Today is World Soil Day, so here’s a reminder that soil is an integral part of life, even if it’s not something we think about that often. Soil serves as a home for fungi, bacteria, and provides nutrients to plant life. Their importance goes beyond just what’s beneath our feet — they help regulate our air, water, and climate, and even prevent flooding and disease. And of course, our soils serve as the foundation for our food system.
However, the current way in which we rely on industrial agriculture to get our food from soil to plate is unsustainable, depleting the health of our soils. If we continue using these agricultural methods, our soils will eventually die, meaning we will no longer be able to grow food as abundantly and important soil services like preventing erosion and mitigating the impacts of climate change will be lost.
Industrial agriculture not only depletes the health of our soils by overworking it, it also contributes to climate change through its harmful greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and deforestation: agriculture contributes around 31% of greenhouse gas emissions through both agricultural activities and land degradation. Rather than supporting industrial agriculture, it is important to find more natural, regenerative ways of farming to not only maintain but improve the health of our soils. This way, we can minimize agriculture’s impact on climate change and make progress to a more regenerative and sustainable food system.
This is exactly what Land Core does. Land Core, a non-profit based in our local LA community, works to “advance soil health policies and programs that create value for farmers, businesses and communities.” Land Core educates people about the importance of soil health, advises government officials on the potential of soil health policy, and ensures that these policies, once passed, will actually work in practice. Land Core is thus focused on a future in which we invest more in soil health, and adopt more regenerative agricultural methods like crop rotation and no-till farming.
This year, we are donating a portion of our profits to Landcore as part of our partnership with 1% for the planet. Shop our Land Collection to give back to the land we stand on, and find curated styles inspired by all that our soils offer us.
