Food for Thought: Soil, Food, Farming and Trade - Border Union Agricultural Society Business Breakfast, Kelso, 26 July 2024
The talks started with a provocation on the topic of soil from Professor Lorna Dawson, SEFARI Gateway Knowledge Exchange Lead for Environment and Senior Soil Scientist at the James Hutton Institute. She discussed the devastation from the dust bowl in the 1930s when an estimated 1.2 billion tons of soil were lost across 100 million acres in the US, to the current regenerative farming practices, which help to protect our soils. Lorna spoke about how, without living plant roots and fungal networks to hold soil in place, strong winds and floods can seriously erode our precious soils that deliver so many of the services on our planet such as fresh water, clean air and nutritious food.