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HEALTHY SOIL IS THE REAL KEY TO FEEDING THE WORLD

to feed the nearly 50 million Americans who regularly face today runs on abundant, cheap oil for fuel and to make
hunger. So even taken at face value, the oft-cited yield gap fertilizer – and our supply of cheap oil will not last forev-
between conventional and organic farming is smaller than er. There are already enough people on the planet that we
the amount of food we routinely throw away. have less than a year’s supply of food for the global popu-
Building healthy soil lation on hand at any one time. This simple fact has critical
Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health implications for society.
undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone So how do we speed the adoption of a more resilient ag-
over the long run. Regenerative practices like those used riculture? Creating demonstration farms would help, as
on the farms and ranches I visited show that we can readily would carrying out system-scale research to evaluate what
improve soil fertility on both large farms in the U.S. and on works best to adapt specific practices to general principles
small subsistence farms in the tropics. in different settings. We also need to reframe our agricul-
tural policies and subsidies. It makes no sense to continue
incentivizing conventional practices that degrade soil fertil-
ity. We must begin supporting and rewarding farmers who
adopt regenerative practices.
Once we see through myths of modern agriculture, practic-
es that build soil health become the lens through which to
assess strategies for feeding us all over the long haul. Why
am I so confident that regenerative farming practices can
prove both productive and economical? The farmers I met
showed me they already are.

By David Montgomery, Ph. D • Seattle, WA
David R. Montgomery is a MacArthur Fellow and profes-
sor of geomorphology at the University of Washington.

I no longer see debates about the future of agriculture as
simply conventional versus organic. In my view, we’ve over- For centuries, agricultural
simplified the complexity of the land and underutilized the practices have eroded the
ingenuity of farmers. I now see adopting farming practices soil that farming depends
that build soil health as the key to a stable and resilient ag- on, stripping it of the organ-
ic matter vital to its pro-
riculture. And the farmers I visited had cracked this code, ductivity. Now conventional
adapting no-till methods, cover cropping, and complex ro- agriculture is threatening
tations to their particular soil, environmental, and socio- disaster for the world’s
economic conditions. growing population. In
“Growing a Revolution”, ge-
Whether they were organic or still used some fertilizers ologist David R. Montgomery
and pesticides, the farms I visited that adopted this trans- travels the world, meeting
formational suite of practices all reported harvests that farmers at the forefront of
an agricultural movement
consistently matched or exceeded those from neighboring to restore soil health. From
conventional farms after a short transition period. Another Kansas to Ghana, he sees
message was as simple as it was clear: Farmers who restored why adopting the three
their soil used fewer inputs to produce higher yields, which tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting
cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution.
translated into higher profits. When farmers restore fertility to the land, this helps feed the
No matter how one looks at it, we can be certain that agri- world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability
culture will soon face another revolution. For agriculture to family farms.

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