Sustainable agriculture must preserve the soil so that it can be used agriculturally in the long term. Communities adapt their farming practices to face environmental, economic and social challenges. This process of adaptation can be supported by research, but only if we understand the soil, how its properties, potential and limitations vary in space and how communities have adapted their farming practices in the past. Soil survey has conventionally been a way to generate knowledge about the variation of the soil and how it is used.   At present the development of sustainable agriculture is a challenge in many countries, particularly in the global south, not least because of climate change. Tackling these problems requires collaboration between different specialists. Whether a technical solution will succeed will always depend, at least in part, on social factors. Is an innovation compatible with practices, values and traditions of a community?  Does it affect how agricultural labour is divided over time, between social groups, between adults and children and between genders?  Studies of farming systems also show that these have rarely been fixed, but have changed over time, in response to different social and environmental factors. This suggests that a historical perspective on sustainable agriculture could be just as important as the perspective of the natural and social sciences in developing robust, equitable and effective solutions to contemporary problems in food security. We contend that collaborative study of the processes and products of soil survey from the colonial era (1930s in southern Sub-Saharan Africa, SSA) until the late 20th century, would provide a context in which natural scientists, social scientists and historians could develop an integrated approach to understanding sustainable agriculture. It would also address a very pressing practical problem.  This problem is the scarcity of information on the soil and its variation in space over most of SSA. Collecting soil data is costly, and few people have the expertise to do it. Yet, the soil surveys produced in Africa in the past, have rarely been mobilised to address contemporary problems. We contend that these sources provide a unique window into past decisions and assumptions about the soil, whose effects are still felt today. In these soil surveys are embedded a rich set of observations and interpretations, along with hard data (soil analyses) and maps.   However, old surveys cannot just be dusted off and used as if new. First, there is the technical challenge of determining whether the analyses are still reliable. Furthermore, the survey was commissioned in a particular historical context to address particular problems. Farming was done by communities with particular structures and power relations, and some perspectives will have influenced surveyors more than others. In short, the soil scientist, historian and social scientist all have a critical role in the process of appra