On this sun-baked, thin soil plants have to be tough to survive.
Erosion has stripped away the often thin soil cover and caused serious silting of streams.
Boulders jut treacherously through the thin soil of left and center fields.
With thin soil, few nutrients, and almost no resources, rainforests could never qualify for a loan.
The younger western slopes have a thin soil covering unlike the lush eastern slopes.
On sites with thin soil, the effect was that much more severe.
Even within zones of cultivation, the presence of steep slopes and thin soil further reduced the area of cultivation.
But public opinion can be pretty shallow, pretty volatile, often rooted in nothing deeper than whatever's being reported in the Daily Beast this week: thin soil.
Goma Puri's three-year-old son, sleeping while his mother worked the thin soil of the steeply terraced wheat fields, was killed.
It is a dreadfully wasteful process because the thin soil is quickly exhausted and ranchers move farther into the jungle, leaving a devastated landscape behind them.
The sheep, horses, goats and pigs brought by Europeans, however, have hard hooves, which compress the thin soil and cause erosion.
