Greater biodiversity is the key to healthier soil. And healthier soil is the key to a range of environmental and economic benefits. Here’s how to achieve them.

• Soil biodiversity plays a critical role not just in the production of food but in maintaining clean fresh water, recharging groundwater reserves, and collecting and storing carbon.
• Soil needs sufficient water, healthy living organisms and plant residue, and the right temperature—all benefits associated with regenerative agriculture.
• Increasing the health of the soil in Germany, for example, would lead to upward of €14 billion in economic benefits annually.
• All stakeholders must pay far more attention to the benefits of soil biodiversity and push for more research, supportive policies, and incentives.

Have you ever thought about the value of soil? It covers 25% of the earth’s surface. It supports all of our ecosystems, from farms and grazing land to rainforests and the vast northern taiga. It contains more carbon than the earth’s atmosphere and all its plant biomass combined. The amount of fresh water in soil that’s available to grow plants is 100 times greater than all the world’s lakes, rivers, and wetlands put together. Soil connects the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. And 95% of the food we eat is dependent on it, making soil the single most important resource for agriculture to feed the world.

Yet despite soil’s importance, we are only just beginning to understand the science of it: its astonishing biodiversity when healthy and the role it plays not just in the production of food but in maintaining clean fresh water, recharging groundwater reserves, and collecting and storing the carbon that would otherwise keep warming the planet.

What we have learned in our latest extensive research is not just about the conditions needed for the healthiest, most productive soil possible. Along with the environmental and nutritional benefits of healthy soil, the significant economic value gained by improving soil (upward of €14 billion a year in Germany alone) makes clear just how critical it is to strive in every way to optimize and maintain its health.

This is a task for all stakeholders—not just farmers and agricultural policymakers but also for food companies, grocers, and consumers. In this article we look at what makes healthy soil so critical to the well-being of the planet and how we can work together to capture its considerable economic value.

The amount and quality of the research that has been carried out on soil biodiversity to date lags far behind the major advances in above-ground plant research now taking place, from new breeding technologies to CRISPR-based gene editing.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here