Coronavirus (COVID-19), environmental safety, and the dynamics of soil management

ABSTRACT

The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the epidemic of the Ebola virus, and currently the COVID-19 pandemic is an essential wake-up call for all countries to transform the approach to soil assessment and environmental management, and these diseases have proved how quickly a new virus can spread to every corner of the globe. With so many countries declaring the state of the emergency protocol due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, adopting and intensifying the provisions for the fourth industrial revolution technologies such as robotics and state-of-the-art mobile laboratories could be the only way to transform and expedite the approach to soil assessment, mapping, monitoring, and environmental management. This article proposes the four^th industrial revolution methodologies that can be adapted to assist the farmers and community in managing soils and the environment when the world nations are in a predicament of the pandemic such as COVID-19. The task would be to develop an outdoor automated or semi-autonomous machine vision system (drone or a robot) that can exceptionally substitute human labour on soil management tasks that are critical and cannot be performed by human labour as a result of COVID-19 national lockdown and any other related limitations of infield conventional assessment methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental health
• fourth industrial revolution
• graves
• natural resources management
• pandemics

The moral agency and the naturalistic intelligence guide that in this day of nature conservation and a strive for better environmental health and global food security, all nations and all fields of science and technology must work together in an endeavour to find ecological solutions for the health and social problems of the twenty-first century all over the world. This is more relevant now when most countries in the world are under lockdown due to an emerging, deadly, and rapidly evolving COVID-19 that has found its presence in more than 140 countries in all continents, evolving in most of them by local spreading.

Environmental contamination of surface water by graves

There is currently unprecedented pressure on the world governments to find an ecologically, socially, economically, and ethically sound resolution to the disposal of human bodies that succumbed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Factors that should be considered when selecting a site to construct large common burial pits are body decomposition, soil characteristics, the potential for groundwater contamination, vegetation and ecology, and the practicality of implementing contingency or mitigation measures (Williams et al. 2009). This is the time for the governments of various nations to enforce a minimum body burial depth as most nations start to be faced with mass graves. When a minimum soil depth for burial is not observed, the appearance of the dead on a soil surface in regions with highly erodible and degraded soils can occur. This dilemma of the appearance of the dead on a soil surface is also possible in other countries of the world with similar environmental conditions such as the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, which is on record as one of the three most degraded Provinces in South Africa (Meadows and Hoffman 2002). As of May 2020, the Eastern Cape Province had the fastest-growing cases of COVID-19 infections per day. Worse, the bodies could be floating in surface water, and taking time to identify if the body is from the shallow soils/graves more especially when the rural dwellers in those regions have views about soil erosion that are not supported by any science (Parwada and Van Tol 2016; Van Tol et al. 2016). A high level of soil erosion and land degradation in these areas are attributed to rainfall, drought, winds, and climate change readily transportable particles due to random frequency-magnitude variations such as inherent adjustments in the extended profiles of channels (Zhang et al. 2004; Ighodaro et al. 2013).

Old age farmers and COVID-19

In most countries, the farming population is growing older, and there are estimations that the typical age of commercial farmers around the world is approximately 55–60 years old (Poch et al. 2020). The nations that are severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are prioritising the young people over the old age on the allocation of hospital beds should realise that an old age farmer is the most reliable link in the food production chain of the years of food production experience. Also, it is considered important for those countries, i.e. USA, Italy, France, China, Spain, the UK, and South Africa, to acknowledge that a nation’s farmers are its most essential asset for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and land degradation neutrality targets committed by the countries within the United Nations Conventions to Combat Desertification. Marginalising the elderly in this COVID-19 times is risking the life of a farmer, the production of the productive part of limited fertile lands, and consequently, this can affect the future prices of food, despite the world knowing precisely that a vast percentage of the world population lives under poverty and food insecurity.

Humanure as a soil amendment during the pandemic

Humanure is human excrement (faeces and urine) recycled on agricultural soil as a soil conditioner (Mnkeni and Austin 2009). The implementation of urban farming through fertilisation with humanure has been a recurring agricultural technique (Richardson 2012). Despite all the benefits of humanure as a soil conditioner, the presence of incurable Coronavirus in the human excreta poses a challenge on the humanure as a soil amendment in urban farming and possible contamination of surface and underground water bodies, and therefore deserve urgent attention to ensure the success of agroecological agriculture. Even though there is no current evidence that human coronaviruses are present in surface or ground waters or transmitted through contaminated drinking-water (La Rosa et al. 2020), around 1.8 billion people worldwide use the faecal-contaminated source as drinking water. Therefore, the risk of transmission of COVID-19 is expected to increase by several folds if proper precautions are not being taken (Bhowmick et al. 2020). According to WHO (2019), as many as one in three of the world’s people do not enjoy access to safe and reliable water services, and 3 billion people worldwide do not have the necessary hand-washing facilities (soap and water) in their home. The U.N. has already stressed that approximately 95% of COVID-19 cases have taken place in urban settlements, with over 1,500 cities affected worldwide (Bhalla 2020). The enteric transmission of Coronavirus is possible, and the contaminated wastewater with the viral load can pose a threat to the people utilising that water source at downstream points (Lodder and de Roda Husman 2020). Coronavirus may lead to intestinal infection and become available in human excreta (WHO 2019). For example, the presence of Coronavirus in the faeces and the gastrointestinal symptoms associated with COVID-19 suggest Coronavirus could be spread via faeces because a recent study from China found just over half of 73 hospitalszed patients with COVID-19 had a virus in their faeces (Wu et al. 2020; Zhang et al. 2020). Isolation of 2019–nCoV from a stool specimen of a laboratory-confirmed case of COVID-19 (Hindson 2020). In France, by sampling sewage across greater Paris for more than 1 month, researchers have detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that correspond to the shape of the COVID-19 outbreak in the region (Leste-Lasserre 2020).

Robotics (Machine vision), drones, and soil assessment during COVID-19

The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the Ebola virus epidemic, and the COVID-19 pandemic are an essential wake-up call for all countries to revolutionise soil assessment and environmental management. These diseases have proved how quickly a new virus can spread to every corner of the globe. When the best system to control the spread of an airborne virus is to lockdown countries, then robotics could be the only actual labour to execute the soil scientists’ daily tasks. The task would be to develop an outdoor automated or semi-autonomous machine vision system (drone) or a robot that can exceptionally substitute human labour on soil management tasks that are critical and cannot be performed by human labour as a result of COVID-19 national lockdown and other limitations of conventional soil assessment methods. Machine vision attempts to replicate human behaviour and, after that, substitute human visual sense, perform an inspection task, and make judgment capabilities by electronically perceiving and understanding an image with a video camera (Domenico and Gary 1994; Brosnan and Sun 2004). Likewise, the machine vision system perfectly fits the soil management system's problem-solving strategy during the COVID-19 national lockdown. Another advantage of this technology is that the technology is an instantaneous non-destructive GPS operated that is comparatively low-cost and can do more in limited time and highly objective (Figure 1a and 1b).

Figure 1. (a and b). Developed by Dr. Arnold Schumann (University of Florida), the cart was retrofitted to make it semiautonomous, meaning it can be driven remotely. It has no steering wheel but does carry computers, and rear- and front-facing cameras for guidance and navigation. A driver sits indoors while the robot works in the field. It uses remote steering where a driver sits indoors behind some computer screens with a steering apparatus, remotely, and can drive it. This is also a drone.Photo credit: Arnold Schumann

Robotics precisely have the potential to evaluate soils and environments for prevention against waterlogging, contaminations, and water erosion, which can destroy the fertility, health, and, consequently, the productivity of the soil. This machine vision technique could be even more useful during the lockdown or restricted human movements in areas where agricultural lands are near industrial and mining areas where contamination of soils can happen due to chemical spills transported via running water or steep slopes. So, the creation and use of guided robots for agricultural use are inevitable and encouraged, especially now that the world is almost annually affected by pandemics that are easily transmitted from one person to another either by touching or airborne.

Mobile soil analytical laboratories with soil sensors

The deployment of mobile laboratories in soil and environmental monitoring cannot be overemphasised, especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, where most soil analytical laboratories are closed, and employees are not allowed to work due to national lockdowns. The use of mobile laboratories in soil and environmental sciences is an opportunity for farmers, government, agriculturists, multisector, and researchers to get instant results and recommendations. For example, the mobile laboratories placed in areas where Ebola virus disease was spreading dramatically during the recent outbreak in parts of West Africa drastically reduced the time between the collection of biological specimens and return of results, making them much more effective than central laboratories located far from the patients (Mansuy 2015). The shorter the delay in obtaining analytical results, the better the situation (Chowell et al. 2015). The design, specification, and cost of trailer laboratories for research and service to farmers and environmental monitors are critical when the nations are faced with a threat from a pandemic that has the potential to influence food security directly and consequently increase poverty and death tolls around the world for an extended period (Barrett 2010). Field tests revealed that mobile laboratories are among the most efficient research tools for environmental monitors, scientists, and are cheaper to construct and easy to operate (Went 1968). Meanwhile, research into remote laboratories showed that these mobile laboratories are a viable, low-cost solution for experimentation, providing uninterrupted access, low-maintenance requirements, environmentally friendly techniques, and a heightened sense of reality when compared to simulations (Iturrate et al. 2013). Also, mobile laboratories can be easily operated by one person who is a driver and a scientist in observation of the national rules of social distancing when the nations are affected by a deadly novel virus.

Conclusion

The quickly evolving new pandemics such as COVID-19 are catalysing the agricultural and environmental science community to quickly adopt the fourth industrial revolution's technological methods to keep up with soil, environmental planning, monitoring, and management on lockdown and citizens quarantined for a prescribed period. The need for adoption and upscaling of these technologies is gaining momentum within the Global Soil Partnership of the Food and Agriculture Organisation to contribute to food security and nutrition, provision of ecosystem services, and improving climate adaptation mitigation. Countries are urged to heed the call and prepare their systems for effective rollout and implementation of these innovations to ensure sustainable soil resources management, which underpins human health and prosperity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matshwene E. Moshia

Dr. Matshwene E. Moshia is a Fulbright Scholar, and a Professor of Soil Fertility Management and Plant Nutrition at the University of Fort Hare. His Soil Science fields of specialization covers Pedometrics, Precision Agriculture, and Environmental Soil Sciences.

Kopano C. Phefadu

Kopano C. Phefadu is a Soil Science lecturer and a Doctoral candidate with the University of Limpopo, School of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. He is an Agroecologist with a particular focus on soil health.

Ramakgwale K. Mampholo

Ramakgwale K. Mampholo is the Deputy Director in Land Use and Soil Management at the South African Government's Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. He is a South African leader and National Representative in Conservation Agriculture.

Loyiso L. Mzini

Dr. Loyiso L. Mzini graduated with a Masters of Science in Environmental Sciences from the University of Cape Town. He also received a Ph.D. degree in Agro-environmental Science from the Universita di Bologna, Italy. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Horticultural Sciences at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa.

Alen Manyevere

Dr. Alen Manyevere is a Senior Lecturer in Soil Sciences at the University of Fort Hare. His Soil Science fields of specialization cover Geomorphology, Pedology, and Pedometrics.