Charles Mann examines Our Good Earth and the problems we’re creating for the soil beneath our feet, starting with compaction:
Midwestern topsoil, some of the finest cropland in the world, is made up of loose, heterogeneous clumps with plenty of air pockets between them. Big, heavy machines like the harvesters mash wet soil into an undifferentiated, nigh impenetrable slab — a process called compaction. Roots can’t penetrate compacted ground; water can’t drain into the earth and instead runs off, causing erosion. And because compaction can occur deep in the ground, it can take decades to reverse. Farm-equipment companies, aware of the problem, put huge tires on their machines to spread out the impact. And farmers are using satellite navigation to confine vehicles to specific paths, leaving the rest of the soil untouched. Nonetheless, this kind of compaction remains a serious issue — at least in nations where farmers can afford $400,000 harvesters.
The bigger problems, of course, are in nations where farmers can’t afford $400,000 harvesters:
In the developing world, far more arable land is being lost to human-induced erosion and desertification, directly affecting the lives of 250 million people. In the first — and still the most comprehensive — study of global soil misuse, scientists at the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) in the Netherlands estimated in 1991 that humankind has degraded more than 7.5 million square miles of land. Our species, in other words, is rapidly trashing an area the size of the United States and Canada combined.
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“Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt,” says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.