Post author:  STUART MEIKLE

Food production must account for climate-change and GHG’s, provide good nutrition, ever-improve animal welfare, minimize pollution, enhance biodiversity, reward farmers and rural communities, and, too rarely mentioned, restore and maintain soil health and fertility. But it is only through the latter that we can link everything else together to create a truly sustainable food system.

If there is a universal panacea for our food systems, it lies within the way we now go about restoring the health and productivity of our soils. By saying such one could however be guilty, as is often the case, of allowing a single issue to dominate, whereas identifying a sustainable food system, differing as they must region by region, is a complex process that requires the joining of numerous dots across a broad canvas. Focus on one issue alone and consequences happen elsewhere. Nonetheless, as one looks at soil regeneration, the solutions for many of our other problems emerge.

Click on the link below to read more [downloadable pdf]

A soils-first farming and food policy

The paper was first published on the http://www.ARC2020.eu website.