Six Ways to Value Soil: Why No Single Policy Can Keep Earth’s Ground Healthy

Beneath every field, forest, and city lot lies an asset so fundamental that economists, ecologists, and farmers routinely disagree about what it is actually worth. Soil produces food, feed, and fibre, buffers floods, stores carbon, sustains biodiversity, and anchors cultural identity, yet there is no shared definition of what constitutes a healthy soil, why it matters, or for whom. That ambiguity, researchers argue, is now one of the biggest obstacles to effective soil policy. A new forum article by Erik Mathijs and Kato Van Ruymbeke of KU Leuven, published in the journal SOIL, tackles the problem head-on by mapping the different kinds of value that investment in soil health can generate, and by showing why no single policy instrument can serve them all.

The study arrives at a politically charged moment. The European Union’s Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” explicitly calls for new business models that support soil health, and regulators across the world are experimenting with carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and sustainability reporting rules that push companies to pay for ecological outcomes. Business models, in the widely used definition of Osterwalder and Pigneur, describe how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. If policymakers want to incentivize land managers, the authors contend, they first need to understand precisely which types of value soil health investments produce, and who stands to benefit from them.

To build that understanding, Mathijs and Van Ruymbeke borrow the Total Economic Value framework from neoclassical environmental economics, refining it with the work of scholars such as Bartkowski, Davidson, and Pascual. The framework distinguishes output value, the aggregate worth of ecosystem services delivered by a system in a given state, from insurance value, the system’s capacity to keep delivering those services under disturbance and uncertainty. Output values split further into use values, covering consumptive goods like food and non-consumptive benefits like recreation, and non-use values, such as existence value and bequest value, the satisfaction people derive simply from knowing soil ecosystems persist for others and for future generations. The authors are careful to position the framework as a structured policy vocabulary rather than a neutral or exhaustive theory, noting that it must be complemented where labour, rights, power, and values that resist monetization are concerned.

From this foundation the researchers derive six complementary perspectives on soil-health-based business models. The productivist perspective treats soil as a form of capital whose improvement raises yields, cuts input costs, and increases land value, giving land managers an intrinsic motivation to invest. The ecosystem services perspective widens the lens to regulating and cultural services that benefit society at large, which can be monetized through compensation mechanisms provided that willing payers exist. The resilience perspective corresponds to insurance value: healthy soil reduces the likelihood or severity of adverse outcomes for farmers, lenders, insurers, and food processors alike, and the authors retain it as a separate category to make accounting, discounting, and long-term stewardship visible as policy concerns.

The remaining three perspectives push beyond conventional market logic. The non-use value perspective captures the benefit people obtain from the mere existence and preservation of soil ecosystems, including value for future generations, and therefore demands a commitment to benefits that may never be visibly realized. The intrinsic value perspective goes further still, asserting that soil possesses worth independent of any human preference, a view rooted in ecocentric and value-pluralist worldviews that echo the land ethic of Aldo Leopold and the agrarian essays of Wendell Berry. Finally, the social perspective, an addition not found in the original Total Economic Value framework, recognizes that soil health is a socially co-constructed concept: soil values are co-produced through natural properties, human labour, management history, and institutions, all shaped by power relations including unequal ownership and historical dispossession. This perspective emphasizes inclusive governance, community agency, and fair access to soil-related benefits.

Together, the six perspectives give economic content to the capital dimension of the broader soil security framework, which also includes capability, connectivity, and codification. Soil health investments, in this reading, are best understood as maintaining or appreciating a natural asset rather than merely boosting short-term productivity. The framework can help policymakers and financial institutions identify beneficiaries, construct credible investment cases, and design safeguards, supporting loans, guarantees, insurance arrangements, and payments for ecosystem services without assuming that every component of soil value must be monetized or collapsed into a single figure. Spatially explicit indicators can partly operationalize the idea: recent Australian research has combined soil functions, services, and threats to estimate soil management capital per hectare, and comparisons between managed phenosoils and least-modified genosoil references can reveal degradation or improvement over time. Measures such as pH-regulation costs, nutrient stocks, and available water capacity can guide targeting, though the authors stress these methods cannot capture every value perspective and should complement, not replace, plural indicators and public deliberation.

Each perspective also implies distinct policy tools and distinct failure modes. Under the productivist view, incentives should in principle be unnecessary if income gains cover the investment, but three problems commonly arise. Returns may be delayed, as in the transition to organic farming, justifying temporary subsidies whose level and duration are context-specific. Returns may be too small to cover the investment, requiring permanent additional income streams or investment subsidies. Or land users may lack the equity or credit access to invest at all, a case where government guarantees can lower lenders’ risk. The ecosystem services perspective, by contrast, relies on payments and markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the emerging biodiversity credit market, reinforced by mandatory rules like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Here the authors flag three complications: interventions may not consistently deliver the expected services, which argues for hybrid schemes blending practice-based and performance-based payments; services are often co-produced, making individual contributions hard to isolate; and credits frequently fail to reflect true opportunity costs, since a one-off carbon payment does not cover the ongoing investment needed to maintain soil carbon, whose marginal gains also decline over time.

The resilience perspective exposes a classic coordination failure. Because every actor benefiting from reduced risk might be willing to pay a premium, uncoordinated action invites free-riding, over-subsidization, or under-subsidization, and unlike discrete ecosystem services, risk cannot be decomposed among beneficiaries. There can also be a direct trade-off between income and resilience, as when crop diversification forces less profitable rotations that buyers, who typically purchase only a single crop, are reluctant to support with broader contracts. The non-use and intrinsic value perspectives, lacking conventional market returns, instead call for public expenditure, intergenerational protection, legal minimum standards such as the EU Soil Monitoring Law, and cultural and educational programmes that revitalize land-based knowledge and sustain an ethic of care. The social perspective demands relational and institutional incentives: peer-exchange platforms such as EIP-Agri, adaptive policy frameworks, grants for community projects, open-access knowledge tools, and participatory research funding, alongside attention to tenure security, bargaining power, transaction costs, and benefit sharing, particularly where external investors might shift control away from local actors.

The article’s central message is deliberately uncomfortable for policymakers seeking a silver bullet: no single instrument can serve all six perspectives effectively. Soil health is shaped by multiple, overlapping values that rarely occur in isolation, and different actors may hold diverse or simultaneous values at once. Effective governance therefore requires a flexible, differentiated strategy that supports land managers with targeted, easily adoptable measures integrated into their business models, while guarding against over-subsidization and free-riding where benefits are non-excludable, and ensuring coordination, accountability, distributional safeguards, and adaptive learning. The authors also warn of the risks of tokenism and co-optation, in which community-led soil initiatives are superficially adopted without genuinely empowering communities, and note that scaling social innovations beyond pilot contexts remains a persistent challenge. By clarifying how soil as a stock can generate different flows of value, and how management can make that stock appreciate or depreciate, the framework offers decision makers a foundation for designing inclusive and adaptive policies, one that adds economic substance to soil security while preventing capital valuation from becoming the sole account of what soils are and why they matter.

Subject of Research: Value-based frameworks for soil health business models and soil policy design

Article Title: Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications

Article References: Mathijs, E., & Van Ruymbeke, K. (2026). Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications. SOIL, 12(2), 835-840. https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-12-835-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/soil-12-835-2026

Keywords: soil health, soil security, business models, ecosystem services, total economic value, soil policy, resilience, carbon credits, biodiversity credits, EU Soil Deal for Europe, natural capital, social innovation