Linking soil health to nutritional and safe food

Soils are essential for the global food system and regulate water, carbon and nitrogen cycles but are put under pressure from population growth and climate change. Maintaining healthy soils helps ensure nutritious, tasty and safe foods, which are essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and in particular SDG 2, Zero Hunger.

Soils are an important element in a holistic view of human health. A great proportion of our food comes from terrestrial environments, in which soils play a central role. Soils have an indirect impact on human health as essential soil compounds are taken up by the food produced on it. Unhealthy soils decrease crop harvests and produce crops with reduced nutritional value. Soil contaminants can pose a threat to food safety, malnutrition and human health. Little is known on interactions between nutrient and microbiome composition of soils and the plant (including its secondary metabolite content) and health effects on human diets (including the gut microbiome).

The quality of the soil plays a central role in determining food quality as it provides the substrate and building blocks for the growth of plants and their edible food produce, which are then harvested for consumption. Soil health and soil quality represent a fundamental requirement for food safety, and therefore for animal and human health, even though this relationship is not always acknowledged enough. Growing evidence links farm management, soil health and plant health; but the relationships between soil health, climate stress, food and crop nutritional quality, tastiness (palatability), technological properties and human health are less well understood.

While information already exists on the interaction between farming practices, soil health and food, a structured synthesis is needed to obtain a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the relevant achievements on this field, in order to support the implementation of the soil mission. A clearer understanding of the possible links between soil health, plants, food and people is the key to improving the quality and healthiness of foods grown in all types of farming systems, including smaller scale urban farming. There is a need to build on the existing knowledge resulting from the latest EU R&I activities and infrastructures that elicit the link between soil, food, diets and human health.

Proposed activities will:

• Further develop and strengthen legitimacy and robustness of the nexus food quality-soil through an engaged, broad and effective European interdisciplinary community of scientists (including medical researchers), innovators and practitioners, while recognising regional and national specificities, contexts and needs.
• Elucidate the current state of knowledge deriving from former and still ongoing Horizon 2020 projects and other relevant state of the art research (e.g. EJP Soil) falling under the the nexus of soils, farming practices, food and human health and identify research and innovation areas where gaps need to be filled.
• Catalyse interdisciplinary collaboration as a holistic perspective, which is necessary to address the issues related to the topic.
• Seek and integrate qualitative and quantitative scientific evidence through in situ and lab experimentation and testing, literature review, surveys, analytical modelling (etc.) to support farming practices that positively influence the link between soil health and food quality.
• Develop easy to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) that elicit the connection between soil health, and four food quality-related characteristics (nutritional composition, tastiness, technological properties and safety).
• Adapt, integrate and demonstrate innovative methods to continuously measure the developed KPIs.
• Investigate how well current funding opportunities at all levels (EU, national, regional) address soils and human health research and innovation needs.
• Build upon existing knowledge and solutions designed and developed from previous projects such as the EIT Food initiative[[]] that addresses the challenge of soil health in a holistic way, from farm to fork, involving multiple stakeholders, highlighting their stakes in soil health and identifying potential drivers to motivate them to take action in collaboration with farmers [1] Regenerative Agriculture | EIT Food
• Summarise the known factors influencing water, soil and plant health and how these are linked with food quality and human health.
• List the potential mechanisms for improved food nutritional quality through soil health and evaluate the current evidence.
• Provide conclusions and recommendation for future research and innovation.

Proposals are encouraged to build on past or ongoing EU-funded research and innovation projects. Proposal should also seek collaboration with relevant initiatives, and in particular deliver on key objectives of the Horizon Europe Soil Health and Food Mission.

Proposals should explain how they will deliver co-benefits to the four Food 2030 priorities as well as the EU Soil Strategy for 2030.

Proposals should set out a clear plan on how they should collaborate with other projects selected under this and any other relevant topic/call, by participating in joint activities, workshops, as well as common communication and dissemination activities and channels.

Proposals should bring together multiple types of scientific expertise in health and natural sciences, and social sciences and humanities. This topic should involve the effective contribution of SSH disciplines.