Sick leave for soils
If we want soils to recover from growing crops year after year, laden with fertilisers and pesticides then we need to put them on sick leave. Our soils need time off to rest, regenerate and recover.
Our soils are sick.
If we want soils to recover from growing crops year after year, laden with fertilisers and pesticides then we need to put them on sick leave. That’s right - we’re here to say soils need time off to rest, regenerate and recover.
Professor Jonathan R Leake and his colleagues have shown that giving land ‘time off’ and growing herbs instead of heavy crops boosts soil biodiversity and health by recruiting earthworms and beneficial fungi surviving in the surrounding degraded soils. The leys also improve the capacity of the soil to hold water, making the soil more resilient to flooding.
What we saw over a three-year period was a progressive improvement in really important soil functional properties which had been degraded by long-term farming.
Professor Jonathan R Leake
Professor of Plant-Soil Interactions, Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield.
By improving soil structure, leys are a low-cost and effective way to restore and manage UK farmland to be more productive and better able to resist extreme weather.
Improving soil water holding capacity through simple management interventions like rotational leys could help make farmland more resilient against flooding, particularly in high-risk areas such as the Vale of York in the northeast of England.
Policy-makers could encourage farmers to rebuild soil structure using leys to boost ecosystem services.
“Society benefits from better quality soils in terms of reduced flood risk, improved water quality, improved carbon storage, less greenhouse gas emissions” added Professor Jonathan Leake.