Rattan Lal, one of the world’s leading soil scientists, is this year’s winner of the $250,000 World Food Prize, “the Nobel of agriculture,” for his breakthrough research on the importance of carbon to soil health and the potential of carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change. Lal’s research “transformed the way the world saw soils,” said the foundation that awards the annual prize.
“Soils of the world must be part of any agenda to address climate change as well as food and water security,” said Lal in a biography issued by the World Food Prize Foundation. “I think there is now a general awareness of soil carbon, an awareness that soil isn’t just a medium for plant growth.”
In a career spanning five decades and four continents, Lal promoted soil-saving techniques that benefited 500 million smallholder farmers and improved the food security of more than 2 billion people. He transformed techniques such as no-till, cover crops, mulching, and agroforestry that prevented erosion and restored carbon and organic matter to the soil. His approach differed from the conventional approach of using fertilizers to replace soil nutrients. In the early 1990s, when he was a professor at Ohio State University, he was co-author of the first paper to show that increasing soil carbon and organic matter increased soil health and also locked atmospheric carbon in the soil.
“Dr. Lal is a trailblazer in soil science, with a prodigious passion for research that improves soil health, enhances agricultural production, improves the nutritional quality of food, restores the environment, and mitigates climate change,” said foundation president Barbara Stinson. “His decades of work to address all of these elements fully warrants his recognition as the 50th World Food Prize Laureate.”
Lal, who began life on a subsistence farm in India, was awarded the Japan Prize, one of the top honors in science and technology, in 2019 for his work on sustainable soil management and its role in improving food security and mitigating climate change. Lal is founder of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State and a past president of the 60,000-member International Union of Soil Sciences.
His interest in soil began as a child on a small farm that used oxen and manual labor to grow wheat, chickpeas, rice, and sugarcane. He wondered at the toil of plowing dry, hard ground baked by 110-degree days.
One gauge of Lal’s stature is that his work has been cited more than 100,000 times in scientific papers. Gebisa Ejeta, the 2009 Food Prize laureate, who chaired this year’s selection committee, said the impact of Lal’s research “on sustainability of agriculture and the environment cannot be over-stressed.”
Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 as the “father of the green revolution,” which used higher-yielding, disease-resistant crops to help feed the world, founded the World Food Prize in 1986 to highlight and inspire achievements in improving the quality, quantity, and availability of food.
For the past couple of decades, the prize has been awarded in a ceremony that is part of an annual symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, on global food security and nutrition. This year, the symposium, scheduled for Oct. 14-16, will be held online due to the coronavirus pandemic, reported the Des Moines Register. Officials have yet not decided whether to hold the award ceremony itself online or in person.