All of a sudden, soil is in fashion. Soil science has been in decline for many years, but interest is rising rapidly. The Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons has launched an inquiry into soil health. Not surprisingly, the White Rose Sustainable Agriculture Consortium has submitted evidence, that it turn builds on the experience we are gathering from our research at the Leeds University Farm. But there are so many things going on in the soil world, following from last year's International Year of the Soil (shown by these giant posters at the FAO headquarters in Rome last year), and the appearance of targeted research funds, through programmes like the Soil Security programme that supports much of my work.
I reckon several things have come together to make this happen. Soil science is developing rapidly thanks to new technologies. Advances in identifying genome sequences are allowing us to see what's living in the soil, and in identifying complex biological chemicals (metagenomics) shows us what they are doing. Stable and radioactive tracers allow us to track the progress of carbon and other materials through the soil, while new sensors, the mighty Nanosims (see below, images of a soil micro-aggregate, showing the locations of different labelled isotopes, from this paper) and even 2nd hand medical scanners show soil structure and processes in ways that were never possible before. The black box (well, brown sludgy mess) is opening up, and scientists are suddenly keen to get involved.
I reckon several things have come together to make this happen. Soil science is developing rapidly thanks to new technologies. Advances in identifying genome sequences are allowing us to see what's living in the soil, and in identifying complex biological chemicals (metagenomics) shows us what they are doing. Stable and radioactive tracers allow us to track the progress of carbon and other materials through the soil, while new sensors, the mighty Nanosims (see below, images of a soil micro-aggregate, showing the locations of different labelled isotopes, from this paper) and even 2nd hand medical scanners show soil structure and processes in ways that were never possible before. The black box (well, brown sludgy mess) is opening up, and scientists are suddenly keen to get involved.
Such new technology is allowing serious money to be made by advising farmers on their soil using big data. Even IT companies like IBM are developing systems that support farmer decision making by monitoring soil, weather and crops. And the need for soil science has never been higher; the current extremes of rainfall and drought, the rising cost of fertilisers and the withdrawal of some agrochemicals means that soil has to be actively managed for sustained crop production.
If you want a career challenge in a rapidly developing area of science of fundamental importance to the whole of humankind, well, you could do far worse.....
If you want a career challenge in a rapidly developing area of science of fundamental importance to the whole of humankind, well, you could do far worse.....
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