SAVE OUR SOILS

The European Commission's findings are clear: „Soil degradation costs the EU tens of billions of euros every year.“ Two thirds of the continent's soils are considered to be degraded. But while the EU has long since regulated the protection of water and air, there is still no legal agreement for soil. In order to protect its soils better, the EU Commission presented its „Soil Strategy“ in 2021. The goal: „By 2050, all EU soil ecosystems are in healthy condition and are thus more resilient, which will require very decisive changes in this decade.“

In July 2023, the Commission presented its draft for soil protection in Europe. However, there is no longer much left of the once ambitious plan.

In its 2021 strategy, the Commission had explicitly identified pesticide residues and over-fertilization as a „problem of soil contamination“. In the current draft, however, there is no mention of regulating fertilization. The annex merely states: „Fertilization should be based on the needs of the plants and the condition of the soil, depending on the location and time.“ Preference should be given to measures that promote creating humus. What this is supposed to mean specifically remains unclear. The word pesticides only appears once in the entire draft: in the annex, as an example of pollutants whose levels the member states „can“, but do not have to gather. Obligations or sanctions? Not a word.

Caroline Heinzel, Associate Policy Officer for Soil at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), an umbrella organization of over 180 environmental NGOs in Brussels, has followed the political process closely. In a position paper, she has criticized the Commission's draft in detail. Heinzel says: „Unfortunately, the draft in its current form will not lead to healthy soils in the EU.“ Even the changed title is symptomatic: the Commission had originally announced a Soil Health Law. Instead, however, it has now presented a draft that is intended to regulate the „monitoring“ of soils („Soil Monitoring Law“). The Commission's proposal stipulates that Member States should monitor their soils for five years and collect further data. Five more years lost for consistent soil protection, criticizes soil scientist Andrea Beste.

For more than 25 years, Andrea Beste has been traveling the world as a consultant to promote soil protection in agriculture. In Europe alone, she has examined more than 500 arable plots. As an expert, she speaks in federal state parliaments across Germany as well as in the German Bundestag and the EU Parliament. In Brussels, she has prepared several expert reports on EU soil policy for MEP Martin Häusling, the Greens party's agricultural policy spokesperson. Beste believes it is important not to blame the farmers alone for the soil crisis.

The European Court of Auditors has come to the same conclusion. In August, the auditors issued the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU member states a damning report. A third of all EU funding still goes to agriculture, with around 55 billion euros to be distributed by 2027. The main beneficiaries are farms with large areas of land. According to the auditors, however, the high agricultural subsidies do not serve to protect the soil. The requirements that the EU countries place on their farmers „hardly require any change in agricultural practices.“ But this criticism falls on deaf ears in Brussels, says Andrea Beste.

Green agriculture or greenwashing?

It was a surprising statement, the like of which the heavyweights of global food system rarely make in public. At the beginning of June, two days after the EU Commission presented its draft soil law, Danone, Nestlé and Unilever declared in a joint press release that „the state of soils in Europe is worrying.“ While the agrochemical industry defends conventional agriculture, the leaders of the food industry warned that the soil-depleting agricultural system would also harm them in the long term. In rare unity with environmental organizations, the companies therefore declared the Commission's plan to be too „unambitious“. They cite studies which point to a connection between the decline in humus content in Europe's arable soils and the stagnating yields of important staple foods. In other words, the soil crisis is jeopardizing their supply of raw materials and thus threatening overall food security.

As a solution, Nestlé is proposing an alternative system of food production in which the company intends to invest more than one billion euros by 2025: „regenerative agriculture“, a form of agriculture that builds up the soil instead of depleting it. Other megacorporations such as Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, PepsiCo, Walmart, Microsoft, Unilever, McDonald's and Cargill have also committed to regenerative agriculture in the past two years, in some cases with promises worth billions.

The key question is: What exactly do the companies mean by this?

Andrea Beste considers the agricultural industry's commitment to regenerative agriculture „a clear case of greenwashing.“

Bringing nature back

The concept may sound modern but it is actually a return to ancient knowledge. Regenerative agriculture contains elements that were widespread all over the world before the advent of the agricultural industry: In diverse landscapes full of shrubs and trees, meandering rivers, ponds and lakes of various sizes, nature and food production were not separate, but interwoven. The Amazon, for example, which often serves as a symbol of the primeval forest par excellence, is in fact largely the result of centuries of planned transformation by the indigenous population, who extracted timber and integrated particularly desirable varieties of edible or otherwise useful trees. People and their livestock moved within these polycultural forest landscapes. In many areas of the global South, such diverse agricultural systems still play an important role in feeding millions of people today. These are the very systems that were dismissed as unproductive by European colonialists who clear cutted the landscape in order to convert the forests into plantations with the help of the plow.

Central Europe's orchards are also an example of species-rich food production systems. In the course of land consolidation since the mid-fifties of the last century, the small-scale, diverse agricultural landscape was largely destroyed. Farmers received bonuses if they cut down old fruit trees, tore out hedges, filled in ponds and straightened streams into ditches. The premise was to create space for the ever larger machines in order to maximize yields. The soil suffered as a result.

Since the 1980s, more and more people around the world have been trying to bring all these cleared elements back into the monotonous agricultural landscape. Their aim is to breathe new life into degraded soils – and ultimately to regenerate the entire landscape.

One of the pioneers of regenerative agriculture in Germany is Maria Giménez. She made a career as an artist – until she stumbled into farming by chance. Her wealthy father-in-law had acquired a lot of land in Brandenburg after reunification. When the leases with the large farmers expired, he presented Maria with a decision that would change her life: he offered her the land to farm, 360 hectares of arable fields and forest. Maria accepted the offer. Over the past eight years, what started as a small vegetable garden for markets in Berlin has developed into a model farm for regenerative agriculture .

Maria Giménez divided the arable land into narrow strips of thirty meters, adapted to the working widths of her machines. She planted trees in between. Lots of trees. There are now more than 200,000 trees of 45 different species in her fields and pastures. The concept is called agroforestry, the integration of woody plants into arable farming. The idea: trees provide shade and slow down the wind. In this way, they prevent erosion. Their foliage nourishes soil life and useful fungi settle on their roots. All this strengthens the cereal plants, sunflowers and all the other arable crops that she grows between the rows of trees. „Around the world, agroforestry systems have been shown to be significantly more productive than growing just one crop on the same area,“ explains Giménez. In fact, studies have shown that the yields of the main crop – such as wheat – can be higher if they are surrounded by, for instance, walnut trees. In many cases, farmers harvest more grain, even though the area under cultivation is reduced by the rows of trees. And the trees and shrubs provide additional sources of income. Their fruit, berries, nuts and wood can also be marketed.

In the tropics, where trees provide much-needed shade and cooling, agroforestry systems are also widespread in commercial cultivation, for example coffee bushes under fast-growing eucalyptus for paper production. For Africa, researchers speak of a „win-win situation“. For the northern hemisphere, where less sunlight is available, studies have come to different conclusions: It is true that even in sunny southern Europe, crop yields are initially reduced minimally in most cases, precisely because the area under cultivation for the main crop has been reduced. However, polyculture cultivation can help to keep crop yields stable, especially in times of increasing climate extremes. In many cases, the quality of the produce also increases. And over time, the yield level evens out again – especially as soon as the trees and shrubs also produce their first harvests. An evaluation of yields from agroforestry systems in Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt „confirms the greater efficiency of agroforestry systems compared to monocultures.“ In Europe, most agroforestry systems are still quite young, apart from a few established flagship projects. Researchers emphasize that time is needed to comprehensively evaluate their efficiency – and a broader view that takes into account factors such as biodiversity, water storage and climate resilience in addition to crop yields.

Ultimately, it also depends on how the farmers cultivate the soil between their trees. Maria Giménez, for example, also farms without mechanical tillage. Her cattle takes care of the soil. In the fall, after the harvest, Giménez sends her herd of forty Scottish Highland cattle across the fields. In this year-round, rotational grazing system, the supposed climate killers once again become the humus-building nutrient converters that they naturally are. The veterinarian and former author of the World Agriculture Report, Anita Idel, has impressively described the outstanding role of ruminants such as cattle for soil health. At Maria Gimenéz' farm, the cattle eats grasses and herbs, fertilizes the land with their excrements and prepares the soil for the following sowing with their hooves.

Giménez imported the seed drill for the subsequent direct sowing from Brazil – a tip from her colleague Mark Dümichen, whose farm is not far away. She often exchanges ideas with him. „Everything I know about regenerative agriculture, I know from other farms that have set up and found out: 'We can't continue the way we are treating our soil,'“ says Giménez. „This movement of farms that work regeneratively and are embarking on this new path is a wonderful movement from the underground. And this movement is global. It's getting bigger and bigger now.“

Walking with Maria Giménez along the ponds and hedges she has created, watching the cattle grazing in the pasture and the fruit ripening, you can get an idea of what sustainable agriculture might look like in the future. It has already become reality here, the vision of a farming system that puts the soil and biodiversity back at the center. A farming system that creates positive effects far beyond the edge of the field, transforming a drought-stricken region into a climate-resilient landscape. A farming system that produces food and does not pollute water and the climate, but protects them. A farming system that can actually be part of the solution.