Soil is a bank account, and modern farming has quietly run it into overdraft.
Plough a field and take a crop, and you make a withdrawal. The structure breaks down, the carbon escapes, and a little more topsoil washes or blows away. Do it year after year with nothing going back, and the account empties.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation reckons a football pitch of soil erodes somewhere on earth every five seconds, and that ninety percent of the planet's topsoil could be at risk by 2050. It takes a thousand years to build a few centimetres. We are spending it in decades.
Grazing animals run the account the other way. They make deposits:
- They crop the grass so the roots dig deeper and pull carbon down.
- Their hooves work seed into the ground and break the crust so rain soaks in.
- Their dung and urine feed the worms and the microbes.
- Managed well, they build measurable topsoil, year on year.
The Dust Bowl fits in one sentence. America took the bison off the plains, ploughed the grassland the herds had built over millennia, and within fifty years the soil got up and blew away.
The repair walks on four legs and runs on grass. We keep choosing the overdraft, then act surprised when the balance falls.