Using a resilience theory approach could help reveal practical solutions and clarify their potential trade-offs.
New research warns that modern agricultural methods are placing the global food supply at increasing risk by weakening the natural resilience of the world’s soils.
Soil resilience refers to the capacity of soil to resist, adapt to, and recover from disturbances—whether from routine farming activities or more extreme pressures such as droughts, floods, or other environmental shocks. A comprehensive review of current agricultural techniques found that while intensive practices like plowing, fertilizer application, and irrigation can raise yields in the short term, their continued and widespread use often degrades soil quality. As a result, soils become less capable of coping with stress caused by environmental or political disruptions.
Since soils support around 95% of global food production and store more carbon than all the world’s forests combined, their decline poses a major environmental concern. Repeated disturbance removes organic matter, compacts the ground, and disrupts the organisms that sustain soil ecosystems. Over time, these changes weaken the soil’s ability to recover, leading to worsening erosion, salinization, pest infestations, and falling crop productivity.
Key threats to global soil stability
According to the study, published in NPJ Sustainable Agriculture, the most severe danger to soil resilience is erosion driven by over-plowing, overgrazing, and deforestation. This process can strip away fertile layers that take centuries to develop. Other significant threats include the build-up of salts in irrigated soils (salinization), pollution from pesticides and plastic residues, and soil compaction caused by intensive livestock operations.
Rothamsted’s Dr Alison Carswell, lead author of the study, said: “Healthy, resilient soils are not just the foundation of food security, they are central to biodiversity and climate stability. Yet many of the practices we rely on to increase yields today risk undermining that foundation in the future.”
Balancing productivity with long-term resilience
The review notes that some practices, such as flooding rice paddies or liming acidic soils, can maintain soil resilience over the long term. And alternatives – from conservation tillage to integrated pest management – can slow or even reverse damage. But most solutions carry trade-offs, requiring careful balancing of short-term productivity with long-term resilience.
The authors warn that ignoring soil resilience could leave farming systems increasingly vulnerable to tipping points, where the sudden collapse of productivity becomes irreversible. Such failures, they argue, could ripple through food and trade networks, threatening global stability.
Global implications and a call for change
The findings come amid growing concern that the world is losing healthy soil faster than it can be replenished, with the UN estimating that a third of soils are already degraded. As demand for food rises, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, the risks may intensify.
“Breaking the cycle of soil degradation is possible,” Dr Carswell concludes, “but it requires rethinking how we manage land – not just for yields next season, but for resilience in the decades to come.”
Reference: “Agricultural practices can threaten soil resilience through changing feedback loops” by Alison M. Carswell, Simon Willcock, Martin S. A. Blackwell, Hari Ram Upadhayay, Paul Harris, Graham McAuliffe, Andrew L. Neal, M. Jordana Rivero, Laura M. Cardenas, Stephan M. Haefele, Andrew P. Whitmore, John A. Dearing, Fusuo Zhang, Mark Farrell, Marijn Bauters, Pascal Boeckx, Yuri Jacques A. B. da Silva, Kwame Agyei Frimpong and Adrian L. Collins, 1 October 2025, npj Sustainable Agriculture.
DOI: 10.1038/s44264-025-00098-6
Rothamsted Research receives strategic funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). This paper was conceived as part of the Resilient Farming Futures [BB/X010961/1; BBS/E/RH/230004A] Institute Strategic Programme. We also acknowledge support from the Growing Health [BB/X010953/1] and AgZero+ [NE/W005050/1] programmes.
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8 Comments
Turns out, knee-jerk solutions are always a temporary patch – and always create worse problems.
The world had a good four billion R&D period and your little notions are always gonna be inane.
always
No, not always.
Regenerative farming started in the 60s, as a “knee-jerk reaction” to the discovery that humanity was causing unsustainable soil erosion.
…And has been wildly successful. Farmers who implement low till/no till methods have seen incredible improvements in the health of their soil, and many places are seeing gains in their soil (as opposed to losses from erosion).
Making blanket statements without actually knowing what your talking about just makes one look like a fool.
*what you’re talking about. Damn autocorrect. 🤦♂️
You don’t need a study to tell you that pumping all those chemicals into the ground is not a good thing.
1.) Yes, you do. If you want to know for sure instead of just assuming.
2.) The main cause of soil degradation is erosion due to tilling. The chemicals play a fairly minor role in comparison.
Fear mongering at its best. This is a complicated issue, and one that humanity has been actively addressing for a long time bu implementing regenerative farming techniques. There ARE places where soil is being degraded. But there are also places where the opposite is happening (and a lot more than you’d think). Farmers are adopting low till/no till techniques at an ever increasing pace (tilling being the #1 cause of erosion/degradation – BY FAR). Currently, almost 75% of farmland in the US is no till or low till. There are quite a few other countries with similar (or higher) rates. Globally, about 25% of all farmland is low till or no till, as of 2020. And we are seeing an increase in global low till/no till rates of approximately 93% per decade. If that rate continues, approximately 93% of global farmland will be low till or no till by 2040.
Stop trying to scare people with a problem that humanity has been actively fixing since the 1960s. While there is still a lot of work to be done – we have made major progress. And there is no indication that the progress is going to stop. The world is not going to run out of farmable soil.
*by implementing regenerative farming techniques.
(I hate that this site doesn’t allow people to edit or delete their posts.)
Isn’t it strange that the Rodale Institute was founded in 1947, and had many fans and adherents dedicated to learning by research, trial, and error, and the collaboration of many hobbiests and academics that made so much progress, yet the Corporate model planet spoilers forced their evil priorities on the economic practices of those engaged in food production. They seemed to have used the brute force of unchallenged economic dominance to negate all those efforts, erasing our collective memory in the process of marginalizing the health of the planet in favor of maintaining their brutal grip on that hegemony. This article is very similar to those that fill the pages of Rodale Institute magazines, written a very long time ago.