War can rip up soil, contaminate it and damage its biosphere. For fertile Ukrainian chernozems, those impacts could impact agriculture for years.
With warfare able to degrade and contaminate soil for years, crop yields — and the people who depend on them — could suffer long after a cease-fire.
Chernozems are rich in elements that plants need to grow, such as nitrogen, potassium and calcium. Those nutrients come from organic matter and underlying loess. Chernozems also hit the sweet spot of clay content — just enough to help hold the soil together and cling onto nutrients but not so much that roots have a hard time penetrating the ground.
. Because of shifts in hydrology and a lack of human management, the landscape reverted from agriculture to forest. “It’s a completely new ecosystem,” he says. When there’s a highly compacted area beneath where the teeth of a plow can go, that impermeable layer of soil “can create standing water, and all other sorts of problems from an agricultural standpoint,” Hupy says.Bombs may leave some of the most obvious impacts, but they aren’t the only thing that can physically disturb soil. Soggy, thawing soils in Ukraine bogged down Russian tanks as if a metaphor of resistance: The land itself was fighting back.
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