"In 2015, the International Year of Soils, Maria Helena Semedo, a deputy director at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, famously commented that the world’s topsoil had become so degraded that it could only support another 60 harvests. Decades of deforestation, monoculture, and poor farming practices, often over-reliant on chemical inputs, had stripped the land of all its goodness. It’s estimated that 75 billion tonnes of fertile soil are lost to land degradation every year, leaving Earth, which is still expected to feed an ever-growing global population, in a parlous state. Last month, the FAO warned that more than than 90% of all the Earth's soils could be degraded by 2050 if we continued on the same path."