Cultivation of the soil is our key to good crops

Kitty Scully looks at the ecosystems of soil for UN Year of Soils and shows how intrinsic it is to all human life.

WHEN we are standing on the ground, we are really standing on the roof top of another world — this explanation sums up the importance of soil and indicates why the UN General Assembly has declared 2015 as the International Year of Soils (IYS).

Soil health is key to food security and similar to the rainforest, savanna or a sea estuary, soil is an ecosystem in which thousands of different organisms interact and make up the global cycles that enable life on earth. But it needs protection too.