Soil is a mixture of mineral and organic matter that contains air, water, and micro-organisms.

Soil plays an important role for the ecosystem as given below:

• Soil ensures food security: Soil provides nutrition to the plants to help them grow and provides foothold for their roots. It, thereby, plays an important role by ensuring crop productivity, which is essential for achieving food security.
• Soil moisture and fauna: The minerals and microbes in soil help clean water by filtering and buffering potential pollutants. Also, soil recharges groundwater, regulates the discharge of excess rainwater, and prevents flooding.
• Mitigates climate change: Soil is the second largest carbon sink after the ocean and can help regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, thereby playing a crucial role in mitigating climate change.
• Biological habitat and gene pool: Soil contains a vast array of microorganisms, many of which are unique to specific soil types or regions. These microorganisms can be a rich source of genetic diversity, and they may contain genes that are useful for developing new crop varieties or for biotechnology applications.

Despite soil playing an important role for the ecosystem, as per the latest Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas of the ISRO, around 30 per cent of land in India has already been degraded and degraded soils are prone to erosion. There is an urgent need for mitigation of soil erosion through the application of sustainable soil management in India due to its following significance:

• Enhances quality of soil: Sustainable soil management practices like mulching can enhance the quality and holding capacity of the soil.
• Ensures farm productivity: Regenerative agriculture should be practised, which is an outcome-based food production system. This method nurtures and restores soil health, protects the climate and water resources and biodiversity, and enhances farms’ productivity and profitability.
• Prevents soil erosion: Slope areas are prone to soil erosion during rain, and thus soil can run down with water. Sustainable soil management practices like flattening the surface can be used to arrest soil erosion.
• Ensures soil health: As traditional tools like ploughs can damage soil by exposing microbes within it, it is necessary to focus on sustainable farm equipment. For e.g. no-till machinery designed to cause less damage to soil, or a robot that can both plant and weed in a less disruptive way, can be used.

Further, attractive incentives should be given to farmers to reach the minimum 3-6 percent organic content in the soil, thus restoring natural soil properties. Also, threshold of measures such as capacity building of farmers, ensuring seed, and input availability etc. will play a key role in achieving the target of restoring 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030.