Healthy Soil: A Foundation of Balanced Meals
In many ways, maintaining healthy soil is the first step in ensuring that people everywhere have access to a balanced meal. To grow the foods we eat, such as our favorite fruits and vegetables, farmers have to nurture and monitor a healthy soil base to have productive harvests. Soil, just like people, requires a steady variety of different vitamins and minerals to thrive.
Supporting soil quality is a delicate but important part of sustainable farming, with a wide range of benefits when it comes to growing crops and using natural resources more efficiently. By maintaining the right harmony of nutrients, moisture, and pH levels in the soil, plants are better able to grow and develop into healthy, robust crops that are better equipped to withstand a variety of challenges, from pests to severe weather conditions. This helps makes it possible for a variety of nutrient‐rich foods to make it to the shelves of your local market or grocery store.
Healthy soil also poses a wide range of benefits for our environment, such as cleaning and protecting our natural water resources. This is an especially important consideration in light of global climate change, which can produce challenging conditions that impact a farmer's ability to bring food to harvest.
At Monsanto, we realize the importance of ensuring that we all have access to balanced meals, which is why we are working directly with farmers, researchers, nonprofits, and others to find ways to maintain soil health for a sustainable future.