2. Building and Maintaining Soil Health | 15 mins

By adopting an organic approach of feeding your soil with organic matter, you will be supporting the activity of often invisible, but crucial, creatures and also avoiding any activities that might disrupt or harm the soil's rich ecosystem and the soil food web which is vital for growing healthy plants.

• Our soils provide us with the majority of our food supply.
• They give us both water and energy security.
• They store and filter water, improving our resilience to flood and drought.
• They help to combat climate change by storing vast amounts of carbon.

Despite these critical reasons to protect it, unsustainable land use practices are threatening this finite resource. Although new soil is being created all the time, the timescale is geological – it can take 1,000 years to create one centimetre of topsoil. Some studies have suggested that half the topsoil on our planet has been lost in the last 150 years (Source: WWF). 

Next page: Best practices to build soil health