WORLD AGRICULTURE FORUM | EARTH DAY SPECIAL REPORT

The Dirt Beneath Our Feet Is Running Out of Time:

A landmark global forum convened on Earth Day brought together soil scientists, agronomists and policy experts to deliver a stark verdict: the world’s agricultural soils are critically degraded, the green revolution’s hidden costs are coming due, and humanity has perhaps decades — not centuries — to reverse course before the consequences become irreversible.

World Agriculture Forum | Earth Day Global Soil Health Summit

A Miracle Built on a Crumbling Foundation

The numbers are, on the surface, cause for celebration. Between 1961 and 2025, while the global population grew from 3.1 billion to 8.3 billion — an increase of 2.7 times — world cereal production surged 3.3 times, from 880 million tonnes to three billion tonnes. Per capita grain production today stands at 354 kilograms, a figure that, as Professor Ratan Lal of Ohio State University put it in his keynote address, “saved hundreds of millions from starvation.” He called it the Borlaug effect, in tribute to the Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution.

But behind that triumph lies a debt that is now coming due. The green revolution was powered by an extraordinary and unsustainable escalation in chemical inputs. Between 1961 and 2019, nitrogen fertiliser use increased 9.2-fold, phosphorus use increased five-fold, potassium use grew 4.8 times, and pesticide use rose 5.2 times. Irrigated land expanded from 144 to 350 million hectares. Global pesticide application now totals 4.2 million tonnes annually. Agriculture consumes two quadrillion gallons of water — a figure almost too vast to comprehend.

The environmental reckoning is already under way. Forty percent of all terrestrial land is now degraded. Soil erosion, salinisation, acidification, the collapse of soil structure and the catastrophic depletion of organic matter have quietly hollowed out the foundation on which global food production rests. In the degraded soils of developing-world smallholders, organic matter content — which should optimally sit between 2.5 and three percent — has fallen below 0.5 percent, and often as low as 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, agriculture contributes 30 to 35 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, consumes 70 percent of the world’s fresh water, and has commandeered 40 percent of Earth’s land surface, three-quarters of which is devoted to livestock.

And still, despite all of this, one in ten people on the planet remains food insecure. One in four is malnourished. The miracle, it turns out, has not fed everyone. And it is destroying the very ground on which any future feeding must depend.

We Have Been Treating Soil as Dirt. It Is Not.

One of the most powerful arguments running through the forum was a deceptively simple one: the world has been managing soil as though it were an inert medium — a substrate for delivering chemical inputs to crops — when it is in fact a living system of staggering complexity and abundance.

Professor Ray Weil of the University of Maryland, speaking from outside Washington DC, cited a recent review by the National Academy of Sciences concluding that 59 percent of all life on Earth — more species, from mammals to microbes, than anywhere else — exists in the soil. “Soils are really a reservoir for all kinds of resources that have to do with life,” Weil told the forum. “This may be antibiotics, medications, things we haven’t even thought about. There are all kinds of potential.”

Professor Lal, whose recorded presentation opened the proceedings, described soil organic matter — now catastrophically depleted across most of the world’s farmland — as “the elixir of life.” Healthy soil, he explained, is not simply darker earth. It is a system defined by large root biomass, intense biotic activity, and the presence of organisms from earthworms and centipedes to the vast invisible communities of bacteria, fungi and archaea that drive nutrient cycling. When organic matter falls, the whole system collapses. The soil becomes compacted, water-shedding rather than water-absorbing, unable to sustain the microbial communities that make nutrients available to plants. Yields decline. Farmers apply more chemicals. The spiral accelerates.

Anthony Fulford, a soil scientist at the International Rice Research Institute based in Varanasi, India, brought the problem into sharp regional focus. Rice production — the staple crop for more than half of humanity — is among the world’s most resource-intensive agricultural systems. Producing a single kilogram of rice requires approximately 4,000 litres of water. Paddy fields are also significant sources of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The challenge, Fulford explained, is not merely agronomic but systemic: research institutions like IRRI are developing stress-tolerant, low-emission rice varieties and improved management techniques, including direct seeding and a water-saving irrigation method called alternate wetting and drying. Early results show greenhouse gas emissions reductions of between 30 and 70 percent under these systems. But getting such innovations from the research station to the farmer’s field — crossing what Fulford called “the last mile” — remains the defining challenge.

Carbon: The Crop Nobody Is Farming (Yet)

At the heart of virtually every discussion at the forum was carbon — specifically, the possibility that degraded agricultural soils, if restored, could sequester enough carbon from the atmosphere to meaningfully alter the trajectory of climate change.

The arithmetic, as presented by Professor Lal, is both breathtaking in its potential and sobering in its demands. The technical potential for soil organic carbon sequestration across the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of cropland stands at 2.5 gigatonnes per year. Add agroforestry — integrating crops with trees and livestock — and the combined land-based carbon sink between now and 2100 could reach 333 petagrams, equivalent to drawing down 157 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere. “If we can find alternatives to fossil fuel,” Lal told the forum, “the fate of climate change is in our hands.”

But Professor Weil urged caution about overstating what is achievable. Most of the carbon currently stored in the world’s soils — which collectively hold more carbon than the entire atmosphere and all vegetation combined — is locked in boreal forests and peatlands, not in managed agricultural land. The soils that farming can actually influence represent a smaller, though still significant, share. And the problem of measurement is acute.

“The real problem is not the measurement but the sampling,” Weil explained. Soil organic matter varies enormously across even a small field — doubling or halving within metres — and the variation increases with depth. Most of the carbon in agricultural soils lies below 30 centimetres, yet sampling to that depth or beyond is logistically and financially prohibitive at the scale needed for a global carbon payment system. His conclusion was unsettling but pragmatic: payment for carbon sequestration will largely have to be based on the adoption of proven practices rather than direct measurement of results, with spot checks providing statistical verification.

Those practices, as enumerated by Weil and others, form a coherent system: eliminate or drastically reduce tillage; maintain permanent plant cover through residue mulching and cover cropping; keep roots in the soil year-round by overlapping crop cycles; introduce maximum plant diversity, including through cover crop mixes; integrate agroforestry; and, where applicable, consider newer interventions such as biochar — charred plant material that resists decomposition for centuries — or enhanced rock weathering, which accelerates the natural geological process by which silicate rocks absorb atmospheric CO2.

Weil offered a particularly vivid articulation of the no-till principle: “The farmer should forget what colour the soil is, because he or she never sees the soil. It is always covered under plant residue.” In a functioning natural ecosystem — a forest floor, a prairie — the soil is never bare. Agriculture’s insistence on ploughing and exposing the soil, he argued, is one of the most ecologically unnatural things humanity does.

700 Million Farmers, $100 Billion a Year, and the Question of Who Pays

Even if the science is settled, the economics are not. Transforming global agriculture requires asking farmers — many of them among the poorest people on Earth — to adopt practices that may be costlier, more complex, and slower to yield returns than conventional methods. The forum was unambiguous: this will not happen without payment.

Professor Lal proposed a framework. There are, he calculated, roughly 700 million farmers worldwide: 550 million smallholders farming less than four hectares, and 150 million medium and large operators. To reward all of them for restoring soil health and sequestering carbon at $50 per carbon credit — one metric tonne of CO2 equivalent — would cost approximately $100 billion per year. Of that, $70 billion would go to smallholders and $30 billion to larger operators. This figure is 100 times the $1 billion discussed at the Paris Agreement negotiations in 2015. “No farmer is left behind,” Lal insisted. “All of them are to be treated equally, fairly, transparently and justly.”

Where that money would come from is the harder question. Lal suggested fossil-fuel-exporting countries, agribusiness, the private sector, and consumers who benefit from safe and nutritious food. Professor Weil reinforced the argument from a market perspective: the negative externalities of degrading soil and over-applying fertiliser need to be built into the price of agricultural commodities, whether in Africa, Europe or anywhere else, so that the policy objectives can be achieved without entirely depending on large direct subsidies.

Anthony Fulford of IRRI drew a direct line between payment structures and adoption. In India, where he is working with the government on the Bharat Healthy Soils initiative — a national soil health protection policy that several speakers identified as a potential global model — the challenge is ensuring that subsidies reward outcomes rather than inputs. “Once we align subsidies with actual outcomes rather than subsidising high fertiliser rates and inefficient use,” he said, “we are very much on our way to a very good situation.”

From Virginia to Tanzania: A New Business Model Takes Root

Among the forum’s most striking presentations came from Manwalia, president and CEO of Architect Inc., who has spent decades scaling agricultural innovations in the United States, India, Africa, China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He described a product called Ectool — an organic humic acid compound derived from coal — that he argued represents a transformative tool for carbon farming.

The centrepiece of his presentation was a Virginia farmer who, over 15 years of applying the product, had transformed heavy red clay soil inherited from his grandfather — soil with less than one percent organic matter, compacted from decades of tobacco cultivation — into some of the most productive land in the region. Organic matter levels, verified by standard laboratory analysis, now stand between 6.4 and 7.5 percent, which Manwalia described as among the highest he had encountered anywhere in the world. Wheat yields on the farm have doubled, from 50 to 100 bushels per acre. Carbon sequestration, measured to 30 centimetres depth, is estimated at approximately 10 metric tonnes of CO2 per acre per year — an order of magnitude greater than the half-tonne per hectare typically attributed to cover cropping or no-till alone.

Trials in India involving 10,000 farmers in collaboration with Krushak Bhavan Kendra in Baramati showed average yield increases of around 20 percent, with farmer incomes rising four to eight times. Results from Egypt showed comparable yield gains alongside fertiliser use reductions of 20 to 50 percent. Data from Tanzania, a country whose soils average below one percent organic matter, suggested the product could form the basis of a viable national carbon farming programme.

Manwalia’s proposed business model is ambitious. Under a government-mandated framework, industrial emitters would pay farmers for carbon credits generated through soil restoration. Farmers producing ten tonnes of carbon credits per acre would receive payment for five of those credits at market rates of approximately $70 per tonne, plus the yield improvement premium. Emitters would offset half their credits and trade the remainder on global markets. Governments would collect tax revenue on exported credits. In the case of Malawi — a country the forum examined as a specific case study — he argued the model could generate the $46.5 billion needed to meet Paris Agreement commitments at a fraction of the cost of conventional approaches. His broader claim: that scaling carbon farming globally could achieve net zero for less than half a trillion dollars, compared to the $200 trillion some estimates place on full decarbonisation.

Beyond Chemicals: The Case for Biologicals

Antonis Angelakis, director of bio-stimulants at Yara International, one of the world’s largest fertiliser companies, made an argument that would have been almost heretical in agricultural policy circles a decade ago: the future of farming nutrition is not chemistry alone, but the integration of biological inputs alongside synthetic fertilisers.

Bio-stimulants are products defined not by their composition but by their function — enhancing tolerance to drought, temperature and salinity stress; improving nutrient use efficiency through nitrogen fixation and nutrient solubilisation; and promoting root growth and soil structure. Critically, Angelakis argued, they are not competitors to conventional fertilisers but complements: tools that make existing chemical inputs work harder, reducing the total quantity needed.

Trials in potato crops showed improvements in potassium and phosphorus use efficiency alongside yield gains that, by increasing output from the same resource base, effectively reduce the carbon footprint per tonne of production. The challenge, Angelakis acknowledged, is getting bio-stimulants out of the niche and into mainstream agriculture. Three barriers stand in the way: inadequate incentive structures that do not reward input efficiency alongside yield; fragmented and inconsistent regulatory frameworks across countries; and a prevailing mindset among farmers and policymakers that treats biological inputs as fringe rather than foundational.

Africa: Where Global Narratives Break Down

If the forum had a moral centre of gravity, it was the intervention of Magali Montaliknossi, a research fellow at the Malawi-based Mapata Institute, which provides data-driven policy analysis for African agriculture. She was quietly devastating on the gap between the soil health conversation at global level and the daily reality of the smallholder farmers who produce more than 70 percent of Africa’s food from plots of less than two hectares.

“When you look at what is happening on the ground, especially for the smallholder farmers, the story is a little bit different,” she said. The global narrative, she argued, tends to assume that farmers can readily access land, digital tools and bio-stimulants; that adoption of new practices is uniform across regions; and that finance, market access and infrastructure are already in place. None of these assumptions hold in sub-Saharan Africa.

Soil organic matter across the continent averages below one percent — far below the threshold for productive farming. Climate shocks — erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, cyclones — are undermining restoration efforts faster than they can be implemented. Poor roads and storage infrastructure limit access to both inputs and markets. And policy is deeply misaligned: in some African countries, 60 percent of the agricultural budget is devoted to fertiliser subsidies, while composting, cover cropping and agroforestry remain severely underfunded.

The extension system — the network of agricultural advisers who translate research into farm-level practice — has been gutted across much of the continent. In Malawi, she noted, the ratio of extension worker to farmer stands at one to 2,000. Carbon markets, in theory a source of income for smallholders who build soil carbon, are in practice inaccessible due to the high transaction costs and complex monitoring, reporting and verification requirements.

She raised an issue that cut across every other discussion: land tenure. A farmer who does not own the land they work has no incentive to invest in building soil carbon over a five-year horizon. And women — who produce 60 to 80 percent of food across much of Africa — are systematically excluded from soil health decision-making, training and inputs, their specific constraints around land tenure and credit almost entirely unaddressed by existing policy.

“Without healthy soils, there is no food security, no climate resilience, and no sustainable future for our smallholder African farmers,” she concluded. Her recommendations were concrete: establish and resource national soil health task forces co-led by governments, farmer organisations and scientists; redesign subsidies to incentivise regenerative practices rather than chemical inputs; develop blended financing models bringing public, private and donor capital together; simplify carbon market access through cooperative aggregation models; and place women and youth as decision-makers, not just beneficiaries, of soil health initiatives.

The Dryland Problem Nobody Is Solving

Dr. Padma Karanam of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) flagged a dimension of the crisis that receives insufficient attention: the radical mismatch between soil health solutions developed for temperate and humid agricultural zones, and the conditions faced by farmers in dryland regions.

“Technologies that are very heavy in the temperate and humid zones cannot be directly transported to the dryland regions,” she said. Heavy tillage and excessive irrigation — the default tools of much of the world’s agricultural development apparatus — simply fail in semi-arid conditions. Farmers in these regions are resource-poor, low-income and chronically exposed to climate shocks. For them, the carbon farming opportunity is real, but it requires locally adapted, context-specific solutions that are largely not yet being developed or deployed at scale.

She argued that the core implementation gap is structural: soil is still being managed as a nutrient delivery system rather than as an integrated physical, chemical and biological entity. Water ministries focus on irrigation. Agriculture ministries focus on chemical inputs. Soil is treated as a separate domain. Until these silos are broken down — until the sponge function of healthy soil, its capacity to absorb and retain rainfall, is valued alongside its nutrient function — the system will continue to fail the farmers who need it most. Her call was for a shift from project-based funding to landscape-level, systemic policy, and for investment in soil organic carbon as “the fastest route to resilience.”

Giving Soil Legal Rights: A Radical But Serious Proposal

Among the most provocative ideas floated by Professor Lal was the proposition that soil, as a living entity, should be granted legal rights of protection analogous to those accorded to animals, and ultimately to humans. “Like any other living entity,” he argued, “soils must have rights to be protected, restored, thrived and managed judiciously.”

The practical implication would be a trinity of legislative acts — a Clean Air Act, a Clean Water Act, and a Soil Health Act — enacted in every country and enforced internationally. The United States has had versions of the first two since the late 1960s and early 1970s. No country yet has a comprehensive Soil Health Act, though India’s emerging Bharat Soil Protection Policy is developing one. Several speakers held it up as a potential template for the world.

The legal framing matters because it changes the default assumption. Without legal protection, soil degradation is an externality — something that happens for free, absorbed by the farmer, the ecosystem and ultimately by everyone who eats. With legal protections, it becomes a liability, and the incentives to restore soil health shift accordingly.

Agriculture 4.0: Producing More From Less

The forum’s overarching vision, articulated most systematically by Professor Lal, is what he called Agricultural Revolution 4.0 — a soil-centric, ecologically grounded transformation driven by artificial intelligence, precision farming and digital tools, organised around the principle of producing more from less.

The ambition is remarkable. By adopting the full suite of regenerative practices — no-till, conservation agriculture, drip fertigation, rotational grazing, agroforestry — the world could, by 2100, reduce cropland from 1.5 billion hectares to 750 million, cut grazing land from 3.7 billion to 1.5 billion hectares, and reduce agricultural water use to less than a third of current levels, while doubling crop yields through improved soil health and better-adapted varieties. Half the land currently used for agriculture could, in this scenario, be returned to nature.

Fertiliser use, currently running at 200 million tonnes annually with an average efficiency of perhaps 30 to 40 percent, could be reduced to a quarter of present levels by 2100 through restored soil health and precision application. Flood irrigation and sprinkler irrigation — which Lal described bluntly as “obsolete and not required, a waste” — would give way to drip fertigation systems that deliver nutrients and water directly to roots with minimal loss.

The plant varieties at the centre of this system would also look different. Rather than the short, shallow-rooted, high-input varieties of the green revolution, the new agriculture would favour tall plants with deep root systems capable of drawing carbon deep into the soil, emitting molecular signals that indicate stress and can be detected remotely, and thriving in integrated crop-tree-livestock systems that mimic the complexity of natural ecosystems.

Soil, War, and the Politics of the Future

One of the more unexpected observations in Professor Lal’s presentation was his identification of war as among the most significant current drivers of soil degradation. The explosives, contaminants and pollutants released by armed conflict are, he argued, devastatingly destructive to soil systems. His conclusion was equally striking: global peace should be understood as a scientific issue. Advancing soil health, nutrition-sensitive agriculture and food processing are not merely agricultural priorities — they are foundational to social stability. “With less civil strife,” he said, “there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift.”

The Coalition and the Challenge Ahead

The forum closed with the announcement that the World Agriculture Forum is convening a Global Soil Health Coalition — a neutral, high-level platform intended to position soil health as a global asset, align the science, policy and farmer voices that are currently operating in silos, and bridge the gap between global ambitions and ground-level realities. Dr. Carlo Portugal, director of science at the Soil Food Web School and Foundation, who moderated the event, framed the coalition’s purpose with characteristic urgency: “Most initiatives are doing excellent work within their own domains. What is missing is a space that connects these to the global policy and finance landscape in a unified way.”

The forum’s panellists, asked to distil their message to the single action most needed by 2030, were consistent in their urgency if varied in their emphasis. Align subsidies with outcomes rather than inputs. Establish carbon farming policy at national level. Shift from standalone products to integrated crop nutrition. Break the silos between soil, water and climate policy. Establish national soil health task forces in every African country. Invest in soil organic carbon as the fastest route to resilience. Make women and youth decision-makers, not recipients.

The 80-year-old entrepreneur Manwalia, who has spent five decades working on these problems across four continents, offered perhaps the most affecting moment of the event. He reached back to a verse from the Atharva Veda — one of the ancient Indian sacred texts — that identifies the soil as having a soul, a juice, a life-force. The Romans called it humus. Scientists today call it soil organic matter. Whatever the name, its depletion is the crisis. Its restoration is the opportunity.

“The science exists,” he said. “The practicality exists. We just need to deploy it.”

This feature is based on proceedings from the World Agriculture Forum Global Soil Health Coalition webinar, broadcast live on Earth Day. Participants included Professor Ratan Lal (Ohio State University), Anthony Fulford (International Rice Research Institute), Professor Ray Weil (University of Maryland), Manwalia (Architect Inc.), Antonis Angelakis (Yara International), Dr. Padma Karanam (ICRISAT), and Magali Montaliknossi (Mapata Institute, Malawi).