Money down the Drain

Two days ago, most of England received 31 millimeters of rain. One hectare of land, after 31mm of rain, receives 310,000 litres of water. England is over 13 million hectares in size. No, I'm not doing the maths.

Point is, that’s a huge amount of water. We can audibly hear the rain on our rooftops, which is collected by gutters, and channelled down into the drains. Even more falls on our tarmac roads or concrete driveways. This rain finds its way into the drains also. But the lion’s share of the rain falls onto open land. Farmland.

So far, so good. Farmland has soil, and soil is notoriously good at storing water. 

But vast amounts of our soil are not storing water at all. In fact, they are doing just the opposite; they are being washed away. At gravity’s mercy, tonnes of soil run to our streams and rivers. 

The soil is getting stored in the water. Not the other way around.

And so, two days ago after the downpour, my local river was a brown colour similar to that of a bar of milk chocolate. Plain to see for anyone observant. 

When we know that good healthy soil can take decades to build, it is alarming to see hundreds of tonnes of the stuff making its way to the sea after a morning’s rain.

I’m no economist, but when you’re spending faster than you're earning, it doesn’t take long to go broke.

“The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself” - Franklin D. Roosevelt