Campaigners are calling for a radical rethink of farming practices to help regenerate soil.

Soil provides many benefits to the health of humans as well as our landscapes and wider environment. It is not only fundamental to the production of food, but it also filters and stores excess water in the ground and absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it critical in the fight against climate change.

However, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) points out that a combination of industrial farming practices, poor land management and damage from development have created a perfect storm that has resulted in dangerous levels of soil erosion, compaction and a loss of soil’s fertility – this degradation of soil costs around £1.2 billion a year, in England and Wales alone.

Shaun Leavey, farming adviser to Dorset CPRE said: “With a mixed farming economy in Dorset (i.e. both arable and grassland) our county has to be acutely aware of the importance which soil management plays in local husbandry – both for crops and stock. Dorset farmers and growers will want to have a say about the way in which any future measures are introduced to improve soil management. I hope that Dorset CPRE can engage with the farming community to learn how they can best implement the objectives that CPRE has set out.

“It will be important to remember that making policy about an issue such as this is one thing, and making it happen on the ground is quite another.

“There is best practice out there on some farms, and we need to learn from those who have adopted it already how it might become a far more widespread and accepted way of safeguarding this crucial area of husbandry.”

CPRE warns in a report that in order to effectively address climate change, urgent action is needed to halt the loss of our soils.