Transforming The Soil in a Subsistence Village

The state of the soil in a subsistence village typically has a great deal in common with the unfortunate condition of the villagers

Subsistence villages tend to be located on what ecologists (and the UN) call ‘degraded’ land

In this context, degraded means:

‘there used to be trees there, but they’ve all long since been cut down’

Degraded land tends to have just a thin layer of soil

This turns out to be the precise reason why subsistence villages inhabit the places they do

Their land is simply not deemed to be the kind of prime farmland that would be considered suitable for large scale industrial farming?

Why is the thin soil on degraded ‘non-prime’ land considered to be no good for agriculture?

it tends to ‘not hold on’ to the nutrients that get put back into the soil by fertiliser

Non-prime land has soil which tends to ‘leach out all its nutrients’ in the rainy season

How do we restore health to the soil of degraded land?

There’s something called biochar which you can add to the soil as ‘medicine’

Biochar acts as a sponge, helping the soil hang onto all the goodness that crops need