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

I. The Plot

The first thing my grandad ever taught me about soil was that you could listen to it.

I was seven. We were on his allotment at Meersbrook, the one halfway up the hill where you can see the whole of Sheffield laid out below you like somebody’s dropped it — the tower blocks, the old works chimneys, the Park Hill flats painted in their bright new colours, the trams sliding along the valley floor. He handed me a fork and told me to push it in slowly and pay attention to the sound.

“Hear that?” he said. It was a soft, crumbly sort of noise, like biting into a biscuit. “That’s good earth. That’s alive.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was seven, and I wanted to find worms.

Eleven years later I was standing on the same plot with the same fork, and the ground didn’t make that sound any more. It made a dull, flat thud, like stamping on a car park. The fork went in about four inches and stopped. When I levered it up, the soil came away in a grey slab, smooth on the bottom where the tines had polished it. No worms. No smell, even — and good soil has a smell, a dark, sweet, after-rain smell that I hadn’t realised I’d been missing until I knelt down and couldn’t find it.

Grandad had died in the February. He was eighty-three, and he’d been poorly for a couple of years before that, which meant the plot had been let go — first the edges, then the beds, then everything. The allotment society wrote to my mum asking whether the family wanted to keep the tenancy or give it up. There was a waiting list as long as your arm. Mum said she didn’t have the time. My uncle said he didn’t have the knees.

I said I’d do it. I was eighteen, working thirty hours a week at a coffee place on Division Street, and I’d dropped out of a business course after one term because I couldn’t see the point of any of it. I didn’t know the first thing about growing food. But I couldn’t stand the thought of a stranger digging up Grandad’s rhubarb, and I think, if I’m honest, I needed somewhere to be that wasn’t my bedroom or behind a till.

So in April I went up there with a borrowed fork and a lot of good intentions, and the ground went thud.

II. What Went Wrong

I did what anyone my age does. I looked it up on my phone.

I typed “allotment soil hard grey no worms” and got a hundred forums full of people arguing about clay. Somewhere around one in the morning I ended up on a page of search results for “soil degradation”, and one of them was a scientific paper.

It was called Restoring Soil Quality to Mitigate Soil Degradation, by a man named Rattan Lal, from Ohio State University, published in 2015. I nearly didn’t open it. Scientific papers, in my head, were things written by people in white coats for other people in white coats. But it was free to read, and I was awake anyway, and the title had the word restoring in it, which was what I wanted to do.

I didn’t understand all of it. But some parts of it went into me like the fork should have gone into the ground.

He wrote that soil is non-renewable on a human timescale. I had to read that twice. I’d always thought of soil as the most ordinary, endless stuff in the world — it’s just dirt, it’s everywhere, it’s what you wipe off your shoes. But the paper explained that it takes so long to form that, for us, within our lifetimes, once it’s gone, it’s gone. Something you inherit, and either pass on or spend.

Then there was a figure about how much was already spent. Around a third of the earth’s land surface, the paper said, is affected by some kind of soil degradation. One estimate he cited suggested soil’s ecosystem services — growing food, filtering water, holding carbon, all the quiet work soil does that nobody pays for — had fallen by sixty per cent between 1950 and 2010.

Sixty per cent. In sixty years. Roughly my grandad’s adult life.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone glowing in my hand, and I thought about that grey slab on the end of the fork, and I thought: it’s not just us. It’s not just his plot. It’s everywhere.

III. The Downward Spiral

The bit that really got me was a diagram. Lal called it a downward spiral.

The idea was simple enough even for me at one in the morning. You plough the ground too much, or leave it bare, or take everything off it and put nothing back. The soil loses its organic carbon — the dark, rich stuff made from rotted roots and leaves and dead microbes. Without that carbon, the soil can’t hold itself together, so it crusts and compacts. Water can’t get in, so it runs off the top, taking the best soil with it. The little life down there — the worms, the fungi, the bacteria — starves. The ground grows less, so there’s less to put back. Less going back means less carbon. Less carbon means more compaction. Round and round, and down and down.

And here’s the part that made the hairs on my arms stand up: the paper said that once degradation gets going, it feeds on itself. It speeds up. It doesn’t just sit there being bad — it gets worse on its own.

I looked at Grandad’s plot in my head and I could see it, the whole spiral. Two years of nobody tending it. Weeds that came and died back and got pulled out in a hurry by my uncle one autumn and thrown on the tip instead of on the compost. Bare ground through two winters. Sheffield rain — and anybody who lives here knows about Sheffield rain — hammering on soil with nothing to protect it. The beds Grandad had built up over forty years, gone grey in two.

I’d always heard climate change, floods, food prices and wars talked about as separate disasters. That diagram joined them up. The paper pointed out that degraded soil can stop being a store for carbon and start releasing it instead — turning from part of the solution into part of the problem. It talked about polluted rivers, people’s health, the economy.

Later I learned there’s a word for that — for lots of crises that tangle together and make each other worse. People call it the polycrisis. At the time I just thought: it’s all one thing. And the thing is under our feet.

IV. The Floods

I was too young to remember the big Sheffield floods in 2007, but I grew up on the stories — the Don bursting its banks, Meadowhall underwater, water pouring off the hills down streets like rivers.

After reading the paper, I started asking a question I’d never asked before: where does the water come from?

Obviously it comes from the sky. But it doesn’t fall straight into the river. It lands on the hills first — on the moors, on farmland, on gardens and allotments. And what happens next depends on the ground it lands on. Lal wrote about the soil-water nexus, about how healthy soil lets water soak in and filters it, and how degraded soil sends it sheeting off the top. Healthy ground is a sponge. Dead ground is a roof.

That spring I took the train out to Edale and walked up onto Kinder. Up on the plateau there are these great black gullies where the peat has been stripped away, deep scars with bare, dark walls, where two centuries of industrial soot — Sheffield’s included — killed the moss that held everything together, and fire and weather did the rest. And then, in other places, there were patches of green: little tufts of sphagnum and cotton grass, where people had been out restoring it, blocking the gullies, spreading cut heather, planting moss by hand.

I stood up there in the wind with my hood up and I realised I was looking at both of Lal’s spirals at once. The black gullies were the downward one. The green patches were the other one.

Because that was the bit of the paper that had kept me awake until three, not one: there was an upward spiral too.

V. The Upward Spiral

Lal didn’t stop at the bad news. He laid out the whole downward spiral, and then he laid out how to turn it round.

He said the degradation could be reversed. Not easily, and not with one magic trick — he was blunt that there’s no silver bullet, and that every place needs its own answer depending on its soil, climate, people and money. But the basic recipe was there, and when I boiled it down it was something I could actually understand.

Stop losing soil. Keep the ground covered so rain and wind can’t strip it.

Put more carbon in than you take out. Feed the soil with living roots and dead plant matter and compost and manure, so the organic matter builds back up. He gave a number for it — a threshold of around one to one and a half per cent organic carbon, below which soil struggles and above which it can start to heal itself. I liked that there was a number. It meant there was a line you could get back over.

Look after the life underground. The worms and fungi and bacteria do the actual work of building structure, gluing tiny particles of soil into crumbs, opening up the little channels that let air and water in.

And stop disturbing it so much. Stop ripping it open every year.

He described the practices that do all this, which together get called conservation agriculture: leaving crop residue on the surface as mulch, growing cover crops instead of leaving ground bare, mixing organic and mineral fertilisers sensibly, and cutting out ploughing. Do those things together, properly, and you start an upward spiral. More carbon means better structure. Better structure means water soaks in. Water soaking in means more growth. More growth means more carbon going back. Round and round, and up and up.

And at the very top of his diagram — I remember this because I actually laughed out loud, sitting in the café on my break — the upward spiral ended with social and political stability, and international security.

Peace. Starting from the worms.

That’s when I stopped thinking of it as a gardening problem.

VI. Getting My Hands Dirty

I went back up to Meersbrook with a plan, and the plan was: copy Lal, as best an eighteen-year-old with a bus pass and no money can.

I stopped digging. That was the hardest one, because everybody on the allotments digs. Old Terry on the next plot, who’d known Grandad for thirty years, looked at me like I’d announced I was going to grow vegetables on the moon. “You’ve got to turn it over, love,” he said. “Let the frost get at it.” I nodded politely and didn’t.

Instead I covered everything. Flattened boxes from the café went over the beds to smother the weeds, and on top I piled whatever organic matter I could get: council green-waste compost, leaf mould from a woman down the road, buckets of coffee grounds from four cafés on Division Street, horse muck from a stables past Ringinglow, fetched in feed sacks on the bus until the driver gave me a look.

I realised later that this was Lal’s idea of recycling organic by-products, including urban waste, back into the soil. A city throws away a huge amount of carbon every day. I was just catching a tiny bit of it before it went to landfill and putting it where it belonged.

In autumn, instead of leaving beds bare, I sowed cover crops: field beans, phacelia, crimson clover. I learned the beans and clover pull nitrogen out of the air and store it in their roots. I learned that roots are how a plant pumps carbon down into the ground, like a straw going the wrong way.

And then I waited, which is the part nobody puts in the videos.

It took a year before I noticed a difference, and it was a small one. It was the following March, and I peeled back a corner of rotted cardboard and there was a worm under it. Just one. Pink and fat and indignant at being disturbed. I’m not ashamed to say I sat down on the path and cried a bit. Terry came over to see what was wrong and I just pointed at it, and he looked at the worm, and then at me, and said, “Well. There you go then.” Which from Terry is practically a standing ovation.

By the second summer, the fork went in with the biscuit sound.

VII. The Bigger Picture

This could have stayed a nice little gardening story. I did grow courgettes. Far too many.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the scale of it.

I’d spent two years and an embarrassing amount of coffee grounds bringing back about two hundred and fifty square metres of soil in the middle of a city. Meanwhile, Lal’s paper talked about a third of the world’s land. It talked about a billion smallholder farmers cultivating less than two hectares each, many in places where the soil is degrading fastest and people have the least money to fix it. It talked about the world needing to grow around seventy per cent more food between 2005 and 2050, on the soil we’ve got, which is getting worse.

He wrote that restoring soil is a societal, national and international task. It can’t just be people like me with cardboard. It needs scientists measuring what works, farmers paid to look after the ground rather than strip it, and people who understand both the science and the humans who have to put it into practice.

And it struck me, one evening sitting on Grandad’s bench with the whole of Sheffield going gold below me, that this city knows something about that.

Sheffield was built on what came out of the ground. Coal, iron, then steel — knives and rails and the stainless steel in half the kitchens of the world. We were brilliant at it. We were also brilliant at the damage: black air, poisoned rivers, moors scarred by our soot. The gullies on Kinder are partly our handwriting.

Somebody in this city ought to be good at putting things back.

VIII. The Decision

The next September I went back to college — an Access to Higher Education diploma in science, evenings, so I could keep my shifts. I was the youngest by ten years, surrounded by nurses retraining and dads made redundant, and they were the best people I’ve ever studied with. Everybody was there because they wanted something.

Chemistry nearly killed me. Nobody at school had ever told me what it was for. But now I knew. Cation exchange capacity, which had been one of those terrifying phrases in Lal’s paper, turned out to be about how well soil holds on to nutrients, like a magnet holding pins. Every single equation had a worm on the end of it, somewhere.

I’ve got my place at university: environmental science, with as much soil as they’ll let me take. The plan — written down, stuck inside my wardrobe door — is a master’s in soil science after that and work on restoration. Peatland, farmland, urban land, I don’t mind which. Anywhere the spiral’s going the wrong way.

When I told Mum, she said, “Soil? You want to study mud?”

And I said yes. I said it’s the most important mud in the world, because it’s the only mud we’ve got. I said it feeds us and cleans our water and holds the carbon and stops the floods, and we’ve been treating it like dirt. I said Grandad knew. He couldn’t have told you about soil organic carbon pools or ecosystem services, but he knew. He used to say you look after the ground and the ground looks after you. Lal wrote a whole scientific paper that basically says the same thing, with numbers.

She went quiet for a bit, and then she said, “He’d be dead proud of you, you know.”

I know.

IX. What I Want You to Know

I’m writing this down because I’m twenty now, I start in September, and some days it all still feels impossibly big.

Some days it’s another flood, another drought, another conflict where the background reason — never the headline — is land that can’t feed the people on it. I look at a third of the world’s land, then at my one plot, and the maths doesn’t add up.

But here’s what I’ve learned, and I want to say it firmly, because I wish someone had said it to me at eighteen when I couldn’t see the point of anything.

The spiral works both ways. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s the science. The same feedback that drags soil down can lift it back up. Cover the ground. Feed it. Leave the life in it alone to do its work. Be patient. It’s slow at the start, so slow you’ll wonder if anything’s happening at all. And then one day you lift a bit of cardboard and there’s a worm.

That’s how it works with people too, I think. One person starts. Then Terry on the next plot, who thought I was mad, quietly stops digging his onion bed and asks me where I get my coffee grounds. Then the woman with the leaf mould starts bringing it up herself. Then the allotment society asks me to give a talk, and I’m stood shaking in front of sixty people with a flipchart of spirals, and afterwards a lad my age asks if he can help on my plot because he’s thinking of studying it too.

Upward spiral.

You don’t have to be a professor from Ohio to start one. You don’t have to have a PhD or a farm or any money. You just need somewhere — a plot, a garden, a window box, a verge, a job, a vote, a voice — and the willingness to stop taking more than you give back.

The ground remembers how to heal. It just needs us to stop getting in its way, and then to get stuck in and help.

I’m going to spend my life doing that. I hope some of you will come with me.

There’s plenty of room. There’s a whole world of it, under your feet.

What the Ground Remembers: Book Club Discussion Questions

Ten questions for discussing What the Ground Remembers, a short story inspired by Rattan Lal, “Restoring Soil Quality to Mitigate Soil Degradation”, Sustainability (2015).

1. The story opens with Grandad teaching a seven-year-old to listen to soil. Why do you think the author starts with sound rather than sight? What did the “biscuit sound” and the “thud” come to mean by the end?
2. The narrator says soil is “something you inherit, and either pass on or spend.” What have you inherited — land, skills, habits, a place — that you feel responsible for passing on in better shape?
3. Rattan Lal’s downward spiral shows how one problem feeds the next. Where else in your own life, work or community have you seen a downward spiral like that? What, if anything, broke it?
4. The narrator realises that climate, floods, food prices and conflict are “all one thing” — the polycrisis — and that the thing is under our feet. Did the story change how connected these issues feel to you? Is that connection hopeful or overwhelming?
5. On Kinder Scout she sees both spirals at once: black gullies and green patches. Is there a place near you where damage and repair sit side by side? What does seeing both together do to your sense of what’s possible?
6. Sheffield is described as brilliant at taking from the ground, and at the damage that followed. Does a city, or a community, carry a responsibility for its industrial past? What would “putting things back” look like where you live?
7. Terry goes from “You’ve got to turn it over, love” to quietly asking where she gets her coffee grounds. What persuaded him — the science, the results, or the person? What tends to change your mind?
8. The narrator drops out of a business course because she “couldn’t see the point,” then thrives once chemistry has “a worm on the end of it.” What does the story suggest about purpose and learning? Has a sense of purpose ever changed how well you learned something?
9. Lal’s upward spiral ends with social and political stability and international security — “Peace. Starting from the worms.” Is that a convincing link or a leap? What would it take for soil health to be treated as seriously as other security issues?
10. The closing lines say all you need is “somewhere” — a plot, a window box, a job, a vote, a voice. What is your somewhere? Name one small, specific thing you could start this month that might begin an upward spiral.