Over the years, digging around in the earth of the garden has thrown up all kinds of objects wizened by time, such as fragments of glass and ceramics in various shapes and sizes, some vivid with colour after a quick clean. Steel horseshoes shaped in perfect U’s have also surfaced, some small enough for a donkey, others large and wide enough to fit a workhorse. It’s always enticing to hear a spade sing a note as it strikes something solid in the soil. Just a few weeks ago, after assuming we’d long since unearthed the store of everyday artefacts, we uncovered a stubby, unexpectedly weighty glass bottle with the words “Dublin Dairies Ltd” etched across its front.
It’s not always about taking from the soil. On a recent visit to a farmer whose land borders the Shannon Estuary, I gathered a small bag of loose seaweed and brought it home. Ideally, it would be left to compost down before spreading, but time is against me this spring, so I took my chances and twisted and worked it into the soil along the small vegetable patch. It’s the best of West of Ireland’s seaweed, injecting nutrients and health into the Dublin soil, in the hope it’ll soon teem with life.
“How many species on Earth live in soil?” is a question scientists haven’t yet fully answered, but two years ago, a team of researchers in Switzerland offered a striking estimate: the soil is likely home to 59 per cent of all life on Earth, including 90 per cent of fungi, 85 per cent of plants and half of all bacteria. It makes soil the most nature-rich, biodiverse habitat on our planet. Scoop up a single teaspoon of healthy soil and you might find more than a billion bacteria cells and 10,000 fungi living within it.
As thin skins go, soil, which envelopes the surface of Earth, has been astonishingly resilient in the face of relentless damage from human activity, including intensive chemical-based farming, overgrazing by too many livestock, large-scale clearance of trees, and “soil sealing” with concrete in urbanised areas, transforming it into a lifeless surface.
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It’s resilient, yet ultimately fragile. Soil health is crumbling in the face of pressures from too many directions, and if current trends continue, 90 per cent of Earth’s soils will face substantial degradation by 2050. Last year’s European Soil Status Report, a collaboration between the European Environment Agency and the EU’s Joint Research Centre, called for immediate action after it highlighted “alarming state and trends, with soil degradation having worsened significantly in recent years”. Across the EU, a billion tonnes of soil a year is lost to erosion; between 2009 and 2018, 70 million tonnes of soil organic carbon were lost.
Soil organic carbon, derived from the remains of plants, animals and micro-organisms (think fallen leaves in autumn), is the core of soil health. Carbon-rich soils act like giant sponges, soaking up vast quantities of water (handy in flood-prone regions) and create the ideal habitats for billions of soil creatures to thrive in, tingling and vibrating with life.
Last week, the latest study by the Joint Research Centre, published in Nature, reported that soil organic carbon is at risk in many parts of European farmland, including Ireland. It underscores the urgency for farmers to switch towards methods which increase carbon in their soils. The idea is fairly simple: promote life in the soil and minimise disturbance. Since 2018, funded by public money, a small group of Irish farmers collectively known as the Danú Farming Group have been doing just that.
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Tillage farmer Norman Dunne, who has 400 acres of beans, oats, wheat and barley in Meath, noticed that the life had drained from his soil. His father Michael spoke of how, in the 1960s, after ploughing the fields, hundreds of birds would follow his tractor, ready to eat the worms churned up in the soil. He even had to wear a hard hat to protect himself from bird droppings. But over time, as farming became more reliant on heavier machinery and more chemical fertilisers, the soil began to die.
Norman asked fellow farmers for advice on how to restore life. The answers were clear: slash chemical fertiliser use, sow crops which can enrich the soil and attract insects, and limit ploughing to prevent disturbing the earth. Norman did what they suggested, and nature has made a return. Skylarks, woodpeckers, barn owls, yellowhammers and even lapwings are back on the farm.
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If our soils have any hope of recovery, we need many more farmers to do the same. Last month, a new EU-funded soil project led by the Technological University of the Shannon was launched in Limerick, Clare and Tipperary. It’ll work with farmers to restore their land, and they’ll undoubtedly end up practising some well-worn agricultural methods from the past – rejecting widespread chemical use in favour of a renewed focus on soil biology and respecting the ecological limits of the land to produce food. As the great American farmer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry wrote: “When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.”
