EcoSphere

Ground built by grass

Pergamino

Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

The Pampas, where no-till farming went from experiment to the default across an entire agricultural region.

The ground under

Pergamino, Buenos Aires Province

-33.8894, -60.5744 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

24.2g/kg

grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil

The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.

30 cmThe stock

65t/haModerate

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

The ordinary range for productive farmland and managed gardens in temperate Europe.

The exact spot you searched for is sealed — built over, paved or water — so there is no soil there to model. This reading is from open ground about 4 km away.

ISRIC — World Soil Information

Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.

deeperThe network

15 fungal records near here

Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.

Why this ground

Ground built by grass

Deep-rooted grassland puts carbon down rather than up. The richest agricultural soils on Earth were made this way, over thousands of years, and can be spent in a century.

The Argentine Pampas is grassland soil under crops, like Ukraine and the American Midwest. What makes it distinct is what happened from the 1990s onward: direct seeding without ploughing spread across the great majority of the cropped area, faster and more completely than almost anywhere else.

Ploughing breaks the soil open, exposes protected organic matter to air, and destroys the fungal networks that hold aggregates together. Not ploughing leaves that structure intact. The trade-offs are real and argued about — herbicide use, compaction, what happens in a wet year — but the scale of the shift makes this region a natural experiment.

Read this one next to Guymon. Same broad soil origin, opposite decisions about how to open the ground.

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Or measure somewhere else