One of the things that kick-started my reentry into active involvement in soil science was discovering the extent of the soil degradation problem world-wide.
This was brought home to me reading a National Geographic article (September 2008 issue) a year or so ago. The comment was made that as far back as 1991 it was reported that 750,000,000 (that's 750 million) square miles of soils on the earth's surface had been seriously degraded by such things as desertification, salinization, deforestation, nutrient depletion, and chemical pollution. That's apparently an area the combined size of the USA and Canada!!!
Wow! I don't think anyone can read something like that and remain indifferent. Nor is this a once-off guesstimate, an alarmist bit of reporting. A recent scientific paper put the extent of the global soil degradation problem at 8 billion hectares. I haven't done the conversion mathematics, but 8 billion sounds a terrifying number.
What makes this all the more serious is that the demand for food production keeps increasing all the time. It's estimated that by the year 2030 the world's population will top 8.3 billion people. To feed this number of people we are somehow going to have to produce at least 30% more grain than we do at present. Yet, with the area of usable arable land in a constant decline through misuse in one form or another, that task looms more and more difficult. Not impossible, but no doubt more difficult.
I don't write this as a "prophet of doom and gloom" as one well-meaning local community leader called me when I shared these statistics at a Lion's Club meeting. I'm simply mentioning well documented information that I'd previously been unaware of. It certainly jolted me into a fresh concern for soil use and a sustainable approach to agriculture.
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