Biodiversity Emergency

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Teverson on securing this debate on Earth Day. I want to talk about earth, but the sort of earth that is under our feet: the soil.

A healthy soil is full of living things, including microbes, bacteria, amoebas, mycelium and invertebrates. I remember the late Lord Peter Melchett, a great champion of the soil, talking about the soil food chain and saying that moles are to the soil what lions are to the Serengeti. Given that soil is so much the base for a healthy ecosystem, has the situation improved with regard to the number of academics working on soil? If we are to have environmental land management, we will need people to analyse, measure and make sure that the targets and remedies are correct. In 2017, when I asked the Government about the number of soil scientists, there were just five professors in the whole of the UK working on soil science and 25 academic staff in total. Can the Minister tell me what the situation is now? We will need to assess the biology of the soil. If there are so few experts, who is to do so?

Those advising farmers and selling products to them—agronomists and agricultural product retailers—are good on chemical analysis and telling whether the soil is compacted, but they are not so good on soil biology. If we are to transform our terrestrial biodiversity, we must be able to recognise that good soil, in all its richness, is a food source to those higher up the food chain as well as a means of producing food for ourselves.