LOSING GROUND: THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE SOIL THAT FEEDS US

THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF ARABLE LAND DEPLETION

Seven years ago, at the Sedona International Film Festival, I reviewed a documentary that profoundly impacted me: The Need to Grow. This award-winning film is a wake-up call—an unflinching look at the rapid depletion of the Earth’s fertile soil and the unsung innovators working to reverse that decline. One of the film’s most chilling revelations was the estimate that we may have only 60 years of farmable soil left if current trends continue. Sixty harvests. Sixty chances to get it right before the ground beneath us—quite literally—can no longer support us.

That film planted a seed in my consciousness. It led me to explore just how deep the crisis of arable land depletion goes—and how profoundly it affects not just our food systems, but our environment, our economies, and global stability.

This commentary brings together what I’ve learned—the roots of the crisis, its far-reaching consequences, and the pathways to renewal—in the hope that others will grasp the profound threat it poses to our future.

What’s eating our soil?

The slow erosion of arable land rarely commands headlines, but it is a crisis in motion. Much of the damage begins with how we farm. Decades of industrial agriculture have prioritized yield over resilience, efficiency over ecology. The result? Soil erosion and degradation on a staggering scale. We are losing fertile topsoil—arguably one of the most precious resources on Earth—at a rate of 24 billion tons per year, according to the United Nations.

This isn’t just poor technique—it’s a systemic pattern. Monoculture farming, excessive tilling, deforestation, and overgrazing all strip away the land’s protective cover, leaving it vulnerable to wind, rain, and depletion. What remains isn’t soil but dirt: inert, lifeless, incapable of sustaining crops or ecosystems.

Then comes the concrete. Across the globe, and especially in the United States, farmland is giving way to urban sprawl—housing developments, highways, and shopping centers. We lose about 2,000 acres of farmland every single day to development. Once paved over, that land is gone for good.

Compounding all of this is climate change. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and erratic weather patterns are accelerating desertification—particularly in regions already vulnerable to water scarcity. At the same time, poor irrigation practices and the overuse of synthetic fertilizers are causing salinization, poisoning the soil, and making vast swaths of land unusable.

The domino effect

The consequences of soil loss ripple far beyond the farm. When fertile land disappears, food production suffers. Crop yields fall, prices rise, and access to basic nutrition becomes a privilege rather than a right. The World Bank has warned that food price spikes—like those seen in recent years—can quickly cascade into civil unrest and economic upheaval.

As agricultural livelihoods vanish, people are forced to move. Migration patterns are already shifting as rural communities collapse under environmental strain. This can lead to urban overcrowding, cross-border tensions, and—in some cases—outright conflict. The Arab Spring, it’s worth remembering, was preceded by a sharp increase in food prices.

Meanwhile, the environmental damage is compounding. Healthy soil isn’t just a medium for crops—it’s a living ecosystem that stores carbon, filters water, and supports biodiversity. When we degrade that system, we not only lose species—we fuel climate change.

A look at home

While this is a global issue, the American experience offers a telling microcosm. In the Midwest—America’s breadbasket—we’ve seen massive losses of topsoil over the past century. Iowa, for example, has lost up to half of its topsoil in some areas, and the situation is far from stable.

Much of the blame lies in how we’ve organized our food economy. Large-scale monoculture farming dominates U.S. agriculture, often subsidized by federal policy that rewards volume over stewardship. This model is profitable in the short term, but it depletes the land and leaves farmers vulnerable to crop failures, pests, and climate shocks.

Even the programs designed to help, such as crop insurance or commodity subsidies, tend to reinforce extractive practices. Rarely do they incentivize soil health, biodiversity, or sustainability. The long view—what it takes to actually preserve arable land—is largely absent from our policy calculus.

And here in Arizona, the land tells its own cautionary tale. Farming in the desert has always required ingenuity, but it now demands urgent rethinking. As groundwater levels continue to drop and the Colorado River becomes a political and ecological battleground, the state’s agricultural footprint faces severe constraints. Pinal County, long a hub for alfalfa, cotton, and dairy feed, has already seen thousands of acres go fallow due to reductions in Colorado River allocations. The state’s arid climate and fragile desert soils simply cannot support unlimited extraction and expansion.

Meanwhile, rapid development—especially across Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal counties—is paving over prime farmland at an alarming pace. Some of the state’s most fertile alluvial soils, deposited over millennia, are now buried beneath housing tracts, warehouses, and distribution hubs. The irony is hard to miss: in one of the driest states in the nation, we are losing arable land both to thirst and to sprawl.

Then there’s the controversy in La Paz County, where a Saudi agribusiness company, Fondomonte, leased thousands of acres of state land to grow alfalfa for export to feed livestock in the Middle East. The crop, notorious for its thirst, is irrigated using Arizona groundwater—a public resource being drained to support foreign agricultural production. That arrangement, once quietly sanctioned, has sparked public outrage and intensified scrutiny of how the state manages its dwindling aquifers. In October 2023, Governor Katie Hobbs announced the termination of one of Fondomonte's groundwater leases in the Butler Valley Basin, and the State Land Department notified the company that three other leases in the same basin would not be renewed and would terminate in February 2024. Nevertheless, legal challenges and ongoing operations on other properties mean the overall situation with Fondomonte in Arizona remains complex and evolving.

To its credit, the state has recently begun to act on other fronts. In 2023, Arizona imposed a moratorium on new groundwater-dependent development in the Phoenix Active Management Area, citing insufficient long-term water supplies. It was a rare but necessary step—though more systemic reform is needed to align water use with ecological reality.

Arizona’s Indigenous communities offer a more sustainable model. For centuries, the Hohokam engineered complex canal systems that sustained agriculture in the desert without collapsing the land’s vitality. The O’odham, Hopi, and Diné peoples continue to practice forms of dry farming, seed saving, and rotational planting that respect both the limits and gifts of the land. Their stewardship traditions remain profoundly relevant—and largely unheeded—in today’s extractive paradigm.

Arizona may not be the heart of American agriculture, but it is a harbinger. What’s happening here is a warning to the rest of the country: without intentional conservation, policy reform, and cultural humility, we risk turning our most productive landscapes into irreversible cautionary tales.

Solutions

We are not without tools or hope. Regenerative agriculture offers a powerful alternative, grounded in restoring soil health through techniques like crop rotation, no-till farming, cover cropping, and composting. These aren’t fringe ideas—they’re proven, scalable practices that can rebuild fertility, sequester carbon, and make farms more resilient.

Agroecology and permaculture go even further, integrating ecological systems into farming in ways that align with natural cycles rather than fighting against them. They offer not just sustainability, but adaptability—a critical asset in a climate-uncertain future.

The state also has policy levers it could pull. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), for example, pays farmers to retire environmentally sensitive land from production, but it’s underfunded and underutilized. Smarter zoning laws could protect farmland from sprawl. And a fundamental overhaul of the Farm Bill could reorient subsidies toward regenerative practices instead of simply rewarding output.

Technology, too, has a role to play. Precision agriculture, vertical farming, and AI-powered data modeling can reduce waste and optimize resource use. But technology alone won’t save us. It must be guided by values—by a genuine commitment to land stewardship and long-term thinking.

A moral reckoning

At its core, this is more than an environmental issue. It’s a moral one. We are stewards of the land, not owners of it. The soil we stand on is a gift from past generations—and our legacy to the future. What will we pass on? A thriving foundation for life? Or a barren, exhausted shell?

Food security, national security, climate stability—these all rest on the ground beneath our feet. We must begin to treat arable land as the strategic, irreplaceable asset it is. And we must act with the urgency this moment demands.

The message of The Need to Grow has only grown more urgent in the years since I first saw it. That we still have time to act should not be a cause for complacency, but a mandate for movement. Each of us, whether farmer, policymaker, activist, or consumer, has a role in protecting and regenerating the land that sustains us.

The clock is ticking. But the ground is still there—waiting for us to do right by it.