Policy Report: Improving Soil Health in the UK
In 2023, AMI hosted an event at the John Innes Centre in the UK on ‘The Power of Microbes in Sustainable Crop Production’, which focused on the impact of microbes in national agricultural settings and food security. The discussions from this event resulted in a policy brief, Improving soil health in the UK: why a microbial approach is indispensable in attaining sustainable soils, which aimed to:
- Highlight the opportunity of taking a harmonised microbiome-based approach to soil health across the UK, explaining why this could be beneficial over current approaches and how such an approach could be implemented across the UK’s four nations; and,
- Propose microbial solutions that can be deployed now – if supported by policymakers and key industry players across all four nations – to improve UK soil health, whilst exploring and building the basis for a microbiome approach.
It was distributed to stakeholders including the UK Government, research institutes, and non-governmental organisations, resulting in over 20 meetings between AMI and various organisations and individuals interested in the UK’s soil health. These meetings resulted in the decision to host a roundtable to cover overarching themes that emerged, namely:
- The need to agree on a cross-disciplinary definition for 'healthy' soil
- The need to determine the most promising and/or suitable biological and microbiological indicator/s for soil health
- The need to discuss the original brief's recommended microbial solutions for sustainably managing soils, refining them based on multi-disciplinary input and perspectives (and potentially expanding them beyond the agricultural setting).
The roundtable was hosted virtually, chaired by Dr Marcela Hernández (environmental microbiologist at the University of East Anglia), and had 34 participants representing academics, governmental and nongovernmental organisations, research institutes, agri-businesses and union representatives. This brief, Improving Soil Health in the UK, summarises the discussions and pulls out the key message of the need to foster effective communication across the soil stakeholder spectrum to build the trust and open-mindedness to risk that is necessary for enabling wide-scale, lasting change.
