The Future of Soil and Land Stewardship - An exploration of stewardship in three scenarios

Maybe it was soil being interwoven with so many aspects of life that made
it invisible. Soil was everywhere, and therefore nowhere. Hidden under our
feet and hard to grasp. Not talking about soil was perhaps the greatest
social silence of all times.
DOWN TO EARTH
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Soil stewardship emerged at the fringes at first. While in the 2020s
authorities kept on supporting industrial agriculture, rebel groups of
students set up parallel experimentation tracks together with farms of all
sorts and sizes. Underground seed exchanges assisted farmers to bypass the
highly regulated, industry-dominated seed market. Experiments focused on
time-tested regenerative practices such as agroforestry, crop rotation and
permaculture, on working with natural systems rather than against them.
Another breeze of change came from companies, with innovations ranging
from peat-free potting soil and breweries switching to soil-friendly crops,
to ‘urban mining’ which turned excavated soil from construction sites into
local building materials.
A third node of resistance was community-supported agriculture (CSA), an
alliance between farmers and citizens. To improve local resilience and food
sovereignty, this farm-to-fork model relied on the science of agroecology
and risk-sharing with customers. CSA farming meant professionalism
and advanced technology - but no supermarkets, no fertilizers, no use of
harmful products and no monocultures. It was the antithesis of the global
distribution chains of modern industrial food production.
CSA grew, although slowly. Initially their main bottleneck was not demand,
but access to land. Every acre was speculated on by traders of frozen
food, potatoes and even horses. CSA initiatives were buzzing, but young
farms couldn’t expand their area due to outdated soil management and
land valuation policies, which seemed designed to frustrate them. Many
conventional farmers, on the other hand, were trapped in an economic
power structure where they had to lease land from the agroindustry,
1 Save Our Soils
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