Soil Health
Situational Analysis – ENG 522
Merissa Dominguez
People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother
Nature’s memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.
Henry Wallace
Secretary of Agriculture,
1936
Overview
Earth currently has a population of approximately seven billion people and
population growth continues at exponential rates; total population is projected to
reach nine billion by 2050. With each passing year, the planet’s natural resources
are pushed to new limits and expected to produce with fruitful outcomes. With this
inevitable population increase, it is important to ask, “How do humans meet the
needs of people while protecting finite natural resources?” The term natural
resource can be arbitrary. When one thinks of natural resources, one generally
thinks of water, biodiversity, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas etc.). Soil is one of the
Earth’s most important natural resources and healthy soil is essential for healthy
plants.
Dictionary.com defines soil as:
1. the portion of the earth's surface consisting of disintegrated rock and humus.
2. a particular kind of earth: sandy soil.
3. the ground as producing vegetation or as cultivated for its crops: fertile soil.
4. a country, land, or region: an act committed on American soil.
5. the ground or earth: tilling the soil.
In this paper, soil will be defined in its agricultural context; this analysis will focus
on farming practices and the implications of various methods on farming practices.
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The management of soil is directly related to its productivity and fertility, which
defines soil health in qualitative terms. The goal of this paper is to describe the
meaning of soil health and to gain an appreciation for this valuable resource, which
is so common that humans have a tendency to take it for granted.
Background
Think of the word health. What does it mean to you? Is it described as a physical or
emotional state? Can you see or feel it? On a non-subjective level can it be
quantitatively described? It is reasonable to say that most of us have a general
understanding of the term health. Of course, health can mean different things to
different people. To some, health may be defined by weight, adequate exercise, or
the number of servings of fruits and vegetables they consume in a day. We often
think of a “healthy” person as someone who pays special attention to the food,
vitamins, and minerals that are put into their bodies, the number of hours they sleep
in a night, or how effectively they manage stress.
What happens when we apply the word health to describe our soils? Are we still
able to delineate the meaning? More than likely most of us are not even thinking
about soil health, at least as it relates to our own health. Before we can establish
what soil health means, we must first recognize that soils are alive and require many
of the same things that we require for health: air, water, food, and habitat. Much
like our own bodies need to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods after exertion,
soil needs to be replenished with nutrient dense organic matter after crops are
harvested in order to retain optimal health.
Soils are an ever-evolving living system that work in dynamic equilibrium to
mediate biological, geological, physical, and chemical interactions. The primary
purpose of soil is providing life to all living creatures. Soils are made up of: open
spaces - air and water; organic material – living and dead organisms; and minerals –
such as sand, silt and clay. Healthy soils will have 45 percent minerals, 5 percent
organic matter, 25 percent water and 25 percent air.
Some effective ways to implement and maintain healthy soils are:

Conservation Crop Rotation – implementing crop diversity to increase
nutrient cycling, manage pest, reduce erosion and hold soil moisture.

Cover Crop – an annual residue-producing crop that is planted to provide
cover and residue to soil that would otherwise be bare or possess little cover.
This practice helps maintain cool soil temperatures, conserves water,
reduces weed competition, decreases use of pesticides and improves crop
production.

No Till – as opposed to conventional tillage, no till is a method that doesn’t
disrupt the natural cycles that provide a habitat to the organisms that are
actively working in the soils and does not damage the structure that
facilitates the soil’s ability to function.

Mulching – applying highly degradable material, i.e. plant residue, to the soil
surface to reduce wind or rain erosion, increases soil moisture and soil
organic matter.

Nutrient Management – management of the soils nutrients to help utilize
nutrients for plant production by addressing the physical, biological and
chemical properties of the soil.

Pest Management – by attracting the “right” predators one can manage the
pest population, which will reduce the need for pesticide application thereby
benefitting air and water quality.
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The ultimate goal is to create a fertile environment that fosters productivity in a
sustainable manner. While the above practices can be applied individually
optimizing soil health is best accomplished using a holistic approach. “Soil health is
improved by disturbing the soil less, growing the greatest diversity of crops (in
rotation and as diverse mixtures of cover crops), maintaining living roots in the soil
as much as possible (with crops and cover crops) and keeping the soil covered with
residue at all times.” (NRCS)
Scope and Urgency
“Soil provides ecosystem services critical for life: soil acts as a water filter and a
growing medium; provides habitat for billions of organisms, contributing to
biodiversity; and supplies most of the antibiotics used to fight diseases. Humans use
soil as a holding facility for solid waste, filter for wastewater, and foundation for our
cities and towns. Finally, soil is the basis of our nation’s agroecosystems which
provide us with feed, fiber, food and fuel.” (Glasener) It is a living system that all
species depends on.
Soil, an integral aspect to our existence, is not easy to create. Soils have been
forming for thousands of years; it takes several hundreds of years (depending on
climate, parent material and topography) to build ONE inch of topsoil. In terms of
productivity, topsoil is where all the biological “action” takes place due to its high
concentration of organic matter and microorganisms. Topsoil is where plants
anchor their roots and attain their nutrients.
This layer takes hundreds of years to form and if damage is severe the ability of it to
perform can be completely eliminated. “The consequences of soil mismanagement
are severe and sometimes irreversible. Erosion is a natural process that wears
away the land, but mismanagement leads to excessive erosion and other kinds of
soil degradation that reduce soil quality and productivity.” (Loynachan et al, 1999)
Degraded soils have been stripped of their protective layers and pushed beyond
their carrying capacity threshold – beyond their ability to perform. The Dust Bowl
that spread across the Great Plains in the 1930’s is the most extreme example of
degraded soils. The “black blizzards” that rolled across the plains carried an
“estimated 200 million tons of soil to the northeastern United States and out to sea”
(Loynachan et al., 1999), which lead to crop failure and economic hardship.
Without soil, the Earth would simply cease to exist. Soil is not an easily-renewable
resource; it is therefore imperative to educate members of the public about soil
health to improve the quality of life in the U.S and around the world. Healthy soil is
the key to raising nutrient-dense food, which in turn, which is essential to our own
life and health.
Target Population
All persons that are considered land managers, or who have direct contact with land
resources such as soil, are considered the target audience. For agricultural
purposes, this group of people can be divided into three categories. Unfortunately,
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all three of them have deviated so far from an intimate understanding of the cycles
of Mother Nature that they suffer from what Leopold wrote: “We can be ethical only
in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love or otherwise have faith
in.” (Leopold, 1987)
The first group of land managers farming practices is implemented, with little to no
modifications, based on previous generations mentality about the value of soil. This
means that decisions about what to plant, when to plant, and what tools to use to
plant are made on the basis of what one’s father, his father’s father and his father’s
father father used. This mind-set is extremely hard to change, as it is engrained
from generation to generation. Educating traditional farmers in sustainable
farming practices that are proven to be beneficial to them, as well as the land, is the
best method in changing their outlook.
The second group consists of beginning farmers who have entered the agricultural
world on a high note. The past five to ten years have been extremely lucrative for
producers who grow cash crops – crops that are grown to be sold to the public. The
focus has been on the land’s ability to produce at any cost, and those cost are at the
expense of the environment. The land is being pushed to extreme limits, with little
to no thought of soil health. Crop insurance and commodity prices are the drivers,
and unfortunately, difficult to compete with.
The third group is so-called “gadget farmers” who rely almost exclusively on
technology in the form of machines, seed and fertilizers to maximize yields. This
dependence on modern technology makes crafting a relationship with the land
difficult to accomplish. “Precision farming, or site-specific management, is an
approach for balancing nutrient supply and demand, and for adjusting other major
management inputs, such as pesticides, water, and tillage to varying soil conditions.”
(Loynachan et al., 1999) This approach helps to build a connection between
technology and the responses from nature. “Restoration managers can speed up the
repair process if they recognize the ecological components of a site and how these
parts function as a whole.” (Whisenant, 1999)
Available Resources
“...perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the
fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than
toward, an intense consciousness of land.” (Leopold, 1987)
A regenerative-ecological farmer understands the interconnectedness within the
soil; such a farmer envisions the soil as a wheel that has many spokes, with each
spoke serving a purpose that that relies upon and closely relates to the surrounding
spokes. This type of land manager is able to develop a relationship with the land
that is formed through a sense of understanding and appreciation. For some this
relationship comes naturally and for others an impetus is needed –an emphasis on
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the link between soil health and the producer’s wallet. Healthy soil requires
relatively few inputs that require time and money, tillage, fertilizers, herbicides,
pesticides etc., to produce optimum outputs, in the form of crop yields. The idea is
to build a soil that works for oneself rather than the other way around.
Unfortunately, this is not as simple as it appears to be.
Commodity prices and crop insurance are the biggest drivers of farming practices.
If a farmer knows, year after year, that they will make twice as much on a field
planted to corn as opposed to a small grain (soybean, sunflower, etc.), they will be
more likely to plant corn every year. And to take it a step further, farmers who
know they will get paid more from crop insurance on the field of corn than any
other crop if it were to fail have very little incentive to focus on soil health.
Eventually, the soil will come to lack everything it needs, including diversity, crop
rotation, and residue, to ensure self-sustainability. Because of this we cannot focus
on the producers to change their practices. They are merely puppets that do what
the puppet masters tell them. Instead the mass media must focus on those that rely
on food for their existence – EVERYONE on this planet.
Summary
The best crop insurance is farming in nature’s image: building soil that is resilient,
resists damage, and recovers quickly when exposed to threats. Implementing
sustainable farming practices will allow the soil the opportunity to use its natural
“immunity” to fight pests, and weeds, and will allow farmers to produce nutrientrich crops, which are essential for our own health and quality of life. In this way,
producers would no longer be reacting to the symptoms of soil degradation and
instead become proactive soil managers to ensure a holistic approach to soil health.
Perhaps the greatest paradox of modern farming medicine is this: As a nation, we
are living in an epidemic of obesity, yet much of the population is malnourished.
Digestive diseases, autoimmune diseases, cancer, heart disease, and a wide variety
of other ailments are at all-time highs, suggesting our overall health is less than
optimal. At the end of the day, we are dependent upon that which the earth
produces in order to sustain life; therefore, it makes sense that the health of that
which we consume from the soil is directly related to the health that we, ourselves,
experience.
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Works Cited
Leopold, Aldo. (1987). A Sand County Almanac (Special Commemorative Edition).
New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whisenant, Steven G. (1999). Repairing Damaged Wildlands: A Process-Orientated,
Landscape-Scale Approach (5th ed.). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Loynachan, T. E., Brown, K. W., Cooper, T. H., & Milford, M. H. (1999). Sustaining our
Soils and Society. Alexandria, Virginia: American Geological Institute.
Altieri, M. A. (1999). The Ecological Role of Biodiversity in Agroecosystems. Berkley,
CA: University of California.