Healthy food requires healthy land on which to grow it. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at mercola.com:
Story at-a-glance
- Healthy soil acts like a sponge, absorbing nearly all rainfall, while conventionally tilled soil sheds water and erodes, contributing to droughts and floods
- Livestock, when managed properly through rotational grazing, restore degraded land by fertilizing, reseeding, and rebuilding soil structure naturally
- Farmers around the world are trapped in a broken agricultural system that destroys biodiversity, bankrupts producers, and relies heavily on synthetic inputs
- Bare soil increases atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) and disrupts rainfall patterns, while covered, biologically active soil cools the surface and restores the local water cycle
- You can support land restoration by buying from regenerative farmers, choosing pasture-raised food, avoiding ultraprocessed products, and raising awareness in your community
Modern agriculture is collapsing under its own weight — and the soil is paying the price. Across the U.S., topsoil is washing away, microbial life is disappearing, and farmers are going broke trying to prop up a system that wasn’t built to last. What used to be self-sustaining, living ecosystems are now bare, lifeless fields that repel rain instead of absorbing it.
When soil biology dies, water runs off instead of soaking in, floods increase, and crops fail. The root problem is that soil no longer captures sunlight or holds water the way nature intended. Former U.S. Department of Agriculture soil scientist Ray Archuleta has spent decades working with farmers across six continents, and he says the pattern is always the same. Overgrazing, chemical fertilizers, and relentless tillage strip the land of its living cover, leaving it naked, hungry, thirsty, and “running a fever.”1
That’s not a metaphor — it’s a measurable collapse of the four core ecosystem processes: sunlight capture, water cycling, nutrient flow, and biodiversity. You’re not just looking at soil degradation; you’re looking at the unraveling of everything that makes food, and life, possible. What many people don’t realize is that these degraded lands aren’t beyond repair.
Yes, tariffs are expected to affect fertilizer prices and availability, particularly for U.S. farmers, due to the country’s significant reliance on imports for certain fertilizer types.
(from AI)