Where has all the good soil gone?

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Soil degradation is reducing crop yields and adding to climate change. It's a big headache not just for farmers, but for all of us.

But fear not, as Ed Butler heads to a wheat field in eastern England where farmer Simon Cowell thinks he has a simple, counter-intuitive solution to the problem: Cut back on fertilisers and pesticides, and plough less. He claims it restored his land in two years.

But if it's this simple, why isn't everyone doing it? And what happens if we don't do anything? How quickly will we run out of usable soil, and how much carbon will our soils emit into the atmosphere?

The programme also features interviews with Ronald Vargas of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization; professor of soil conservation Jane Rickson of Cranfield University; and geologist David Montgomery of the University of Washington.

Producer: Josh Thorpe

(Picture: Close-up young plant growing in the soil; Credit: Mintr/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
0:05.7	Coming up, why the fields that we depend on for food might be facing a crisis worldwide.
0:12.2	The soils seem to be deteriorating.
0:14.3	We were ploughing, we were deep cultivating, sub-soiling,
0:17.9	and very quickly the soil lost its fertility and I realized that I needed to find a
0:23.6	different way of farming it. Yes, we're looking at the soil today why it's getting degraded everywhere
0:29.4	and the good news about how to fix it. What I was astounded by was how fast both yields come back,
0:35.9	how fast you can rebuild soil organic matter,
0:38.1	and how much better economically for farmers it was to adopt these new practices.
0:43.0	Back to Earth, that's Business Daily from the BBC.
0:52.9	My family been farming in this area for four generations, and they moved down here until 1930s.
1:00.2	I've just taken over from my father, and we've got about 400 acres now.
1:05.4	The farmer Simon Cowell is leading me into his wheat field.
1:09.5	It's a few dozen kilometres north-east of London.
1:12.2	The young green shoots are just beginning to sprout
1:14.6	from the rich brown soil beneath our feet.
1:18.0	He remembers the day some 15 years ago
1:20.1	when he made a decisive switch.
1:22.9	With his father, he realised that something was really badly wrong with his land.
1:27.6	We were growing arable crops, but the soil seemed to be deteriorating.
1:31.5	We were ploughing, we were deep cultivating, sub-soiling,
1:35.2	and very quickly the soil lost its fertility.
	...

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