Soil Health Institute Announces Methods for Evaluating Soil Health at a Continental Scale, Anticipates Actionable Data for Farmers, Ranchers and Policymakers by 2020.
WASHINGTON, May 18, 2018 – Soil health is gaining widespread attention because it promotes agricultural practices that are not only good for the farmer and rancher, but also good for the environment.
The lack of widely-applicable measurements and methods for assessing soil health has been a significant barrier to evaluating and adopting soil health practices and systems and ultimately ensuring sustainable agricultural productivity in the long term.
To address this need the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) awarded the Soil Health Institute (SHI), in collaboration with the Soil Health Partnership and The Nature Conservancy, a $9.4 million grant to advance soil health science and implement soil health management practices. The grant was matched by additional donors for a total investment of nearly $20 million. A full press release for the project can be found here.
A major goal for the project is to assess the ability of soil health indicators to detect differences in properties of soils that have been managed in different ways for at least 10 years. To gather useful data, it became necessary to identify the particular analytical method for each indicator being evaluated in the project. The Institute convened a panel of experts from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), several universities and the private sector to develop consensus on how each of 19 soil health indicators should be measured.