Perhaps the various soil improvement agronomic system ideas that have been expressed here (and many other places, of course) will be more memorable if expressed in conventional crisis terminology: Peak Soil, like peak oil.

By 2050, according to Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University, "All the necessities of food, feed, fiber, and fuel are going to be met by less than one-tenth of an acre per person, on average. And we already have seriously degraded a lot of the available land. So unless you can restore some of it you will just run out."

People have been improving as well as degrading soil for millenia. Some civilizations develop more successful systems than others. The results can be catastrophic. It may be that we can learn to make soil, in a formal way.

Dick Haynes, a soil scientist at Australia's University of Queensland, has created a synthetic soil from industrial waste products: fly ash from power plants and byproducts of aluminum processing for its mineral components, poultry litter and manure for its organic matter. Haynes has said he wants to launch a soil-making industry in Australia, a country that has seen its limited fertile soil threatened by a decade-long drought. He hopes to have a product on the market within a few years.

Though Haynes has described his dirt as the world's first artificial soil, there are some precedents. In the mid-1990s, a Purdue University engineering graduate student named Jody Tishmack created a similar soil from power plant waste, biosolids left over from antibiotics production at a nearby Eli Lilly plant, and animal bedding from the veterinary school. The university used it for reclamation and landscaping projects around campus.

Today, Tishmack is still working on artificial soil, and her experience illustrates a key obstacle to its widespread adoption: cost. Synthetic soil is a very expensive way to replace a resource that is, however troubled, free.

She founded a company called Soilmaker, which uses a slightly less exotic recipe for its soil and sells it to gardeners and landscapers. Asked whether her product could work on an agricultural scale, she responded, "I can make it, but that doesn't mean that you can afford it. It would cost you $30,000 to put an acre of it down."

If nothing else the costs of shipping massive quantities around is high and rising. If soil making is ever to become practical it would seem that it would need to be made on site. Farmers just looking to reduce their fertilizer costs are coaxing CAFOs to locate on a portion of their farms so that they can use the manure produced for a portion of their fertilizer. Hauling such quantities is a large expense, so having a local source is valuable.

These aren't political issues, but politicians are seeking ways to exploit them.

The loss of soil that feels so urgent to geologists averages out, over all the world's farmland, to just one millimeter per year. That rate is slow enough to create a political problem: It's outside the time frame of the politicians - and in many cases the farmers - who are key to fixing any problem as big as disappearing soil. . .

Ultimately, it may be the issue of climate change that drives public interest in soil.

As Daniel Hillel, a research scientist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research, points out, climate change is in part a soil problem. Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide released from cultivated earth are in essence lost plant nutrients, and they're also major greenhouse gases.

Caring properly for soil, whether through additives like biochar or techniques like crop rotation and no-till agriculture, may have a serious role to play in mitigating greenhouse gases. Part of biochar's appeal, in fact, is that it keeps carbon locked up in soil for the many years the charcoal takes to break down. Currently, researchers at England's Newcastle University are working on a calcium-rich soil that they believe will have enhanced carbon-storing capacities.

I think that this is wrong. Growers are always concerned about soil, but it's one of many concerns. They do what they must to stay in business, and there are often higher priorities. They can't care for the soil if they go bankrupt. But, things are changing. As the cost of inputs rise techniques to enhance soil and so reduce the need for purchased inputs become competitive. Politics or not, climate change regulation and subsidy or not, improved soil management is becoming ever more cost effective. The ideas aren't new, but the economic climate is changing in ways that favor them.