Soil is perhaps the most valuable
ecosystem on earth.
It’s also the most diverse, containing millions of life sustaining bacteria, fungi and organisms that help our crops to grow. Soil health and maintenance is vital to our own health and survival. It’s also an important carbon storage system. There are a number of things we can do to support soil health:
- Avoid pesticides. While it’s not always possible to source organic food, organic crops are more supportive of biodiversity as more species can thrive there. Bees in particular are supported by organic farming – and they are vital to farming as a whole.
- Waste less food and eat less meat. We’d use less land, and therefore use less soil, if we didn’t waste a third of our food. This would also produce less animal-based pollution. Deforestation for meat production erodes healthy soils, which is then lost and can’t store carbon.
- Don’t pollute – substances like turps, paint and certain cleaning agents should not enter the water system as they are extremely difficult to remove and will often end up on land used for food, or in nature areas and the sea. These can be disposed of at waste disposal facilities.
- Compost your vegetable waste and feed it back into your own soils, or put it in your BROWN garden waste bin together with other food waste. Don’t throw away soil when renovating, dispose of it at a waste disposal facility.
