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Why Is Soil Important To The Environment – The United Nations has designated December 5 as Earth Day, to raise awareness of the need for Improving the health of the soil for the benefit of the stars. Which might make some people wonder what soil is, let alone why it’s important enough to be rated its own global day.
The answer to the first part of this question depends on who you ask. For many of us, there is no difference between dirt and soil. It is what we wash our hands, disappointed when it follows in the house, and maybe what we stick the roots of basil-bound windowsill into (that we may forget the water).
Why Is Soil Important To The Environment
For scientists, farmers, and (real) gardeners, though, soil is the ultimate thing. Unlike manure, which is mostly broken rock that contains minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and iron, soil is compost that contains bacteria, fungi, protozoa, worms, and insects. These aerate, create structure, and provide important nutrients to the soil. Add plants to this mix, and what you get is a complex system called the “soil food web.” It lives, and it still supports our life in this world.
Soil And United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — European Environment Agency
There is not just one type of soil, and the type of soil you have determines the type of food you eat. Can be planted well. That being said, if you care about eating, you care about the soil. Healthy soils can also help us cope with the harmful effects of climate change on our food systems, including storing large amounts of carbon. How does it all work? Here we go down – down to – the basics.
If you dig a hole several meters deep in the backyard, you will see that the soil has layers. The older the soil, the more layers you will find. But basically it will look like this:
There are a number of interesting microbes in your rhizosphere. If you have “good soil,” says soil biologist Elaine Ingham, 1 gram of it can contain 75,000 species of bacteria, 25,000 species of fungi, 1,000 species of protozoa, and hundreds of species of nematodes.
If you remember the food chain from elementary school, the soil’s food web will sound familiar. Plant roots allow sugars and organic matter to be consumed by bacteria and fungi. Nematodes and protozoa eat bacteria and fungi, some of them excrete; Then the roots of the plant will absorb those nutrients.
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Bacteria and fungi are particularly important for plant growth, each of which contributes to health and the ability to fight pests and diseases. According to Dorn Cox, director of research at the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & Environment in Freeport, ME, fungi that create networks with plant roots “provide feedback between what the soil bacteria need and what the plant is producing. A large amount of the plant’s energy is not put into growing itself, but into feeding their microbiome.”
There are (noticeable) insects are soil, too. Beetles, worms and spiders were eaten and are still being eaten. When these organisms die naturally, they become food for the remaining organisms.
A soil scientist will tell you that the type of soil you have depends on the type of rock it started with – the “parent material.” It has different amounts of sand, silt, and clay and a variety of minerals. A good combination for food cultivation purposes creates loam; The sand in it makes the roots penetrate, the clay in it keeps moisture.
Quite a lot of land can grow something. But if you want to grow tomatoes, or wheat, or peaches and not just grass, Ingham says, you’ll need a balance of organisms in your soil food web. So, if you picked tomatoes this past summer, for example, it’s highly likely that you have the wrong percentage of fungi and bacteria in your soil.
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Write Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis in their book “Teaming With Microbes,” “Each soil environment has different organisms and therefore a different soil food web.” That’s because, as Mark Kopecky, a private gardener in Florida, explains it, “Plants are designed to be members of a community and every species has its own microbes and other organisms that it needs to grow with it, and they. Take care of each other,” including notifying each other when there are pest problems.
Unfortunately, Ingham says, the chemicals we use in our industrial food systems (which feature monocrops of corn, soybeans and other food crops) destroy soil organisms. This can happen even in places with highly fertile soils, such as parts of New Jersey and Michigan, which store more organic matter with plant roots. And without the right amount of beneficial organisms, you get a system that requires a lot of inputs, Kopecky said. It’s a vicious cycle.
The more chemicals you add to your crops, the more organisms you destroy, until you’re left with a lot of dirt (i.e. soil minus the good stuff). And the extreme weather only made this worse.
What we can grow depends on a bunch of things, including the weather (no one is trying to grow lemon trees outdoors in Maine); water available (peas like it wet, black-eyed peas like it dry); and the landscape (agriculture in the Arctic presents challenges). But food still needs certain nutrients in the soil to grow.
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Ingham explains that soil types – and what grows in them – exist on a spectrum, changing from a high percentage of bacteria, to a high percentage of fungi. If you start from scratch – in a Midwestern cropland that experienced severe flooding last spring – you can continuously build your way back to soil health, with one type of crop creating the right structure and nutrients to lead to soil growth. The next crop: from tomatoes and broccoli, with more bacteria, then to legumes and barley, with an equal number of bacteria and fungi, and finally herbs and fruit trees, which grow in soil rich in fungi.
As much as biodiversity is a buzzword for scientists discussing the health of grasslands, or tropical forests, or deserts, Cox points out that it has important effects on the soil’s food web as well. “Soil biodiversity not only provides optimal crop yields, but also weed suppression, fire resistance, flood resistance, as well as soil growth,” he said, becoming increasingly important as climate change wreaks havoc on our landscape. “All essential ecosystem services, healthy soils can provide.”
It’s a way of thinking that is fundamental to regenerative agriculture, and one that states are starting to legislate, and even big food companies are embracing. But the health of the soil is also attracted by the diversity of farmers, which is about to achieve results. Reduced production from “dead” soil and high cost of chemicals. As Minnesota grain farmer Tom Cotter points out in a video for the nonprofit Agriculture Project, “We need to help make the soil strong for our crops. [And] there’s only so much you can do with human-made things.”
Has the municipality suspended food waste and garbage collection due to COVID-19? May 11, 2020 City composting 101: stickers, bags and containers March 26, 2019 Kondo Your Kitchen February 5, 2019 Lessons learned from the launch of a composting program November 13, 2017 Cover crops, like this red cabbage in Sussex, Dessex, help return carbon to farmland. Michele Dorsey Walfred/Flickr, CC BY
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Jocelyn Lavallee does not work for, consult with, own shares in or receive funding from companies or organizations that will benefit from this article, and does not disclose any affiliations other than their academic appointments.
Human society is built on land. It feeds the world and produces important fuel and fiber. But most people rarely give soil a second thought.
Recently, soil has received the attention of environmental organizations, policy makers and industry leaders. It has been covered in news articles, debated in policy debates and even received an international day of recognition.
Why all this attention? Because the world urgently needs to keep carbon out of the atmosphere, and create food security for the rapidly growing world population. Soil can do both.
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However, current efforts to promote soil carbon storage miss a key point: not all soil carbon is the same. As scientists focus on soil ecology and sustainability, we believe that effective soil carbon management requires consideration of its diversity.
Carbon sequestration in soil can help cut greenhouse gas concentrations in the air. It also improves soil quality in many ways: it improves soil structure, stores water and nutrients needed by plants and feeds important soil animals.
But soil carbon does not exist by itself. It is combined with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements, in a compound that scientists collectively call soil organic matter. This material is amazingly complex, made of thousands of chemical compounds that remain from the decay and transformation of plants, animals and microbes.
Adding to
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