The Responsibilities Series – Episode One: Soil Health
Soil is the basis of all terrestrial life, yet it’s one of the least understood biospheres on planet Earth. While vignerons have always known the value of the floor beneath our feet, they have not been able to access the best scientific understanding of it, for the simple reason that soil has been a largely unknown quantity to science itself, until recently.
That’s why ARENI chose to discuss soil health for the first episode of our Responsibility Series, where we explore the specific responsibilities of those who work with fine wine. We believe that fine wine can no longer be defined solely by its taste or its complexity, but also by its leadership, values and ethos. And if fine wine sits at the top of the pyramid, we need to reflect on the individual and collective responsibilities of sitting at the top.
This very special series has been possible thanks to the support of Moët Hennessy and their program Living Soils, Living Together.
The hosts of this podcast are Pauline Vicard, CEO, and Felicity Carter, Editorial Director.
What follows is a condensed transcript of the podcast. Listen to the whole episode below. This podcast is an independent production, our partners do not influence our content. The views expressed on that podcast are our own.
Felicity Carter:
Why are we doing this podcast right this moment, Pauline? Tell us why this moment is crucial.
Pauline Vicard:
Soil health has always been important. But on the 7th June, the European Commission has planned to release the first draft of their new directive on soil health, and they’re hoping to bind all the member states with new measures. The last time I was in Brussels, they were still discussing about what’s going to be in that directive. We don’t really know if it’s really going to be published on the 7th June. They’re working very hard towards that. But the end goal for some people could be to give soil the same status as oceans and air.
Felicity Carter:
This isn’t the first time the European Commission has tried to legislate on soil health, but it never happens. Why is that?
Pauline Vicard:
The difference between oceans and air is that nobody owns the oceans, nobody owns the air. But there’s rarely a piece of soil anywhere which is not owned by anyone. Soil is the foundation of private property, but it’s also the foundation of sovereignty and nations and countries. It’s a highly emotional and very political topic to be talking about. So that’s the first thing.
And you’re right, the Commission already wanted to legislate around soil health around ten years ago and member states killed the idea of having a directive because, apparently, they were not ready for that mindset to consider soil something else than private property. What is changing now is Brussels seems to be really determined to make that happen.
The difference between oceans and air is that nobody owns the oceans, nobody owns the air. But there’s rarely a piece of soil anywhere which is not owned by anyone. Soil is the foundation of private property, but it’s also the foundation of sovereignty and nations and countries. It’s a highly emotional and very political topic to be talking about.
Pauline Vicard
Felicity Carter:
We’ll talk about concrete actions later in the episode, but I’m interested to know more about what’s happening in Brussels now. Pauline, you were in Brussels quite recently. What did you hear?
Pauline Vicard:
I’ve had the privilege from time to time to be invited at the Commission and follow some of the work they’re doing on soil health. I was there was on the 26th of April. The European Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius, welcomed us that day and I think it’s a good example. It shows how much the Commission is ready to do something about soil. So let’s hear what he has to say.
Virginijus Sinkevičius:
A healthy soil is filled with life. It’s full of nutrients, water and organic matter. It’s not full of artificial fertilisers or contaminated by pesticides. All great soils are unique and they need strong protection. They are your natural capital and they are also a finite natural resource. If the soil is degraded in Champagne or Burgundy, the impact will be direct. Across the EU, between 60% and 70% of our soils are less than healthy. That means that the whole agri-food system needs radical change. We need to prioritise the living capacity of our soils. And right now it’s not happening by itself. That’s why we need the soil health law. It comes with a long term vision of healthy soils and their ecosystems; by the middle of the century, by the year 2050, protection, sustainable management and restoration of soil should become the norm. Agro-ecological and regenerative principles are good for the soil, but they are also good for business. Moët is setting a good example with herbicide-free Champagne and investments in research on sustainable viticulture.
Across the EU, between 60% and 70% of our soils are less than healthy. That means that the whole agri-food system needs radical change. We need to prioritise the living capacity of our soils. And right now it’s not happening by itself. That’s why we need the soil health law.
Virginijus Sinkevičius, European Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries
Right now we are finalising the legal proposal to strengthen protections for soil. We hope to adopt the proposal for the new soil health law in June. We are still fine-tuning the details, but it will set new standards to define and monitor the health of our soils. We will be asking member states to identify and remediate contaminated sites. It’s time to restore unhealthy soils.
Pauline Vicard:
What the Commissioner was saying is that between 60% and 70% of the European soil are in an unhealthy position. And so, of course, that threatens our capacity to feed ourselves and to produce food; they estimate that because of the degradation of the agricultural land, that will lead to productivity losses of 400 billion euros per year and an expected food price increase of 30% by 2035. So there are really heavy consequences to be faced if we’re not doing anything about soil. I know that viticulture is not per se responsible for producing food, but there are some very, very typical problems with regards to soil health in wine regions. I mean, we talk a lot about copper pollution, but this is something really important and really visible.
Felicity Carter:
Pauline, can you drill down a bit into why soils are in such a bad condition?
Pauline Vicard:
There are a couple of culprits or practices that are not good for soil health. The first one is industry. It has nothing to do with agriculture, but it’s the big industries putting chemicals back in the soil and not treating their waste and things like that. There’s urbanisation and what they call ‘soil lock’ a soil that can’t live and can’t be alive because there’s something built on it.
If you’ve got a locked soil, this cannot be used either to produce food or either to capture carbon. That can also cause more damage, with the incapacity of soils to react to climate change and floods. And of course agriculture has its role as well and has impacted soil quality as well. Tilling is one of those practices that has been challenged over the last maybe five years.
Felicity Carter:
That’s one of the most contentious issues in soil, because one of the things that stops tilling is herbicides. But herbicides are something that we have an interest in getting rid of as well. So it’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Pauline Vicard:
Those are the questions that are very difficult to answer, because soils are so complex.
When when we were at the World Living Soils Forum, I was talking with microbiologist Diana Wall, and she was saying we only know approximately about 40% of the biodiversity that lives underground. And when you don’t know about something, it’s difficult to protect it.
Felicity Carter:
And not only that, but the bits that we do know about, we’ve done our best to get rid of. Like nematodes.
Pauline Vicard:
One of the things is the lack of data. So Luca Montanarella, who’s the expert that did the Soil Atlas of Europe, explains it really well. It’s very hard to build soil maps of Europe because all European countries have a different way of assessing soil health. They don’t have the same data. And so it’s hard to know what the state of soils are.
There’s something that struck me as well in viticulture is that I think we’ve confused soil quality and soil health. When you talk to viticulturists, no one is going to tell you they don’t care about soil. But usually they are more interested in soil quality. And it’s slightly different. Every fine wine property will have done research about the composition of the soil. But all the data is to determine what the quality of the soils are and not what the health of the soil is.
In viticulture, we’ve confused soil quality and soil health. […] And it’s slightly different. Every fine wine property will have done research about the composition of the soil. But all the data is to determine what the quality of the soils are and not what the health of the soil is.
Pauline Vicard
Felicity Carter:
I think this touched on a point which has been a problem in the environmental movement generally, which is that you can only convince people to be interested in the environment if you show them how it’s going to affect them. It’s a transactional view of nature.
Pauline Vicard:
We’ve also had that literature about the vine needs to suffer, and you need really poor soil. But a really poor soil doesn’t mean unhealthy soil. We’ve been talking about soil quality for years, but not really a lot of people have been talking about soil health, even in viticulture.
Felicity Carter:
What is a healthy soil?
Pauline Vicard:
When I was doing some research about how to define a healthy soil, I ended up understanding that the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) has just released their definition of what a healthy soil is in 2020. So again, that shows how new and how recent the conversation about soils are.
What they came up with is the ability of the soil to sustain the productivity, diversity and environmental services of terrestrial ecosystems. And so another definition that I’ve found is the USDA one. So the US Department of Agriculture is: “Soil health is defined as the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustain plants, animals and human”. I like this one also because it’s a bit less human centric. So, you know, soil is not just here to produce food for us, but this idea of continued capacity. If you talk about terrestrial ecosystems or as a vital living ecosystem, there’s also this notion of the soils being able to sequester carbon and maybe help with climate change. I think sometimes people put a bit too much hope in this. Agriculture might not be able to change the world and to be the unique solution. But this is surely something that we can do to contribute.
Felicity Carter:
What are some of the challenges that arise when talking about soil health? We’ve touched on some of them. One, that people don’t understand what it actually is or does. What are some of the other challenges?
Pauline Vicard:
The lack of a common reference system; to have a directive or a law around soil, you need to have something as a common reference system. And it’s hard because as we know in wine, there’s extreme complexity in the nature of soil. So they can vary enormously and the characteristics of the soil can change across the landscape, but also with depth.
A challenge in terms of soil health is the lack of legislation, but when there are directives and legislations, they are not applied or they are not respected. Faustine Bas-Defossez, who’s the director for Nature, Health and Environment at the European Environmental Bureau was saying that there’s also a misuse of EU subsidies.
Faustine Bas-Defossez:
The main drivers in agriculture of soil pollution and degradation comes from unsustainable practices like intensive farming, tilling, overgrazing, mono-cropping, excessive fertilization with water used for irrigation, plastic materials, etcetera. But the big question here is why? We know how important the soil is, yet we are aware of the dramatic state of the soil. Why these practices go on — that’s the big question.
There are several reasons, and I would highlight a few here for the debate. First of all, we have a lack of implementation and enforcement of existing legislation. The Nitrates Directive, which is not being enforced as it should be, the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive, which is not implemented at a national level as it should be, also, the Water Directive Habitats Directive and the list goes on. Another one is the misuse of existing subsidies. We have analysed the CAP strategic plans. We have analysed 17 CAP strategic plans, and member states are not using the tools that are there to help farmers to transition to sustainable farming. It’s still maintaining business as usual.
Felicity Carter:
A couple of things spring to mind listening to that. One is how top down it is. Europe has got all these directives that it wants to implement, but in some of the implementation we’ve seen in the last year or so, it’s actually led to social disruption. If you look at the Netherlands, farmers have been protesting about being asked to reduce the nitrates in the soil because it means that they have less income, less farming and so on.
When you were in Brussels, how much did you hear people talking about working at a community level and how much did you hear that kind of talk of ‘let’s impose legislation and enforce it?’
Pauline Vicard:
A lot, actually. But when it comes to sustainability and new agricultural practice, there are a lot of things — you know this in wine — already happening, and there are loads of private and collective initiatives. It seems that there’s almost a link missing with everyone in Brussels and everyone at the field level, because it would be totally unfair to say that the agricultural community hasn’t done anything or was waiting for a regulation to actually act on something. Because if there is a class of people that actually understand climate change better than others, those are the farmers and the viticulturists because they can see that happen.
I need to recap how Brussel works because sometimes I feel that because people don’t really understand how that works, then we don’t really use all the opportunities. First of all, what they are working on is not a law, it’s a directive, meaning that the Member States will be able to use that directive as they want. It’s not like a law, it’s a directive that gives them a frame for action.
Felicity Carter:
Let’s go back to the Commission. What is it that they are working on at the moment?
Pauline Vicard:
They have a very, very ambitious plan, the European Green Deal, and they want to reduce CO2 emissions by 55% by 2030, which is tomorrow, and to be carbon neutral by 2050. But it’s widely admitted that we are very late on those objectives. My understanding is for soil health, the actions are organised around four levers of change. So they want to increase knowledge and data on soil, and I think that’s something that we can easily do at our level. You know, when we do tourism, when we host people at the winery, just explain how soils are important for the production of food. We know loads of wineries that already do that.
They are launching a series of Living Labs, which is a collaboration between private companies, the state, and research. There will be funding, and so if you’ve got an idea and you want to test carbon capture, or anything that can improve the soil health, there will be European funding for this. The third axis is to measure and monitor soil health. The directive gave us KPIs and indicators that can be used across Europe. How can we know if we’re going on the right direction with soil health and raise awareness and soil literacy of the general public?
Felicity Carter:
So on that last one — raising awareness and soil literacy of the general public. And also going back to your point earlier about the fact that fine wine people are acutely conscious of soil. What can they do that they’re not already doing?
Pauline Vicard:
First of all, there’s always more that you can learn about soil. There’s a lot of research being done. In terms of viticulture, there’s the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation launched two years ago, I think, with Justin Howard-Sneyd MW and Stephen Cronk in the UK. We’ve done a couple of podcasts on the matter of soil health and the future of viticulture with Antonio Graca from Sogrape in Portugal, or Mimi Casteel in the US on regenerative agriculture. I’ll put all the links in this transcript.
Europe is still a very big source of influence and inspiration for other big blocks when it comes to writing laws. If we end up with a very ambitious directive for soil health in Europe, that will impact other countries as well. So even if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re not in Europe, it’s really interesting to follow what’s going to happen in Europe in the next couple of months because there’s likely going to be an influence in your part of the world in a couple of years. If you are in Europe, contact your government representative, your general body; have your voice heard on this on this particular topic.
Europe is still a very big source of influence and inspiration for other big blocks when it comes to writing laws. If we end up with a very ambitious directive for soil health in Europe, that will impact other countries as well.
Pauline Vicard
Felicity Carter:
If we’ve already got regulations or directives that are not being applied, do we need another one?
Pauline Vicard:
Again, my understanding is that it’s not going to be a law. It’s going to be a directive. So it’s slightly different in the way it’s going to be implemented. And my understanding is what they want to achieve first is a common reference system; we can’t really be that ambitious at the moment because we still lack data. We need to measure soil health more. We need to be more aware of what’s happening before binding people with, “you can’t do this anymore…”, because, of course they don’t know what’s happening in the soils.
You know, as the daughter of a farmer, I’m inclined to think that Brussels is totally useless because that’s how I grew up. But listening to all the representatives in Brussels, I think we sometimes don’t realise that those legislations, those regulations, they help to accelerate things. We can listen to what Sandrine Sommer says about it. So Sandrine is the Chief Sustainability Officer for Moët Hennessy, and she has her opinion on why we need more regulation.
Sandrine Sommer:
Our sourcing represents 20% of our needs. So we need to involve our partners. And to do that, we absolutely need this framework, this ambitious law. To scale up the different initiatives we absolutely need to have our partners. And for sure this law would help us to go faster and we need to go faster just to come back… As we mentioned, we have a specificity on different terroirs. Even in France, for example, it’s not the same when we’re in Champagne, when you are in the south of France, or when you are in Cognac. So it’s very, very important to remind people that we have to have specificity to adapt.
Pauline Vicard:
As Sandrine said there are very big expectations for that directive. You know, not just Moët Hennessy, but there were loads of different people represented in that room and they all agree that we need more regulation. And so the big expectation is that we agree on KPIs and common agreements on what to measure, that we’ve got global binding targets, but with space for local specificities.
Felicity Carter
So speaking as an individual who’s on this podcast from a town covered in concrete, I don’t have very much contact with soil in my day to day life because I live in an urban environment. What can somebody like me do about soil health?
Pauline Vicard:
That’s an easy answer because you have your voice in the wine world: talking more about soil health and advocating for soil health. The more we know about soil, the more we are aware. Then you can also sign the Soil Manifesto, an initiative by the European Commission, again, to show that people care about soil.
You know, you were talking about top down for Brussels, but actually Brussels, like every legislative system, reflects what society is at one moment and they have to legislate around what society is or what society wants to become. And if you have a project and you need funding, you can go to the Living Labs website and see if you can apply for money.
Felicity Carter:
Any final thoughts on dirt?
Pauline Vicard:
We have to move on from that idea of soil just being dirt, but actually realising there’s enormous, amazing life under our feet and that life supports our life.
Felicity Carter:
All right. And on that note, soil is not dirt.
In the Same Series:
Additional Resources on Soil Health:
- 12 Conversations: Different Ways of Looking at Sustainability
- Unlocking the Secrets of Soil: 5 Eye-Opening Discoveries from the World Living Soils Forum
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