April 7th is recognised globally as World Health Day drawing our attention to human health and wellbeing. The theme for World Health Day in 2022 is ‘Our Planet, Our Health’ drawing on the link between human health and environmental health. The World Health Organisation, the organising body of World Health Day, has clearly indicated that many of the serious global health issues, including Covid-19 are due to avoidable environmental causes.
Human health and environmental health are closely related in many ways. BiobiN South Africa is using this opportunity to highlight soil health and conservation as a key environmental concern that impacts human health.
Healthy soils are productive soils, having the ability to produce a healthy crop plant and better-quality end product with a higher nutritional value. South Africa’s soils are under severe strain to produce enough crop to feed our population. Our 12% of remaining fertile needs to be carefully managed and soils that are used for agricultural production should follow some form of restoration to retain its ability to produce health food.
So, what soil restoration initiatives should the agricultural sector be implementing to keep up productivity. Our food and organic waste is the greatest opportunity to help our soil health. More attention has been placed on this waste stream to produce high grade organic compost that significantly improves soil health. Adding compost to a soil body, increases its carbon content, facilitates beneficial biological activity, and improves water retention.
Closing the loop with food and organic waste gives us the opportunity to improve soil health for a productive and healthy food system.
At BiobiN we have seem many of our retail clients process large volumes of organic waste into compost which is then donated to a community food garden project.