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ADVERTORIAL
Soil health and canine health
By Guy Ellis, Head of Production, Honey’s Real Dog Food
I was in love with soil as a child, of course. I played with it, rolled around in it and – if photographic evidence is to be believed – ate it. When I became interested in gardening I understood, in an abstract way, that it was important to care for the stuff, but it wasn’t until I started making organic dog food that I really came to realise the essential wisdom of Lady Balfour’s remark that ‘Health, whether of soil, plant, animal or man, is one and indivisible.’ I’ll come back to the connection between soil health, canine health and canine diet in a moment. First, a quick summary of the UK’s soil situation.
In June 2019, Emma Howard Boyd, then chair of the Environment Agency introduced a report on the state of British soil with these words:
‘Soil holds three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, it reduces the risk of flooding by
absorbing water, it is a wildlife habitat, and it delivers 95% of global food supplies. Unfortunately, it is a limited resource under pressure from climate change, population growth, urban development, waste, pollution, and the demand for more (and cheaper) food.’
She then quoted Leonardo Da Vinci, who pointed out five hundred years ago that ‘we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot,’ saying that she believed we are no less ignorant today. Indeed, the government’s most recent (2023) report on soil opens with this worrying statement:
‘Soil biodiversity and the many biological processes and soil functions that it supports are thought to be
under threat. There are insufficient data on the health of our soils. Investment is needed in soil monitoring.’ In other words, the government suspects it’s bad, but doesn’t know how bad. What it does know is that in England and Wales:
• almost 4 million hectares of soil are at risk of compaction
• over 2 million hectares of soil are at risk of erosion • intensive agriculture has caused arable soils to lose
about 40 to 60% of their organic carbon
• soil degradation was calculated in 2010 to cost £1.2
billion every year
• wasting food and growing crops for bioenergy are
putting additional pressure on soils
• spreading of some materials to land is poorly
controlled and can give rise to contamination... around 300,000 hectares are contaminated in the UK, and
• microplastics are widespread in soil with unknown consequences.
Compaction and the loss of organic carbon, by the way, are serious threats to soil health. They affect
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