A short story inspired by Rattan Lal, “Restoring Soil Quality to Mitigate Soil Degradation”, Sustainability (2015)

I. The Question

At twenty-five, at a quarter past one in the morning, sitting on the floor of a rented room in Gaborone with my laptop balanced on a crate, I typed the most honest question I have ever asked a search engine:

How do I restore my depleted Kalahari soil which was not actually depleted, it just sucked from the get-go?

I wasn’t expecting an answer. I was expecting nothing, or a gardening shop trying to sell me a bag of something. I think, really, I was just saying it out loud to the only listener awake at that hour.

Some background, so you understand why a grown man was arguing with the internet.

My nkoko — my grandmother — has a piece of land outside Letlhakeng, on the eastern edge of the Kalahari. Our family have ploughed those masimo, those fields, for as long as anyone remembers. Sorghum, beans, a few melons in a good year. Nkoko is eighty-one now and her knees have retired, even if she hasn’t. That year she called me and said, in the tone she uses for things that are not questions, “Christopher. The lands need you.”

I was working in an office doing data reports for a logistics company. I was good at it and I didn’t care about it, which is a dangerous combination at twenty-five because it feels like the rest of your life. So I said yes. I drove out every weekend that first rainy season with a hired tractor and a head full of plans.

And I failed. Properly failed.

The sorghum came up thin and yellow. The beans sulked. The rain, when it came, didn’t soak in; it sat on the surface for a moment and then vanished into the sand like it had somewhere better to be. Two weeks after a storm the ground was dust again. I dug a hole a metre deep and it was the same pale, loose, orange sand all the way down. No dark layer. No crumbs. Nothing that looked like the soil in the pictures.

My cousin Kabelo, who farms near Molepolole, laughed when I complained. “What did you expect? It’s the Kalahari, monna. It’s a beach without the sea.”

So that was the question. Everybody talks about restoring degraded soil, about getting land back to how it was. But my land was never anything. You can’t restore something to a golden age it never had.

II. The Paper

Somewhere in the results that night was a scientific paper: Restoring Soil Quality to Mitigate Soil Degradation, by Rattan Lal of Ohio State University, published in 2015 in a journal called Sustainability.

My first reaction was irritation. Restoring. There it was again. The paper was written for people whose soil had fallen from grace. Mine had never been anywhere near grace.

But it was free to read and I was already awake, so I read it. And I’m glad, because by four in the morning I had stopped being irritated and started taking notes.

The first thing that stopped me was a number. Lal argued that soil needs a certain amount of organic carbon — the dark, living, decomposed material that gives good soil its colour and its grip — and he put the critical threshold at roughly 1.1 to 1.5 per cent by weight in the root zone. Below that, soil struggles to hold water, hold nutrients, and hold itself together.

I had a soil test from the agricultural office in my bag. I dug it out. Our sand came in at about 0.2 per cent.

Not a little short. Five to seven times short. It was like being told that the healthy weight for your height is seventy kilos when you have been forty kilos since the day you were born.

I sat there and laughed, the tired laugh you do when the universe has confirmed your worst suspicion. My soil really did suck from the get-go. Now I had a peer-reviewed reference for it.

But I kept reading, and two things in that paper changed everything.

III. What Lal Actually Said

The first was a sentence I nearly skimmed past. Lal wrote that the indicators of soil quality differ among soil types, climates and land uses. He gave examples — the intensively farmed plains of India need different measures from the old weathered soils of the semi-arid tropics. Later he said plainly that there are no universally applicable techniques, that every approach has trade-offs, and that the answer has to be site-specific.

Read that again if you’re a farmer on sand. The paper wasn’t telling me my soil was a failure for missing a European or American standard. It was telling me to stop comparing. To work out what good looks like for this soil, in this rain, under this sun, and work towards that.

The second thing was the way he framed the whole problem. He didn’t talk about soil as a fixed object that is either good or bad. He talked about processes. Soil gets better or worse depending on what goes in and what comes out. He described a downward spiral — bare ground, erosion, lost carbon, dying soil life, less growth, less to put back — and an upward spiral, where cover, carbon and life feed each other and the soil gets steadily more able to look after itself.

That’s when the question in my head changed. I had been asking, how do I get my soil back to where it was? That was a dead end, because it had never been anywhere. The better question was: which way is my spiral turning — and how do I make it turn up?

Lal set out three basic strategies. Stop losing what you have. Put in more carbon than you take out, and look after the life in the soil while you’re at it. Strengthen the cycles of water and nutrients. He was blunt that there’s no silver bullet.

Fine, I thought. No silver bullet. But I can count. And I could see straight away that every year I had been doing the opposite of all three.

IV. What I Had Been Doing Wrong

Every spring we ploughed. Of course we did. Everybody ploughs. My grandfather ploughed with oxen and we ploughed with a tractor, and in both cases we turned that sand over and left it bare and hot under a sun that can push the surface past sixty degrees.

Lal is hard on ploughing. He describes how indiscriminate tillage, combined with stripping crop residues off the land and leaving it bare, drives soil downward. On a soil that starts with almost nothing, I was burning through the little carbon it had like paper on a braai.

After harvest, the cattle came in and ate everything down to the ground. Then they wandered the lands all dry season, trampling. Lal has a whole section on rangelands that might as well have had our village’s name on it: overgrazing and trampling reduce plant cover, break down soil structure, cut infiltration, increase runoff and erosion. He cited work from right next door in South Africa showing that when grass cover is lost, soil carbon goes with it.

And here’s the thing I found most painful. Our land wasn’t actually empty when we started each season. I just didn’t know how to see what was there.

V. Learning to See

The next weekend I didn’t take the tractor. I took a notebook and walked the lands with Nkoko, slowly, at her pace, which is the pace of someone who has looked at the same ground for sixty years.

“You want to know where the good soil is?” she said, when I explained what I was trying to do. “I could have told you. You never asked. You young ones ask your telephones.”

She took me first to a corner of the field near the old cattle kraal, abandoned since before I was born. The sorghum there had been taller, greener. I had put it down to luck. “That’s where the cattle slept for twenty years,” she said. “Twenty years of dung. You think that goes away?”

Then she showed me the camel thorn trees — the big old mogotlho standing alone in the lands, which we always ploughed around. Under each one, in the shade, the sand was darker. Leaves and pods had been falling there for a century, and the roots go down tens of metres to water no crop can reach. Each tree was a little island of fertility in a sea of sand.

Then the termite mounds. I’d always thought of them as a nuisance, something to knock flat. Nkoko said the old people used to carry termite soil to their gardens. Lal mentions termites too — alongside earthworms, as builders of soil structure, mixing and binding the ground, and as signs of healthy tropical soil.

And then she bent down, slowly, and touched the surface of the sand where nobody had walked. It was dark, almost black in places, and crunchy, like burnt sugar.

“This skin,” she said. “When you were small, this was everywhere. Now only where the cows don’t go.”

I went home and looked it up. It’s called a biological soil crust: a living layer of cyanobacteria, algae, lichens and mosses, millimetres thick. In drylands like the Kalahari it binds the loose sand against wind, and some of those organisms pull nitrogen from the air into a soil that has almost none. It forms over years. A herd of cattle can break it in an afternoon.

I stood in my rented room in Gaborone and felt ashamed. My soil hadn’t sucked from the get-go. It had been poor, yes. Stingy, honest, harsh. But it had its own systems, its own slow economy of carbon and nitrogen, its own islands of wealth. And every year we’d been ploughing them up, grazing them down, trampling them flat, and then complaining that the land gave us nothing.

There’s a line in Lal’s paper I copied out and stuck above my desk. He wrote that when people are poor, desperate and hungry, they pass on their sufferings to the land. He’s right, and it’s not a judgement on anyone. My grandfather’s generation ploughed and grazed hard because they had to eat this year. But the paper also showed me the way out: stewardship and desperation can’t live in the same place. If you want people to look after land, you have to make looking after land worth their while.

VI. Turning the Spiral

So I made a plan. Not a restoration plan. A building plan. Lal’s three strategies, translated into Kalahari.

Stop losing what we have. No more ploughing the whole field. I marked out rows and only opened the soil where seed would go. I talked to my uncles — this took three long evenings and a lot of tea — and we agreed to keep the cattle off the lands for the growing season and most of the dry season, and to bring them in only briefly, in one part at a time, to graze stubble and leave dung. Lal calls it controlled grazing at appropriate stocking rates. My uncles call it “Christopher’s nonsense,” but they agreed to try it for three years.

Put in more carbon than we take out. This was the big one, because there was so little carbon to start with. I couldn’t afford to cover forty hectares in compost. So I concentrated. I dug planting basins — shallow pits a little wider than a dinner plate, in rows — like the zaï pits farmers use in the Sahel. Into each one went a shovel of old kraal manure, a handful of termite soil, and some charcoal. The charcoal came from the sickle bush and black thorn that have been creeping across the grazing land for years, choking out the grass. Clearing it helps the rangeland, and burning the wood slowly, low on oxygen, gives you biochar. Lal mentions biochar as a carbon-rich amendment that can build soil resilience. I couldn’t prove it would work in our sand. I could prove we had too much bush.

The rest of the cleared bush I chipped and spread between the rows as mulch, so the sun hit dead branches instead of bare sand. Lal is clear about this: keep the ground covered, return the residues, don’t strip the land. After harvest, the sorghum stalks stayed where they fell.

Strengthen water and nutrient cycles. Every basin caught rain. Instead of running across the surface and vanishing, water pooled for a few minutes where the manure and the seed were. I made little half-moon banks on the slight slopes to slow the runoff. I planted cowpeas — dinawa — between the sorghum, because beans feed nitrogen into the soil through their roots. I planted morama, the wild Kalahari bean that has lived here far longer than we have and laughs at drought. And I stopped ploughing around the camel thorns and started planting young ones, because a tree is just a slow, patient fertility pump.

None of it was glamorous. Most of it was digging. In that first year I lost four kilos and the skin off both palms.

VII. Small Numbers

Here is what I want you to understand about building soil in the Kalahari: the numbers are small, and the small numbers are everything.

In the first season, the basins worked and the rest of the field didn’t. Sorghum in the basins came up dark green and twice as tall as anything outside them. Kabelo drove over to see and stood there with his hands on his hips for a long time before he said, “Hm.”

In the second season, the crust started coming back on the edges of the rows where nobody walked. Thin patches. Dark specks. I photographed them like a proud father.

In the third season, I had the soil tested again. The open sand between rows was the same, about 0.2 per cent organic carbon. But the basins — the ones that had been fed three years running — had roughly doubled.

Doubled from 0.2 to around 0.4. Still nowhere near Lal’s threshold. Somebody from Iowa would look at those figures and feel sorry for me. But I knew what they meant. They meant the spiral had turned. Not everywhere, not quickly, but in hundreds of little circles across Nkoko’s land, the soil was holding more water, feeding more life, growing more plants, putting more carbon back. Each basin was a tiny upward spiral.

And Lal’s paper had taught me the most important thing about spirals: once they get going, they feed themselves.

That was the year I stopped thinking of my soil as a problem I’d inherited, and started thinking of it as a long-term investment that compounds — and it was the year I knew I couldn’t go back to the office.

VIII. Why This Is Bigger Than My Nkoko’s Field

I’m not the only person with this problem. Not even close.

Huge areas of southern Africa sit on deep sand like ours. Lal points out that sub-Saharan Africa has some of the most degraded soils on earth, in a harsh climate with fragile soils, and that degradation there is shrinking a finite resource faster than almost anywhere. He also makes a point that I think about every day: simply adding chemical fertiliser or improved seed is not enough, even though it’s what well-meaning advice often recommends. Without organic carbon, fertiliser on our sand just washes straight through and past the roots.

What happens to soil here doesn’t stay in the soil. When the land fails, young people leave for the city — I was one of them. When the cattle have nothing to eat, families sell them in a drought for nothing. When the grass goes, the dust rises, the bush moves in, and the rain that does fall runs off instead of soaking in. Climate change makes the dry spells longer and the storms harder. People talk about the polycrisis — all these problems tangled together — and from where I stand, a lot of the knots are tied in the top thirty centimetres of the Kalahari.

Which means that a lot of them can be loosened there too.

IX. The Decision

I’m twenty-eight now. I’ve just finished the first year of a master’s in soil and land management at the agricultural university in Gaborone. My dissertation is on planting basins and bush-derived biochar in Kalahari sands, and Nkoko’s land is one of my trial sites, which she finds hilarious. “My grandson the professor,” she tells the neighbours, “who learned about dung from me.”

She’s right. Half of what I know, she knew. The other half came from a paper by a man in Ohio who has never seen Letlhakeng and was writing about soils on the other side of the world. The most useful thing I’ve done is put those two kinds of knowledge in the same room.

What I want to do with my life is simple to say and hard to do: help farmers on poor sands build soil they never had. Not restore. Build. Work with the extension officers, the cattle owners, the women who run most of the masimo and get the least credit for it. Test what works field by field, because Lal is right that there’s no silver bullet and the answer is always site-specific. And find ways to make stewardship pay, so that nobody has to choose between feeding their family this year and keeping their land alive for the next.

X. To Anyone Holding Bad Soil

So if you’re out there at a quarter past one in the morning, typing your own version of my question — if you’ve been handed something that was never good to begin with, whether it’s land or a job or a place or a start in life — here’s what I learned.

Stop asking how to get back to a golden age you never had. Ask which way your spiral is turning.

Look properly at what you’ve got before you plough it under. There are islands of fertility in every bad field: an old kraal, a tree, a termite mound, an old woman who has been watching the ground for sixty years and is waiting for you to ask.

Concentrate your effort. You can’t fix forty hectares at once. You can fix one basin. Then another. Then a thousand.

Measure honestly, and celebrate small numbers. Going from 0.2 to 0.4 is not failure because it isn’t 1.5. It’s the spiral turning.

And be patient. The Kalahari doesn’t hurry for anyone. But it does keep score — and when you start putting back more than you take, it notices.

My soil didn’t suck from the get-go. It was waiting for someone to stop taking from it and start building it up.

Pula. Let it rain.