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Nature Food
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Soil health contributes to variations in crop production and nitrogen use efficiency

Nature Food (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Soil health affects both food production and environmental quality. However, quantifying its impact poses a substantial global challenge due to the scarcity of comprehensive soil health data and the complexity of disentangling its effects from other variables. Here we integrate high-resolution global data on soil, climate and farm management practices to assess the contribution of soil health to agricultural productivity. We show that soil health is responsible for approximately 12% and 22% of global variations in crop production and nitrogen use efficiency, respectively. While the influence of climate on crop yields is comparable to that of soil health, it is substantially overshadowed by the role of agricultural management, which accounts for roughly 70% of the global yield variation. In regions such as China, India and the central United States, the influence of soil health on crop yields and nitrogen use efficiency is less pronounced due to the dominant effects of farming practices, including the intensive use of fertilizers. Enhancing global soil health could increase crop yields by 7.8 Mt while reducing nitrogen surplus by 8.1 Mt worldwide by 2050. It is crucial to achieve global sustainable development through managing soil health beyond traditional agricultural practices and climate adaptation.

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Fig. 1: Global pattern of soil, climate and management drivers for crop nitrogen yield and NUE.
Fig. 2: SEM of climate, management and soil impacts on agriculture yield and NUE.
Fig. 3: Relative contribution of drivers on yield and NUE changes.
Fig. 4: Relative changes of yield, NUE and nitrogen surplus in 2050 under the SSP126 scenario.
Fig. 5: Trends of crop nitrogen yield, NUE, nitrogen surplus and total crop production under SSP–RCP scenarios towards 2050 and the cost–benefit of improvement of soil health.

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Data availability

We utilized nitrogen budget data at a 0.5° × 0.5° spatial resolution, including fertilizer input, biological nitrogen fixation, deposition and manure, from the IMAGE–GNM database (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-8-4045-2015)28. Cropland data, measured in square kilometres per grid at the same resolution, were obtained from HYDE v. 3.2 (https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-927-2017)29. Rural population data were sourced from the WorldPop dataset (https://www.worldpop.org/)30. Soil physical properties, including bulk density, pH and organic carbon density, were extracted from the surface layer (0–30 cm) at a 1 km × 1 km resolution (ISRIC dataset;https://files.isric.org/). Phosphorus content was sourced from figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14583375)50. Biotic data were from ref.51, covering fungal richness data from ref.52, bacterial richness data from ref.20, viral abundance data from ref.53, and nematode and worm abundance data from ref.54. Soil pesticide data, including fungicides, herbicides and insecticides, were sourced from ref.55. Climate data for 2020, including temperature and precipitation at a 0.5° × 0.5° resolution, were obtained from CRU TS v. 4.06 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0453-3)34. For scenario analysis, we collected cropland area, population, temperature and precipitation data under three SSP–RCP scenarios (SSP1–RCP2.6, SSP2–RCP4.5 and SSP5–RCP8.5). Cropland area projections until 2050 were sourced from the LUH2 dataset (https://luh.umd.edu/data.shtml). Population projections until 2050 were obtained from gridded datasets for population and economy under SSPs (https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.01683)36. Monthly temperature and precipitation data (2015–2050) at 0.9° × 1.25° resolution were sourced from CMIP6 (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/). Data supporting this study’s findings are included in the article and Supplementary Information. Additional data are sourced from publicly available databases and literature, as cited in the reference list.Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Statistical analyses and computations were conducted using Stata 16.0. All model code is available in the Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42325707 and 42261144001) and National Key Research and Development Project of China (2022YFE0138200).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Soil Pollution Control and Safety, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jianming Xu & Baojing Gu

  2. College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jianming Xu, Chen Wang, Sitong Wang, Bin Ma, Yan He, Lingfei Hu, Xingmei Liu, Fangzhou Zhang, Luotian Lu, Shuyao Li & Baojing Gu

  3. Biosphere Sciences and Engineering, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, CA, USA

    Chenchen Ren

  4. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Xiuming Zhang

  5. State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Jiabao Zhang

  6. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yong-Guan Zhu

  7. Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Peter Vitousek

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  1. Jianming Xu

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Contributions

B.G. and J.X. designed the study. C.R., X.Z. and C.W. conducted the research and analysed the data. B.G. interpreted the findings and wrote the first draft of the paper. B.M., Y.H., L.H., X.L., S.W., F.Z., L.L. and S.L. provided support for the data availability and processed the raw data. J.Z., Y.-G.Z. and P.V. revised the paper. All authors contributed to the discussion and revision of the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence toJianming Xu orBaojing Gu.

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Nature Food thanks Hai-Lin Zhang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Xu, J., Ren, C., Zhang, X.et al. Soil health contributes to variations in crop production and nitrogen use efficiency.Nat Food (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01155-6

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