I love this article, it talks about soil as a living organism and trees are necessary to keep soil healthy and prevent it from eroding away.
https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/news/ ... eath-feet/
Soil food
Similar to how people can feed probiotics and prebiotics to the microbes in their guts to improve their health, farmers can use cover crops and apply compost, yard waste and other organic matter to feed microbes in the soil. Reduced tillage, efficient irrigation and other methods also strengthen the soil’s ability to store carbon.
Such techniques have long been used by farmers to enhance soil—particularly on organic and small farms.
“This is ancient knowledge, really,” said Pelaymo Alvarez, outreach director for the Petaluma-based Carbon Cycle Institute and a graduate of UC Davis. “When you increase soil organic matter in the soil, good things happen. But climate change is bringing new attention to it. And regardless of climate change, we should be doing this for many reasons—for productivity, erosion control, drought tolerance. It’s going back to our roots, no pun intended.”