A Letter From the Soil

By: Adebayo Balqees Folayemi 

Dear Humanity,

Before you call me ordinary earth, allow me to introduce myself.

I am the soil beneath your feet. The silent keeper of harvests. The cradle of roots. The memory of every seed that has ever dared to dream.

You have walked upon me all your life, yet you hardly know my name.

I remember the first rains that softened my body and awakened sleeping seeds. I remember the laughter of children chasing butterflies across farmlands. I remember farmers who looked to the skies with hope, pressing kernels of maize, cowpea and rice into my palms as though entrusting me with tomorrow itself.

I have never broken that trust.

Everything green that has stretched towards the sun first whispered its dreams to me.

Yet today, I feel different.

Not because I have grown old, but because I have grown weary.

Each season, I give away pieces of myself. My richness leaves with every sack of harvested grain, every basket of vegetables and every truckload of tubers. I watch my strength disappear one harvest after another, while fewer hands remember to restore what has been taken.

Some call me unproductive.

Others call me exhausted.

No one asks who exhausted me.

You strip away the trees whose roots once held me together. You leave me bare beneath a blazing sun until my skin cracks with thirst. Then the rains arrive, not as friends but as thieves, carrying away the most fertile parts of me into rivers that cannot return them.

You pour chemicals upon me as though I feel nothing. You bury me beneath plastics that refuse to disappear. You burn the fields I nurture, and with every flame, countless unseen lives vanish with the smoke.

Still, I remain.

Do you know what lives within me?

Not emptiness.

A living world.

A world where earthworms tunnel through my body, microorganisms labour without rest, fungi weave invisible threads and countless tiny creatures perform miracles so quietly that humanity mistakes them for ordinary.

They are my heartbeat.

When they flourish, crops flourish.

When they perish, hunger begins its slow journey to your doorstep.

You often celebrate the farmer, as you should. You praise the rain when it falls and the sunshine when it smiles.

Rarely does anyone remember the ground that held everything together.

Perhaps that is the burden of being the foundation.

No one notices it until cracks begin to appear.

Look around you.

The signs are no longer hidden.

Harvests are becoming less certain. Farmlands are losing their vigour. Floods swallow fertile fields, while drought leaves others gasping for life. These are not distant headlines. They are the language of a wounded earth.

But even wounded ground remembers how to heal.

Yet I have not written this letter to accuse you.

I have written because hope still grows in me.

Return organic matter to my body. Let trees once again stretch their roots through my embrace. Farm with wisdom, not with haste. Treat me not as a resource to be emptied but as a companion to be sustained.

If you care for me today, I will feed generations you may never live to meet.

One day, another child will eat a meal grown from fields you chose to protect.

Another family will gather around a harvest you made possible.

Another farmer will smile because you remembered that life does not begin in the marketplace or the kitchen.

It begins here.

With me.

So, the next time your feet touch the ground, do not merely walk away.

Pause.

For beneath your footsteps lies a quiet promise.

Care for me, and I will continue to turn tiny seeds into endless tomorrows.

Waiting beneath your feet,

The Soil