What Causes Soil Erosion?

We're losing a lot of soil each year. The amount might surprise you!

Soil erosion is caused by the bare earth being exposed to the elements, specifically rain and wind.

Run washes the soil away down stream and out into the ocean while the wind blows it away into the atmosphere.

This happens for a few different reasons, but mostly due to the loss of life in the food web. Mechanical tillage of the land kills all of the life inside the soil. Imagine earthquakes of apocalyptic proportions that happen every generation. Worms, bugs, fungi, about half are killed each time the plow goes through the ground.

Without the fungi holding everything together, the soil very quickly becomes dirt.

Another way that life is killed in the soil is through chemical fertilizers. Virtually every synthetic and chemical fertilizer is a salt. Now we as humans can handle a little salt, in fact we need it at times. But for our microrganism buddies, that level of salt is fatal and therefore, bad for business.

Till the soil, drop down five figures worth of nitrogen, clear some trees, you got yourself a recipe ... for death!

And with nothing holding the web together, the nutrients and dirt just blows, or runs away. Ergo, we're fucked to the tune of 3 tons of soil per person per year.

Or ... we not till, or at the least, reduce our tillage so as not to turn the whole thing upside down each season. We can plant some cover crops to add life into the soil instead of letting it just be bare for the whole season. Or we could use organic fertilizers like worm castings or compost tea to take care of these things for us.

Nah, that seems too easy.