World Soil Day is celebrated each year on the 5th December. Soil is an essential component of everyday life, allowing us to produce 95% of all food globally. However, soil has become increasingly degraded from a number of pressures, including monoculture farming (where just one crop is produced). Degraded soil can lead to a number of problems from reduced crop output, soil erosion, to reduced water storage and filtration.
Soil is intrinsically linked with water resources. It's found that 1 cubic metre of healthy soil can retain more than 250 litres of water. Restoring soil will have the positive effect of helping us to sustainably manage our vital water resources too, something we think a lot about at HNP!
Soil-friendly ways of farming (known as regenerative agriculture) has been proven to be a success, and we can do this in a number of ways, including:
Reducing tilling
Planting cover crops
Crop rotation
Regenerative agriculture has been shown to produce food sustainably whilst ensuring healthy soil by Indigenous cultures around the world for hundreds of years. Returning to these practices will help farms become more resilient over time, especially with the increasing pressures of climate change. This is particularly important in areas such as Lincolnshire, which contributes over 10% of the UK's food! In fact, these farming practices have the added benefit of helping nature too, which you can read about here.
