Soil moisture and temperature are key drivers of agricultural productivity. These factors dictate planting schedules, crop development, and the timing of field operations.
Farmers are slowly adopting soil health management as an approach to increase the resilience of their operation. This includes reducing soil disturbance, increasing soil coverage, promoting biodiversity, and maintaining living roots throughout the year. Some are hesitant to make a management change due to the unknowns on how spring temperatures and soil water content will be affected.
Farmers often share anecdotal information about the presence of standing water in fields following an extreme precipitation event, wondering if soil health management can improve farm resilience by improving water infiltration during storms and increasing water holding capacity during droughts.
Sand County Foundation’s soil health initiative aims to support the anecdotal experiences with on-farm data.
Applying a peer-to-peer learning approach, farmers already implementing soil health management are paired with a neighbor farming on similar soils but not yet implementing soil health principles. The aim is to quantify how infiltration, water holding capacity, soil trafficability, leaching potential, aggregate stability, and other soil properties are influenced by farm management.
Each farmer's field has a sensor installed, which they can access from their cell phone to observe their field’s real-time soil moisture and temperature data. Not only can they access the data to improve their day-to-day decision making, they can pull data up while meeting with other farmers to show what is happening below the soil surface during extreme climate conditions.
Sand County Foundation's goal is to expand this work across different geographic regions to evaluate the data under varying climates and expand the reach of these peer-learning networks. To learn more contact: Heidi Peterson, PhD. 612.504.7186 hpeterson@sandcountyfoundation.org
Empowering Conservation Champions: Real-Time Soil Metrics
SOIL HEALTH MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
1) Minimize Soil Disturbance
2) Maximize Soil Cover
3) Maximize Plant Diversity
4) Maximize Presence of Living Plants/Roots
5) Integrate Livestock
