National Geographic Article Highlights Importance of Soil Resources and Prospects for the Future

Amidst impacts of evolving climate conditions across the world, soil resources play a critical factor in managing future prosperity for communities.

When a resource supports and enables a wide range of human activity behind the scenes, it is often easy to take it for granted, or miss the scope of how that support works and why it matters. Soil can be considered such a resource, and an increasing number of organizations are paying closer attention to the extent to which this resource is utilized and impacted. For the sake of preserving basic necessities, productivity, human health, and more, details of human use of and interaction with soil need to be shared and addressed. National Geographic provided a recent highlight of the value of soil throughout the world:

A changing climate and growing human population will continue to place enormous pressures on the world’s arable lands, which will need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050.

Current human practices, however, aren’t exactly helping. Excessive cultivation has sapped many soils of vital nutrients. Sprawling urban areas have eaten away at farmable lands, sickening them from chemical runoff or choking them under impermeable, man-made coverings. And a football field’s worth of farmable soil is lost every five seconds to erosion, soils’ gravest global threat.

But saving soils will not only secure humankind’s food supply, but it will prove key in combating climate change. Soils hold onto more carbon than all the vegetables, animals, and minerals sitting atop them, making them an enormous “climate sink.” In fact, increasing soils’ carbon content by 0.4 percent annually through conservation and better management could stabilize humankind’s dangerous carbon emissions—and improve crop yields, too.

In other words, “if soil is managed poorly, it is impossible to imagine an optimistic future,” the UN report’s technical summary concludes. But if we can conserve and take care of soil as something “to be preserved for future generations,” as Montanarella urges, we can literally break new ground.

Supporting and developing Sustainable Agriculture is among Team Gemini’s primary endeavors. We take a multipronged approach to addressing challenges associated with soil, including revitalization of drought-plagued agriculture areas, separating sulfuric acids and phosphorous from liquid manure, eliminating existing sludge lagoons, reducing CO2 exposure into the atmosphere, and significantly reducing odor penetration on animal farms. Additional practices include water conservation and treatment that supports strained water levels, as well as advanced greenhouses which minimize the burden on soil while maximizing production of various foods. Team members like Artigianfer, A3-USA, and VISCON Group all contribute technologies to treat resources efficiently throughout the year.

Beyond conservation, Team Gemini also examines current industry practices to help eliminate harmful and counterintuitive treatment of waste. Most industries follow outdated practices of treating their waste, which continues putting a burden on water, soil, and other life- and business-sustaining components of our environment. Through pre-treatment technologies like liquid-manure separation, capturing valuable Nitrogens, and further processing organic waste in anaerobic digestion and add-on technologies provided through Team Gemini and our partners, we’re able to turn waste into a multitude of resources such as electricity, thermal energy, grade-A compost and liquid concentrated fertilizer, Ammonia powder production, as well as a range of biofuels. Rather than have waste pollute groundwater and soil, why not have it become a resource that contributes to a healthy Triple Bottom Line?

To learn more about Team Gemini’s diverse technology solutions, visit http://teamgemini.us/technologies/. Consider subscribing to our RSS feed or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay in the loop about key updates.

The original article can be found on this page.