the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 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.
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Status: final response (author comments only)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-4072', R. Murray Lark, 23 Dec 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-4072', Anonymous Referee #2, 13 May 2026
Paper by Mathijs and Van Ruymbeke
The paper presents a holistic framework for understanding “soil health”-based business models (SHBMs) to address the fragmented perspectives on what constitutes healthy soil and how to incentivize its management. Building on the Total Economic Value (TEV) framework, the authors identify six distinct value perspectives: productivist, ecosystem service, resilience, non-use value, intrinsic value, and social innovation. Each perspective highlights different motivations and beneficiaries, ranging from private economic returns for land managers to collective societal empowerment and the inherent moral value of nature. The authors argue that no single policy instrument can effectively address all these perspectives. Instead, they recommend a differentiated, multi-perspective policy strategy that combines direct subsidies, ecosystem service payments, risk coordination mechanisms, and institutional support to align incentives, avoid over-subsidisation, and foster sustainable soil stewardship and governance.
Clarifying Soil Health vs. Soil Condition
To strengthen the theoretical foundation of the paper, the authors need to confront the inherent vagueness of the term "soil health". As currently framed, the paper relies on a concept that lacks a globally agreed definition and is often inconsistently and variously measured and/ or weakly connected to spatial planning and policy [1]. Drawing on recent advances in the soil security framework, the authors could clarify that "soil health" is most easily and rigorously conceived as homologous to the "condition" dimension of soil security [2] [3]. As Evangelista et al. (2024) and McBratney et al. (2026) articulate, while soil health provides valuable insights on soil condition at the scale of farmer’s fields, it is challenged to address national-scale challenges related to spatial variability, cumulative risk, and economic valuation [1] [3]. By explicitly adopting the "soil condition/health" phraseology, the authors can perhaps anchor their business models in a more robust, multidimensional framework that extends beyond biophysical metrics to integrate socio-economic value and governance. This broader perspective would allow the paper to better articulate how local improvements in soil condition/health cascade into regional and national resilience.
Reframing the Contribution to the Capital Dimension
Perhaps the greatest contribution this paper makes is not actually to the somewhat vague concept of "soil health," but rather in providing a better insight into how the "capital" dimension of soil security could be assessed. The paper’s adaptation of the TEV framework essentially unpacks the capital dimension—which Evangelista et al. (2024) describe as one of the less ambiguous but under-quantified aspects of soil security [3]. The current discussion of SHBMs focuses primarily on flows of income and services, while the capital dimension is underpinned by the notion of placing a monetary value on soil as an asset or stock [4]. As such the present paper potentially extends the Soil Capital Dimension concept and suggests a wider SSBM (Soil Security Business Model). To elaborate further, as established in the Soil Security Assessment Framework by Evangelista et al. (2023), evaluating soil security requires integrating soil functions, services, and threats [5]. By reframing their six value perspectives as mechanisms to assess and operationalise this capital dimension, the authors would provide a crucial bridge between abstract economic theory and practical soil science and soil policy. This reframing could demonstrate how soil functions, services, and threats can be translated into economic terms to support investment cases and incentives [1]. Such an approach would allow policymakers and financial institutions to design instruments that treat soil as an appreciating or depreciating natural asset rather than merely a factor of production, fundamentally shifting how agricultural and nature positive financing is structured.
Quantifying and Spatializing Soil Capital
Finally, the paper could be improved by incorporating practical methodologies for measuring and spatialising these value perspectives, moving the framework from a conceptual exercise to an actionable policy tool. The authors could draw inspiration from recent spatial assessments of soil capital, such as the work by Francos et al. (2024), who quantified "soil management capital" by integrating soil functions, services, and threats into a unified economic metric [6]. In their Australian case study, Francos et al. utilised digital soil mapping to calculate capital in US$/ha units on a pixel-by-pixel basis, factoring in pH regulation costs, nutrient stocks, and available water holding capacity (AWC) [6]. Furthermore, the paper could greatly benefit from incorporating the concepts of genosoils (the least modified reference state of a soil) and phenosoils (the variant resulting from land use and management) [7]. Comparing phenosoils to their reference genosoils provides a direct, measurable insight into soil degradation and, consequently, the loss or gain of capital value (including TEV) over time [8]. Suggesting that SHBMs/SSBMs be supported by such spatially explicit, comparative utilities based on role-specific (functions, threats, services) indicators would provide concrete tools for policymakers to identify biophysical feasibility, target remediation where trajectories are deteriorating, and design instruments - such as soil-backed green bonds - that reward land managers for building and maintaining the inherent capital value of their soil stocks.
References
[1]: https://doi.org/10.3390/earth7020062 "McBratney, A., Evangelista, S., Francos, N., et al. (2026). Beyond Soil Health: Soil Security Underpinning a National Framework for Sustainable Australian Agriculture. Earth, 7, 62."
[2]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2013.08.013 "McBratney, A., et al. (2014 ). The dimensions of soil security. Geoderma, 213, 203-213."
[3]: https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.agron.2023.10.001 "Evangelista, S. J., Field, D. J., McBratney, A. B., et al. (2024 ). Soil security—Strategizing a sustainable future for soil. Advances in Agronomy, 183, 1-70."
[4]: https://www.soils.org/files/am/pdfs/soil-security-dimensions-brief.pdf "Soil Science Society of America. (n.d. ). Soil Security Dimensions Brief."
[5]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soisec.2023.100086 "Evangelista, S. J., et al. (2023 ). A proposal for the assessment of soil security: Soil functions, soil services and threats to soil. Soil Security, 10, 100086."
[6]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soisec.2024.100141 "Francos, N., et al. (2024 ). Valuing and integrating soil roles in assessing the capital dimension of soil security: An Australian case study. Soil Security, 16, 100141."
[7]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soisec.2023.100108 "Román Dobarco, M., et al. (2023 ). Genosoil and phenosoil mapping in continental Australia is essential for soil security. Soil Security, 13, 100108."
[8]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soisec.2024.100157 "Francos, N., et al. (2024 ). Mapping available water capacity as a soil production capital metric in Australia. Soil Security, 16, 100157."
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4072-RC2
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- 1
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.