Repairing the Soil Carbon Rift: Enhancing Agriculture and Environment

When Magdoff's studied soil fertility as a graduate student in the mid-1960s, soil organic matter was recognized as something that occurred, but it received little emphasis in textbooks or class discussions. There were a few courses on soil biology, but the focus of practical soil fertility studies was on individual elements needed by plants, how they behaved in soil, and how to determine if they were present in sufficient amounts in forms that were available for plants to use. Over many years, individual soil types develop their unique characteristics as a result of the combined effects of the local climate and the vegetation growing on them, as well as the sources of minerals (parent material) from which a soil develops. As years pass, soils on the bottom of slopes receive eroded soil from the side slopes. This depletes the side slopes of organic matter-enriched topsoil at the same time that soils at the bottom become enriched.