| 29 Sep 2025
Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications
Abstract. Soil health is foundational to ecological sustainability, economic productivity, and societal wellbeing. However, fragmented perspectives on what constitutes "healthy soil" hinder coherent policies and business models. This article addresses that gap by offering a value-based framework to guide soil-health initiatives. Building on the Total Economic Value (TEV) framework, six complementary perspectives are identified: (1) productivist, (2) ecosystem services, (3) resilience, (4) non-use value, (5) intrinsic value, and (6) social innovation. These represent different motivations and beneficiaries – from private returns through public goods, to moral duties and collective empowerment. Each perspective implies specific opportunities and challenges for policy design. For instance, direct subsidies may be justified in cases where economic returns are delayed or insufficient, while ecosystem service payments require credible measurement and market mechanisms. Resilience investments often suffer from coordination failures, and intrinsic or social values lack clear economic incentives, requiring legal, educational, or institutional support instead. The article argues that no single policy instrument can serve all these perspectives effectively; rather, a differentiated, multi-perspective strategy is needed to align incentives, avoid over-subsidization, and ensure equitable access and accountability. This framework provides a foundation for designing inclusive and adaptive policies that foster sustainable soil stewardship across diverse stakeholders.
I agree with the authors about the importance of considering the multifaceted nature of soil functions and the benefits which these generate. However, I do not find the framework proposed very enlightening, and it seems to me to disguise various neoliberal assumptions about `value’ and how this is to be assessed.
`Value’ is a tricky concept, and one which has been the focus of considerable debate in political economy as a whole, and the economics of land in particular. Ricardo’s theory of rents assumed that different soils had different productive capacities which were in some sense static `natural’ characteristics, but Marx (e.g. in Grundrisse), drawing on the work of von Liebig and the Scottish agricultural writer John Anderson (1784) pointed out that the productive capacity of soil is created by the interaction of labour and inherent characteristics of the land. I suggest that this insight undermines, for example, the partition of “productivist” accounts and “Ecosystem services” accounts of soil into distinct phenomena. Key ecosystem services provided by soil may depend on management of the soil within production systems. Furthermore, these activities produce `value’, but whether these different values can be aggregated into some overall `output value’ (line 39) seems to me to be very questionable, but is taken for granted by the authors. How does one `aggregate’ the value of nutrient cycling functions, modulation of water flows, carbon sequestration and maintenance of biodiversity into one measure of value?
If we grant that some formula is possible, the next `value’ which we encounter is called `insurance value’. This is not defined (line 40), it is said to `reflect’ capacity of soil to sustain ecosystem services. `Reflect’ is a very vague verb here, does it mean `corresponds to some aggregated (and possibly discounted) future `value’ of the ecosystem services, or does it mean `… is related to these future services in some hand-waving sense..’? We are not really enlightened by this.
At line 42 we are told that the `benefits’ of healthy soil (are these `values produced by..’ ?) can be divided into `benefits to humans and benefits to nature’. We are told that the former comprise `use and non-use values.’ (line 43). This is confusing because, in political economy, use value means the features of some commodity which satisfy some human requirement so it is contradictory to say that a benefit of healthy soils to humans can be a non-use value. In fact we have a new definition of use-value (line 43) as what seems to be some version of exchange value, which classical political economy contrasts with use value. This redefinition of terms with established applications is not helpful to the reader. It is confusing again then to be told that this new `use value’ can be divided into option value (future use) and something called `actual value’ (line 44) which seems to comprise the exchange value of commodities produced on the soil, other benefits (clearly important, but not with any obvious exchange value) and ecosystem services (`indirect use’). We then are told that healthy soil has `non-use value’ (line 47) which, confusingly, seems to depend at least in part on possible future use (line 48/49).
We return to `insurance value’ at line 50, but this does not help us to understand the introduction of the term at line 40 (this really cannot be called a definition). At this point a social dimension of soil value is introduced, but this seems to relate only in some undefined way to the distribution of benefits.
The authors recognize correctly that any assessment of `value’ produced by and inherent in soil must deal with multiple different and potentially conflicting ways in which soil functions and human labour can interact. This is complicated further by the element of time, soil can change over time and an assessment of `value’ must account for value of future soil functions an present ones. However, this framework with its proliferation of partly overlapping and partly contradictory terms does not really take us any further.
I think that the general set of `perspectives’ set out in table 1, with a bit of tweaking, can be useful. I think that its main drawbacks are as follows
My final observation is that this paper seems to take for granted a neo-liberal perspective on soil and broader ecosystem value. This is implicit in attempts, for example, to trade off one kind of value against another through a pricing mechanism (e.g. carbon credits) which, either openly or in disguise, transforms soil values into exchange values. This assumption has already had severe impacts on social use of soil in places such as sub-Saharan Africa where large swathes of land have been appropriated into carbon trading schemes which have proved deficient both technically and in terms of value delivered to local communities (e.g. Dzingirai, V., and Mangwanya, L. Struggles over carbon in the Zambezi Valley: the case of Kariba REDD in Hurungwe, Zimbabwe. In: Carbon conflicts and forest landscapes in Africa (2015), M. Leach and I. Scoones, Eds., Routledge.
Murray Lark, Nottingham.