The brief showcase of the documentary revealed the importance of biodiversity, as well as the organic matter that lays under the ground, for the soil's fertility. This enables plants to grow healthy and allows us to grow crops over more than just a few years. In fact, in the documentary it is said that in a single tablespoon of dirt, there are more organisms than humans on the entire planet.

The farmers who participated in the documentary revealed that they employ nature's own solutions when growing their crops, bringing as little artificial processes as possible to avoid degrading the soil, which could become infertile if exposed to enough damage. Using compost, farmers offer the organisms living within the soil new room to expand and to start a new life, while the organic matter found within the compost can be consumed and transformed into valuable nutrients that plants can use to grow healthy.

We wrote about sustainable agriculture before on Green Start-Up and you can read about this subject here.

The importance of protecting Europe's soils

But what do researchers believe we need to do in order to have a more sustainable farming sector? Mircea Sevastel, Professor of Soil Erosion and Conservation, University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, shared his findings and expertise after witnessing the effects of traditional farming and chaotic soil management in Romania over the past decades.

According to him, the soil serves five main functions for humanity, these being:

  • the production of food and other biomass;
  • storing, filtering, buffering and transformation;
  • habitat and gene pool for organisms;
  • physical and cultural environment for humankind;
  • source of raw materials;

Up to 70% of the earth that gives food is unhealthy

Soil is extremely important worldwide for our survival and in Europe, 95% of the food we consume comes from this environment, but 60-70% of the earth that gives us this food is considered unhealthy by experts. Because of this, soil degradation causes European countries to lose 50 billion euros every year.

Over the past more than two decades, European legislators came up with different strategies to help protect and regenerate these fragile ecosystems, such as the European Soil Observatory (ESUSO), which was founded in 2020, as well as the EU Soil Strategy for 2030, presented in 2021.

According to EU officials, this strategy sets out "concrete measures to protect and restore soils, and ensure that they are used sustainably. It sets a vision and objectives to achieve healthy soils by 2050, with concrete actions by 2030."

But what are the dangers to which European soil is exposed to? Most of the threats that make our farmlands infertile are natural, such as salinization, erosion, as well as compaction, but farmers and not only also contribute with their own set of actions that degrade the ground. Chemical contamination is probably the biggest issue, as it leads to a loss in biodiversity, as well as a decline in organic matter, both essential to the health of the soil.

What causes farmlands to go infertile

In Romania, a large portion of the farmlands, especially those located on plains, are affected by fertility diminishing, because of chemicals pollution, crust formation and water erosion. The land that is still stable under natural conditions is mostly found within forests or the Danube Delta, meaning that it's not suitable for farming anyways. Small parts of the country's land in the western, as well as central areas, are stable under human pressure. Most of the south and south-east is either compromised or degrading, as well as the east and north-east side of the country, which is also where a large amount of the farming is being done.

As these lands become less suitable for farming, because they don't support productive yields, farmers turn their attention to new pieces of land, which are sometimes used for other purposes, such as real estate development. This involves removing the existing native vegetation from untouched or virgin parcels. By doing that, however, the soil is destabilized, being vulnerable to things like floodings, landslides or even cave-ins.

This is why native vegetation should be kept around the area of land that is being worked and not completely removed.

"It's better to preserve than to restore. Scientific research says that the cost involved for soil restauration is around five to six time higher than that needed to prevent damages", said Professor Mircea Sevastel.

He also mentioned that the floods that affected Romania earlier this year, such as those in the Galati area, as well as those that hit Spain just a few days ago, could have been either prevented or mitigated, if proper soil management solutions were employed. Among those also sits the preservation of native plant species, which use their root networks to stabilize the ground, as well as to absorb most of the excess water.

Another issue stated by the professor is that regarding the farming of lands found in hill areas. The parcels farmers were given after 1990 were positioned perpendicular and not parallel to the hill, meaning that soil erosion was accelerated, because the nutrients were pulled towards the bottom part of the hill during plowing. If the parcels would have been worked from side to side, this problem would have been avoided, as the soil would have moved across a fairly leveled ground.

These are some of the issues that led to the accentuated desertification of farming land in Romania underlined by the researcher at the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, which can also apply to other countries. What could be done differently? Employing natural solutions, instead of chemicals to fight pests, such as crop rotations and introducing protective species.

The way we work the land is also important, so that during unproductive time-frames, farmers should plant cover cultures, while those working in hilly mountains should try to farm the land from side to side, instead of the top-to-bottom approach currently implemented.