Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
It takes a thousand years to build three centimetres of topsoil. We lose a football pitch of it every five seconds.
A third of the world's farmable soil is already dead. The UN warned that if the stripping goes on, we have sixty harvests left.
Iowa, the richest ground in America, has lost close to half its topsoil since 1850. Ploughed loose and sent down the Mississippi.
Warming gets the summits and the placards. The soil that grows ninety-five percent of your food is washing away right now, and that is the one that starves you.
Here is the part that stays off the stage.
The deepest, blackest, most fertile ground on earth, the American prairie, the Russian steppe, the Ukrainian black earth that feeds the world, was built by one thing.
Vast herds of grazing ruminants. Trampling, dunging, moving on. Tens of millions of bison, roots fifteen feet deep, packing carbon into the ground for ten thousand years.
The plough switched that off. The cow, moved like the wild herd, switches it back on. Graze it right and the carbon sinks, the soil thickens, the rain soaks in instead of tearing the field away.
The best machine ever built for saving the soil is the animal they want off your plate.
A tractor cannot build soil. Fertiliser cannot build soil. Only the herd ever has.
But healing the world's dirt means more cattle on grass, not fewer.
So you will hear about the cow's burp right up until the last of the topsoil reaches the sea.
