Soil health in agricultural ecosystems: Current status and future perspectives

Humanity thrives when soils are healthy as soils provide food, fiber, shelter, and a life-sustaining climate. Awareness of the need to optimize soil functions to grow food for an expanding human population and a desire to sustain environmental quality has led to an intense interest among stakeholders and practitioners in enhancing soil health. The public has become aware of soil health only in the last few years; however, for the seasoned soil scientists and agronomists, the journey to improve soil health began a long time ago, starting with the Dust Bowl Era and later to what was called soil quality movement. This article aims to review our current understanding of soil health by examining the history and evolving definition of soil health and then exploring the best soil health indicators from the physical, chemical, and biological domains that could be used to support practices for enhancing soil functions. Improving soil health will enhance soil functions, and so the conclusion that improving soil health involves enhancing soil organic carbon is justified. We briefly review the various soil health indicators and management options for enhancing soil health and explore. the social and economic perspectives of the call for farmers to use soil health practices. We conclude the review by examining the current knowledge gaps and suggesting ways to advance soil health understanding and conversation. For the agricultural community, we present a new definition of soil health as the capacity of soils to provide a sink for carbon to mitigate climate change and a reservoir for storing essential nutrients for sustained ecosystem productivity.