Our transcription: Like water, soil is a geological resource essential to sustaining civilization.
For farmers like Wayne Soppeland, who lives in California's Mojave Desert, maintaining a fertile, plentiful supply of soil is an ongoing struggle.
The chief threat is erosion, which can be caused by either rain or wind.
Rain is a fairly minor situation here in the desert.
We only have four inches of annual rainfall.
Sometimes it all comes at one time, and we do have some runoff from sloping parcels or some stream bank erosion in streams that are normally dry, but that's relatively minimal.
Our major problem with soil erosion results from the wind, and that can happen at any time of the year: winter, summer, fall.
It doesn't matter, and we have fairly heavy winds for long periods of time, and we have to take a number of precautions related to that.
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