3 SEPTEMBER 2026
The real challenge isn’t growing more food – it’s restoring moisture to degraded soil so it can grow food again.
Soil is a living system that supports a diverse ecosystem of micro-organisms, nutrients, and organic matter. Soil organisms decompose organic matter, converting it into nutrients that plants can absorb.
Soil contains over 25% of the planet’s biodiversity, acts as a carbon sink, and is responsible for producing 95% of our food.
Soil structure acts like a delicate framework that allows air, water, and tree root networks to grow, move, and thrive, but once subsoil is compacted, it can take decades to recover, if it recovers at all. Compacted subsoil makes it difficult for earthworms and microorganisms to move, breathe, and do their work, and restricts root growth, limits water movement, and reduces the soil’s ability to support crops and ecosystems alike.
Protecting and restoring soil health is central to biodiversity, food security, climate resilience, and human health and survival.
Healthy soil supports biodiversity, produces food, regulates water, stores carbon, and sustains the countless organisms that keep our ecosystems running.
Soil degrades climate change heat the planet, drying out soil by increasing evaporation. Warmer air holds more moisture, leading to longer droughts followed by intense rainstorms that run off dry, hardened ground instead of soaking in. This strips away fertile topsoil and makes it harder for soils to recover amid increasingly erratic weather.
Soil also degrades because agricultural machinery is larger and heavier than in the past. Heavy agricultural machinery compresses soil layers below the surface, often beyond the top 20 centimetres. Over time, the compaction of the subsoil makes it difficult for earthworms and micro-organisms to move, breathe, and keep the soil healthy. Research shows that much of today’s farm equipment exceeds safe limits for maintaining healthy soil structure and reduces the soil’s ability to support crops and ecosystems alike.
Modern farming practices add to the strain. Historically, soils were enriched with organic matter- crop residues, compost, and animal waste-that fed soil life and built long-term fertility. Modern agriculture relies heavily on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, whose production consumes large amounts of fossil fuel energy. While these inputs can boost yields in the short term, they cannot replace the complex living systems that healthy soil depends on. Adding more fertilisers cannot fix compacted soil, meaning food production declines even as chemical inputs increase. In effect, we lose food capacity – not always visibly, but steadily.
As soils lose fertility and resilience and farmland becomes less productive, the most common response has been to clear more land – especially forests- to make room for food production. This strategy comes with a hidden cost: it makes the planet drier, hotter, and more challenging to live in.
Healthy forests do far more than store carbon or house wildlife. When allowed to thrive, forests help create and regulate their own rainfall. Trees draw water from the soil through their roots and release it into the atmosphere, where it forms clouds and eventually returns as rain. When forests are cut down, the cycle breaks. Rain becomes less predictable, droughts intensify, and soil degrades even further, making both farming and ecosystems more vulnerable. Clearing forests to compensate for declining soil productivity ultimately worsens the very problem it is meant to solve.
One of the obvious things to do is to use lighter agricultural machinery. There is no single fix, but aligning with regenerative agriculture systems is proving that it is possible to protect the soil while producing nutritious food. Regenerative systems work with nature rather than against it, restoring water-holding capacity, supporting biodiversity, strengthening ecosystems, and helping to stabilise climate. But for such efforts to succeed at scale, farmers need secure access to land, opportunities to share knowledge, and meaningful financial and political support.
The concern is simple but profound: if soil structure continues to degrade, the productivity of farmlands and the services soil provides to society are at risk. Remoisturising soil is not just an environmental issue – it is an investment in long-term food security, a more stable climate, biodiversity restoration, and human survival.
FACT SHEET
Soil is the foundation of our food systems and one of the richest ecosystems on Earth. Yet as soil degrades and loses its ability to retain moisture, its capacity to support food production and biodiversity is also threatened.
These three facts highlight just how much we stand to lose and why restoring soil health matters.
Thought for the Day
“Soil remembers how we treat it. Care for it, and it sustains life. Degrade it, and scarcity follows.”
– Sabiha Rumani Malik, Founder, The World Bee Project
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