: What is soil degradation and what are the factors responsible for it?
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You will always have degraded areas like desert or steppe, but in general there’s a lifecycle of decaying matter and growing plants that feed off the decaying matter with a free bonus food source of the sun.
The decaying matter can be leaf litter like in a rainforest, animal pooh like the heards of buffalo, spring bok, wilde beast (etc) create, which also churns up the soil with their hooves, dead trees that fungi break down, decaying animals, or whatever else I’ve forgotten or just don’t know.
This decaying matter revitalises the soil with minerals and other nutrients.
This sparks bacterial growth, which gives better quality food for the herbivores, encourages plant and reciprocal fungal growth which leads to more flowering and seeding, which creates more insect life. Flowers, seeds and insects attract birds. All of the above attracts predators which creates very nutrient rich pooh which is often buried creating more nutrients. Healthy predation on browsing animals like cattle or capybara produces a lot more pooh, and so on and so forth.
When you remove the chain of herbivores browsing and poohing, carnivores eating, poohing and dying, and plants reproducing you strip a lot of the nutrients from the soil.
When you get intensive farming practices which rely on fertilizer rather than the natural soil cycle, you strip the last remaining mineral content of the soil, which starves the bacteria and fungi of their food.
You end up with dust, like the dust bowl in the US in the 1930s. Nothing can really grow.
Farmers on the whole aren’t idiots. They know how to tend and care for their land in order for it to remain productive. When pressures of supporting your family, and paper thin margins created by large distribution and retail outlets, worst practices are not uncommonly resorted to “just to get by” for another year. These temporary measures can become permanent when the paper thin margins become even thinner.
**Edit** grammar and syntax
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