School of Sustainability

Fertile ground was built by hand, not inherited

Ask where good farmland comes from and the usual answer is the luck of location. Some regions sit on prairie loam or black steppe earth and some do not; you are born onto generous ground or you are not. History mostly reinforces the gloom. Wherever people have farmed intensively, the ground has tended to give out beneath them — washed off the slopes, baked hard underfoot, spoiled by the very water meant to feed it. Good soil, on this account, belongs to geography's lottery winners.

Yet the record has a quieter strand running through it. Scattered across centuries and continents are places where communities raised fertile growing ground on land that would not previously carry a crop at all. The excerpt published by Regeneration International sketches this only in outline — the full account continues in a longer essay on Acres USA — but even the outline unsettles the assumption. In these cases, rich soil was not found. It was made, deliberately, by the people who needed it.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. If fertile ground can only be received and never made, then most of the world's farmland is on a countdown and the only variable is speed. If it can be made, then soil is less like a bank balance and more like a building — slow to raise, quick to wreck, and always the work of whoever is standing on it.

Regeneration International · Read the source