Why We Need To Take Soil More Seriously - Part 2: Air By forests we don't quite mean national parks. We are only referring to self fulfilling cycles, ecosystems that can support themselves in terms of fundamental requirements like nutrition, water and air. Whether we do food extraction from them is immaterial as long as that balance is maintained. In fact, if all agricultural land on earth were to shift towards food forests, we will be able to not only support 5 times more people but also continuously increase the soil carbon content every year. It is estimated that 1% increase in soil carbon content amounts to offsetting all carbon emissions of the last 40 years.