Johan Jörgensen is a writer, food systems thinker, founder of Sweden FoodTech, and the author of the new book, Flat Earth Food, from which this excerpt is adapted.
There is a field in the American Midwest – you can find its equivalent in the Ukrainian steppe, the North China Plain, the agricultural heartlands of northern Europe – that has been farmed intensively for eighty years. Its organic matter content has declined from perhaps 5% to less than 1%. Its earthworm population has collapsed. Its mycorrhizal network has been severed. It produces approximately the same yield of commodity grain as it did twenty years ago, maintained by increasing chemical inputs.
Fifty kilometres away, there is a field managed differently – diverse rotations, animals returned to the land, margins and hedgerows maintained. Its organic matter content is 4%. Its mycorrhizal network connects the roots of its crops to the soil ecosystem in a continuous, functional relationship. Its water infiltration rate is three times higher. It requires a fraction of the chemical inputs. In a drought year, it significantly outyields the degraded field.
On the agricultural land market, these two fields are priced within a few percent of each other.
This is not a minor valuation error. It is a categorical accounting failure. Healthy soil is almost certainly the most undervalued asset on Earth.
The replacement cost argument
Natural capital accounting captures the annual service flows from living soils – nutrient cycling, water filtration, carbon sequestration, flood regulation, erosion control, the biological suppression of crop disease and pests. For agricultural soils specifically, these services are estimated at $3.5-5T annually. Large as the figure is, soil is still radically undervalued. The accounting is not wrong. It is incomplete.
What would it cost to replace, through industrial technology, what living soil currently provides for free? Synthetic fertiliser to replace biological nutrient cycling: a $200B market annually, with enormous fossil fuel usage attached. Industrial water treatment to replace biological filtration: $700B annually. The global pesticide market: approximately $100B annually. But the honest answer is that we cannot fully replace these services at any price. We can buy partial substitutes. We cannot buy back the system.
Intensive agriculture systematically draws down one of its most fundamental assets: soil organic matter. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, we lose approximately 75 billion tonnes of soil every year due to degradation. When valued through the lens of climate alone, the soil carbon lost since the Green Revolution corresponds to tens of trillions of dollars. When replacement costs, productivity losses, and degraded ecosystem services are added, the cumulative value of lost soil function plausibly reaches $100-250T globally. This is what has already been destroyed – not an annual flow figure, but a cumulative stock loss.
What makes soil degradation particularly difficult to perceive is that it is a problem of core assets expressed through annual flows. Annual yields may remain stable or even increase, giving the impression of system health. But beneath this apparent stability, the underlying asset base is being eroded. The system appears productive in the short term while becoming progressively more fragile, more dependent on inputs, more exposed to shocks, and less capable of self-regulation.
What kind of system is soil?
Natural capital accounting treats soil as an asset that provides separable services. This is a useful simplification, but it is a simplification. Soil is a complex adaptive system – a web of relationships between organisms, minerals, water, and atmosphere whose productive properties emerge from the interactions between its parts rather than from the parts themselves. Understanding this changes what the economics of soil looks like.
Soil systems have thresholds. Above them, the soil’s biological community maintains its own fertility, regulates its own moisture, suppresses its own pathogens. Below them, these regulatory functions break down simultaneously – not gradually but abruptly. The cost of the last fraction of degradation may be the entire system. Marginal analysis systematically underestimates this risk.
A 4% organic matter soil does not produce twice the value of a 2% soil. It produces substantially more, because the ecological relationships that become possible at 4% are qualitatively different from those possible at two. Soil organic matter feeds the soil microbiome. The soil microbiome generates the chemical diversity that feeds plant secondary metabolism. Plant secondary metabolism feeds the broader food web that returns nutrients and organic matter to the soil. The productive capacity of the system exceeds the sum of its components because the components are in relationship with each other in ways that generate genuinely new productive possibilities.
The two fields at the opening of this essay may look similar today – same yield, roughly the same price. One is an appreciating, self-improving investment. The other is a depreciating liability being held together by continuous external expenditure.
Soil as a biological interface
Replacement costs, carbon losses, the hundreds of trillions in cumulative degradation – these are natural capital figures. They are what you find when you ask what soil does and what it would cost to replace. They are important and they are large. But they systematically miss the most important dimension of soil value: they enumerate what soil produces, not what soil is.
Soil is not primarily a production system. It is an interface – the primary biological interface between the living world and the human body. And the value of that interface is not captured by any replacement cost calculation, because there is no replacement for it.
The chronic disease burden of modern populations – the diet-related cardiovascular disease, the metabolic syndrome, the autoimmune conditions, the inflammatory disorders – runs to tens of trillions of dollars annually in welfare costs across developed economies. These are the costs of a broken immune interface, the accumulated downstream consequences of human immune systems not receiving the ecological inputs they evolved to require. Where do those inputs originate? Primarily in soil. The organisms whose presence calibrates the human immune system are soil-dwelling microorganisms that enter the body through food grown in living soil, through direct contact with soil in agricultural and natural environments, and through the microbial communities of traditionally fermented foods that themselves originate in soil-linked biological communities.
If even 30% of the immune-mediated chronic disease burden is attributable to soil biological impoverishment – a conservative estimate given the converging lines of evidence – the annual economic value of soil’s immune interface service runs to seven to $11T per year. This is the value of what healthy soil does for human health through one biological pathway alone. It does not appear in any soil valuation. It does not appear in the natural capital figures. It does not appear in the Dasgupta Review. It is a complexity service that natural capital accounting was not designed to see.
The library beneath our feet
There is a second complexity value that natural capital accounting also misses: the option value of the secondary metabolite library that biologically complex soils generate. Plants produce secondary metabolites – polyphenols, flavonoids, alkaloids, terpenes, carotenoids – as signals, defences, and attractants within the ecological community of the soil and the plant’s immediate environment. These are not produced only by plants but by fungi, bacteria, and the full web of soil organisms. A plant responds to a specific soil fungal pathogen with a specific alkaloid. It responds to a specific mycorrhizal partner with a specific flavonoid that deepens the symbiosis. Each of these responses is a finely evolved biochemical solution to a specific ecological problem, refined across millions of years of co-evolution between the plant and its soil community.
What human pharmacology has discovered, repeatedly, is that these biochemical solutions to ecological problems also solve biological problems in human bodies. The polyphenol that the plant produces to signal its mycorrhizal partner turns out to regulate inflammatory pathways in human immune cells. The alkaloid that defends against a soil pathogen turns out to inhibit the growth of human cancer cells by a related mechanism. This is not a coincidence. Human biology and soil ecology share a deep evolutionary history.
Plants provide more than two hundred thousand distinct secondary metabolites, of which fewer than 10% have been characterised, and a fraction of 1% have been screened for pharmaceutical activity. The currently documented pharmaceutical value of soil-derived and plant-derived compounds is roughly $300-500B annually. A conservative estimate that the screened fraction represents 5% of the accessible library implies a total pharmacological option value 10 to 20 times the documented figure: $3-10T annually.
Here is the part the genetic libraries cannot capture. The archive is the relationship, not the components. Preserve the ecology – maintain the living soil community in which plants and microorganisms have been co-evolving their biochemical dialogue across geological timescales – and the library continues to generate new solutions. Destroy it, and no amount of genetic sequencing or compound banking recovers what was lost. You can sequence the genome of a soil bacterium. You cannot sequence the relationship between that bacterium and the plant root it has been signalling for ten thousand years.
What the market cannot see
There are approximately 1.5 billion hectares of degraded agricultural land globally – land once productive and biologically complex, reduced by industrial farming to simplified, low-fertility conditions. This is an area larger than the entire land surface of Russia. It is currently generating a fraction of its biological potential, maintained artificially through external inputs that substitute for the ecological functions it once performed for free.
Restoring it to meaningful biological complexity – rebuilding the organic matter, the mycorrhizal networks, the microbial communities – would unlock value across a land area whose restoration potential dwarfs any other available intervention. The obstacle is not biological. The soil’s capacity for recovery is well-documented. The obstacle is a coordination problem: the costs fall on farmers, and the benefits accrue to communities whose water is filtered by healthy soil, to children whose immune systems are calibrated by exposure to microbial diversity, to health systems whose chronic disease burdens are reduced, to insurance companies whose flood and drought claims are lowered, to the climate system that benefits from carbon sequestration. No existing institutional mechanism routes those distributed benefits back to the people who would do the work.
The two fields at the beginning of this essay are priced within a few percent of each other. When the full complexity economics of soil is understood – the non-linearity of degradation, the path dependency of restoration, the emergent productivity of biological systems, the immune interface service, the metabolomic premium, the secondary metabolite option value, and the irreversibility of what is lost – the gap in their true value is not a few percent.
It is, conservatively, an order of magnitude.
The land market is not mispricing soil by a small amount. It is failing to see it almost entirely.
Flat Earth Food: A Copernican Shift in How We Grow, Eat and Heal by Johan Jörgensen (Pedon Press) is available now.
.webp&w=280&h=180)
