ABSTRACT Achieving the EU Soil Strategy's goal of 75% healthy soils by 2030 critically relies on farmers, who are expected to act as soil stewards. This article explores the conditions external to farms that shape soil management decisions and we examine what these conditions imply for opportunities for achieving healthy soils. Drawing on a farming systems perspective, we conceptualize soil management as an outcome of interrelated ecological, economic, social, and policy dynamics, rather than individual decision‐making alone. We identify five key domains (ownership and finance, farming structure, markets and value chains, technology and data governance, and policy regimes) that jointly enable or constrain soil stewardship. We show how changes to these underlying conditions limit the abilities of individual farmers to engage in long‐term soil care. The analysis further underscores that to understand soil stewardship, we need to move beyond actor‐centric approaches toward agri‐food system‐level interventions that also consider dynamics that are beyond the reach of individual land‐users. Strengthening soil health therefore requires a reconfiguration of the institutional, financial, and technological conditions governing agricultural soil management, rather than a narrow focus on farmers' individual practices and decision making.
Thorsøe et al. (Sun,) studied this question.