Soil pit

Wednesday 21st April 2021

Back to lectures. It was good to meet up with everyone, it felt a bit like starting again - and others felt the same. We went out in the Steadings field with Felicity which was helpful for my assignment. She has had a large soil pit dug in the middle of the field. The samples that we were taking were one spade depth - so about 20cm - that is still all topsoil. It was interesting to see the soil pit where you can see that it is only 30cm of total soil before you hit the limestone bedrock.

Across the world the agricultural techniques that we have used over the last decades remove soil from the surface quicker than it can be created. As you can imagine soil creation is a slow process. There are some reports that say that if we don't change what we are doing there are only 100 more harvests before we run out of soil. That is obviously an average and very much depends on the depth of soil over the bedrock. But it does make you think though - in the Cotswolds it could be less than 100 years if we dont look after our soil better.