. “But those trees have roots,” pointed out Ephraim Nkonya, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute who specializes in land management and natural-resource use in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. “We see trees above the ground and get fixated on their importance,” Nkonya said. But stopping climate change is less about planting more trees to make up for losses owing to deforestation than about taking better care of the land we have. Changing agricultural practices to focus on better land management and decreased deforestation could reduce nearly a third of carbon emissions.

Plants—all plants, not just trees—draw carbon out of the air to help them grow, and what they don’t need is drawn through their roots into the soil. Eighty percent of all terrestrial carbon resides in the soil, according to a 2012 Nature article by two members of the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University. While two-thirds of carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels, a third comes from soil organic carbon loss “due to land use change such as the clearing of forests and the cultivation of land for food production,” the authors wrote.

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