The Size (and Weight!) of the Soil Problem

During a time of climate change, we are rightly worried about the resource that we consume a lot of that contributes to our current impending doom. That of course is fossil fuels and specifically, oil.

But what if I told you, that we are running out of an even more valuable resource that we depend on even more?

That resource, is soil.

Not dirt, that stuff is dirt cheap (Ha!, See what I did there?!) I mean soil.

Dirt is dead. Soil is alive. More importantly, soil KEEPS us alive.

Soil is what we plant our crops in, like maize, grass/hay, rice, soy, wheat and all that other fun stuff.

And we are losing 23 billion tons of it a year. To put that into context, that is close to 3 tons of it per person, per year. That's more than the amount of food that we eat each year on a per person basis.

But FunGuy, you might ask, where is all this soil going?

It's going down river and into the ocean. It is being eroded away. And this isn't the fun weathering and erosion that made the Grand Canyon, this is the economically and environmentally damaging type that is caused by industrial agricultural practices.

Tilling the soil, removing the life and infrastructure in its place and leaving the ground bare allows the wind and rain to wash all that good stuff away.

Which is absolutely silly, because we do have amazing natural tillers of the soil, like fungi and worms. We don't need tractors to do all that work, we can get these guys to do it. And in doing so, save the gas ... and the soil in the process

FunGuy Out