Soil security and global food security

Highlights

● Much of the world’s agricultural land has been degraded through soil loss and degradation of soil organic matter.

● Regenerative farming practices based on combining cover crops, reduced tillage, and diverse crop rotations can rebuild soil, soil organic matter, and soil health.

● In the coming decades, global food security will increasingly depend on agricultural policies that respectively support soil-building practices.

Abstract

Over the course of the postglacial period has managed to add degrade a substantial portion of the world’s potential agricultural land. The soil loss and degradation that has repeatedly impacted regional societies around the world resulted from agricultural practices that increased the physical loss of soil (erosion), reduced soil organic matter, changed pH (acidification) or salinity, and disrupted or altered communities of soil life. In the coming century, as continued soil degradation threatens global food security while the global population keeps rising it is imperative that farmers develop and adopt soil-health building (regenerative) practices to solve a problem that has plagued societies throughout history. Growing evidence suggests that agricultural systems that combine cover crops, reduced tillage, and diverse crop rotations can reduce erosion, enhance soil health and rebuild soil organic matter to cultivate beneficial soil life and harvest both economic and environmental benefits. In the coming post-oil world, global food security would benefit from a global effort to promote soil restoration to help addresses the challenge of sustainably feeding the world, increase soil-based carbon sequestration, protect on-farm biodiversity and reduce off-farm water pollution. Because soil security sets a solid foundation for global food security, agricultural policies and subsidies should be reformed to encourage farmers to adopt regenerative, soil-building practices.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Agriculture / soil security / food security / regenerative

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The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)