I am reminded - not for the first time - that this stuff bores the snot out of most people.

By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world's bad soils. "Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root," Lal says. "In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil."

The article goes on to describe various examples of gross soil destruction in various places in the world as well as a few instances of soil restoration. An interesting sub-story is that the efforts of governments and aid organizations are hugely expensive boondoggles that build a few small Potemkin villages but utterly fail to accomplish anything significant on a large enough scale to matter. But there are effective interventions.

Last year Reij made a thousand-mile trek across Mali and then into southwestern Burkina with Edwige Botoni, a researcher at the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel, a regional policy center in Burkina. They saw "millions of hectares" of restored land, Botoni says, "more than I had believed possible." Next door in Niger is an even greater success, says Mahamane Larwanou, a forester at Abdou Moumouni Dioffo University in Niamey. Almost without any support or direction from governments or aid agencies, local farmers have used picks and shovels to regenerate more than 19,000 square miles of land.

Economics as much as ecology is key to Niger's success, Larwanou says. In the 1990s the Niger government, which distributed land in orthodox totalitarian fashion, began to let villagers have more control over their plots. People came to believe that they could invest in their land with little risk that it would be arbitrarily taken away. Combined with techniques like the zaï and cordons pierreux, land reform has helped villagers become less vulnerable to climate fluctuations. Even if there were a severe drought, Larwanou says, Nigeriens "would not feel the impact the way they did in 1973 or 1984."

Land in China was destroyed on a grand scale by millions of peasants following the orders from the central authority. Weak government that ignores peasants is better for the soil since individuals are free to innovate. Those who fail copy those who succeed. It's parallel trial and error, a method to search the possibility space for useful approaches. All are guaranteed to be cheap since the searchers are all destitute. Property rights are an accelerant since the farmers then have motivation and interest.

Is this the best than can be done?

Every Ecology 101 student knows that Amazonian rain forest soils are fragile and impoverished. If farmers cut down the canopy of trees overhead to clear cropland, they expose the earth to the pummeling rain and sun, which quickly wash away its small store of minerals and nutrients and bake what remains into something resembling brick—a "wet desert," as these ruined areas are sometimes called. The certainty of wrecking the land, environmentalists argue, makes large-scale agriculture impossible in the tropics. . .

Most restoration programs, like those in China and the Sahel, try to restore degraded soil to its previous condition. But in much of the tropics, its natural state is marginal—one reason so many tropical countries are poor. But in much of the tropics, its natural state is marginal—one reason so many tropical countries are poor.

This is important. The leave-it-alone-assumption is the bedrock of most thinking about soils and ecosystems in general. The politics of limits is the result. Natural systems are feared due to ignorance and a crippling emotional reaction to change. But restoring damaged soils is not enough. Growing heritage foods is not enough. We need to do better than natural.

[Wim] Sombroek came to believe that terra preta might show scientists how to make land richer than it ever had been, and thus help the world's most impoverished nations feed themselves. . .

Terra preta is found only where people lived, which means that it is an artificial, human-made soil, dating from before the arrival of Europeans. . .

Unlike ordinary tropical soils, terra preta remains fertile after centuries of exposure to tropical sun and rain, notes Wenceslau Teixeira, a soil scientist at Embrapa, a network of agricultural research and extension agencies in Brazil. Its remarkable resilience, he says, has been demonstrated at Embrapa's facility in Manaus, where scientists test new crop varieties in replica patches of terra preta. "For 40 years, that's where they tried out rice, corn, manioc, beans, you name it," Teixeira says. "It was all just what you're not supposed to do in the tropics—annual crops, completely exposed to sun and rain. It's as if we were trying to ruin it, and we haven't succeeded!" . . .

Sombroek had wondered if modern farmers might create their own terra preta—terra preta nova, as he dubbed it. Much as the green revolution dramatically improved the developing world's crops, terra preta could unleash what the scientific journal Nature has called a "black revolution" across the broad arc of impoverished soil from Southeast Asia to Africa.

Key to terra preta is charcoal, made by burning plants and refuse at low temperatures. In March a research team led by Christoph Steiner, then of the University of Bayreuth, reported that simply adding crumbled charcoal and condensed smoke to typically bad tropical soils caused an "exponential increase" in the microbial population—kick-starting the underground ecosystem that is critical to fertility. Tropical soils quickly lose microbial richness when converted to agriculture. Charcoal seems to provide habitat for microbes—making a kind of artificial soil within the soil—partly because nutrients bind to the charcoal rather than being washed away. Tests by a U.S.-Brazilian team in 2006 found that terra preta had a far greater number and variety of microorganisms than typical tropical soils—it was literally more alive. . .

"With eight billion people, we're going to have to start getting interested in soil," . . . "We're simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt."

Biochar is a huge benefit to soil but it's not magic. Nutrients are required too - fertilizer in other words. All 16 primary and secondary nutrients are required in order to get good production. Biochar can help get the most benefit from added fertilizer, but fertilizer is still required. There's no free lunch, one way or another you pay for your pleasure. Whatever is removed from the field as crop must be replaced as fertilizer. Failure to fertilize is soil mining, an extractive process that depletes and eventually destroys soil.

Another consideration is the mechanical effects of tillage and cultivation. Even when there is no erosion by wind or water there is outgasing from tilled soil and the structure of the soil is degraded.

Walking the roads on the farm hosting Wisconsin Farm Technology Days, it was easy for me to figure out what had worried Jethro Tull. Not Jethro Tull the 1970s rock band—Jethro Tull the agricultural reformer of the 18th century. Under my feet the prairie soil had been squashed by tractors and harvesters into a peculiar surface that felt like the poured-rubber flooring used around swimming pools. It was a modern version of a phenomenon noted by Tull: When farmers always plow in the same path, the ground becomes "trodden as hard as the Highway by the Cattle that draw the Harrows."

Tull knew the solution: Don't keep plowing in the same path. In fact, farmers are increasingly not using plows at all—a system called no-till farming. But their other machines continue to grow in size and weight. In Europe, soil compaction is thought to affect almost 130,000 square miles of farmland, and one expert suggests that the reduced harvests from compaction cost midwestern farmers in the U.S. $100 million in lost revenue every year.

The ultimate reason that compaction continues to afflict rich nations is the same reason that other forms of soil degradation afflict poor ones: Political and economic institutions are not set up to pay attention to soils. The Chinese officials who are rewarded for getting trees planted without concern about their survival are little different from the farmers in the Midwest who continue to use huge harvesters because they can't afford the labor to run several smaller machines.

See Secret Ingredients for more about Tull and The New Horse Houghing Husbandry: or, an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation.

Compaction is a problem but the reason that large machines are used is not that "they can't afford the labor to run several smaller machines". And, as Tull noted, small machines don't solve the problem anyway. Just the weight of oxen was enough to cause harm in those days. Cropping is inherently harmful to soil. Deal with it. It is an exceedingly unnatural activity that requires close attention to harms and timely efforts to remedy them. It's a lot of work, an energy intensive activity, and most of all a difficult management activity.

The fantasy of agriculture as some sort of primitive traditional activity - fit work for Mother Nature's Son - is harmful. Mother Nature writhes in pain as she is molested by farmers. A more mature attitude is required, one that clearly observes the consequences of farming and takes the necessary steps to deal with them. First among them is soil management.