In his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, economist Theodore Schultz (1979) remarked, “Most of the world’s poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor”. If agriculture, then, largely determines the fate of the world’s poor, soil health has a fundamental role to play, given its impact on agriculture. In this paper, we lay out the deep relationships between soil health, agriculture, and poverty, and their implications for policy making. We focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG 1): No Poverty (United Nations, n.d.- a), which seeks to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. Extreme poverty is defined as surviving on less than $2.15 per person per day, at 2017 prices. We use the Intergovernmental Technical Panel’s definition of soil health: “. . . the ability of the soil to sustain the productivity, diversity, and environmental services of terrestrial ecosystem” (FAO, 2020).