By MATTHEW D. ERNST

Missouri Correspondent

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Dan DeSutter, who farms more than 5,000 acres near Attica, Ind., puts soil health front and center as he rethinks the way he operates.

“We think soil health may unlock our ability to produce $10 (certified organic per bushel) corn,” said DeSutter, who is transitioning from conventional to certified organic production.

Most producers are aware of basic soil health indicators, such as the percentage of organic matter. He saw soil organic matter increase on one farm from 1.8 to nearly 4 percent, after 15 years of cover-cropping, he said at an April meeting in St. Louis.

But one challenge for landowners and farmers is to evaluate and quantify how different practices, including cover crops, impact other measures of healthy soils.

“Soils are the most biologically diverse ecosystem,” said Jennifer Moore-Kucera, West Regional Soil Health team leader for USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Oregon. Since soil organic matter is linked to microorganism activity, researchers are finding there is still much to learn about “how can management influence and help support higher soil organisms?”

Soil’s biological diversity, and the range of soil types used to grow row crops, make national soil health measurements difficult to standardize. A research initiative announced in May puts nearly $20 million, funded from public and private sources, toward developing national soil health standards.

The project involves both laboratory research and farm outreach through three nonprofit organizations. Researchers will develop and test soil health measurements at the Soil Health Institute in North Carolina. The Soil Health Partnership (SHP), an initiative administered by National Corn Growers Assoc., will implement and evaluate soil health practices on working farms across 12 states.

And The Nature Conservancy will work with non-farmer landowners on education about using science-based soil health practices. “This grant represents one of the largest investments ever made in soil health, one of the best tools we have to optimize productivity while minimizing environmental impact,” said Nick Goeser, SHP director.

The project combines $9.4 million in funding from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, established in the last farm bill, with matching funds from private sponsors. The private and foundation donor list includes General Mills, the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, Midwest Row Crop Collaborative, Monsanto, Nestlé Purina PetCare Co., The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Walmart Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Soil health initiatives are likely attractive to donors, as they provide ways to improve natural resource stewardship while producing ingredients widely used by manufacturers of food and consumer packaged goods.

Other efforts are also ongoing. Unilever this season reactivated a cover crop cost share program for producers growing soybeans that are crushed for use in Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

The microbiome

DeSutter and Moore-Kucera both spoke on the soil health track at the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education national conference in St. Louis this year. Research into the soil microbiome, at the molecular level, is the next step in soil health research, said Moore-Kucera.

“If we really want to understand how soil health can be enhanced in different regions, we need to understand what the biology is doing,” she explained.

Soil biology has been difficult to pin down. “Soil health assessment really has to be at all of the spheres – the chemical, the physical and the biological,” she said. “That biological piece has kind of been that sort of Holy Grail of how the whole system comes together.”

Soil microbiome research, which the USDA has prioritized for funding, is set to explode the information available about soil health, she said.

DeSutter is looking for every piece of information he can get as he looks to make his farm more productive without the use of the conventional tools he long used. He has shifted to a rotation that includes wheat and is using a cover crop strategy that keeps living plant roots in the ground year-round.

“What we’ve seen is that as diversity increases, weed pressure decreases, pest pressure decreases, fertility needs decrease, inputs in general decrease and yields increase. That’s a pretty good recipe for the bottom line,” he said.

He is no longtime organic farmer, just now in the process of transitioning cropland to certified organic. He spent four years of high corn prices growing mostly no-till continuous corn, when prices and crop insurance made that system a financial no-brainer.

But he spent three months as an Eisenhower Fellow in New Zealand and Australia, studying agricultural systems there and thinking about how to keep his farms productive with healthy soils for the long-term. He’s banking a lot on improving soil biology.

He thinks that more intensive crop rotations and management, including time “under hoof” from livestock on row crop ground, and less intensive chemical usage will benefit his soils.

DeSutter has seen soil organic matter increase on a farm where he used cover crops for 15 years. But he sees a lot of room for improvement, because there is still little difference in some measures of soil microbiological diversity on his long-term cover crop farm, when compared to corn-soybean fields on neighboring farms.

He thinks a year-round cover could be a key to unlock more microorganisms for which researchers are still identifying positive benefits.

“When we think of native prairie, there’s a hundred different species of plants on the native prairie. That’s how the system’s designed to work,” said DeSutter. “We’ll never get to that, but we’ve got a lot of room for improvement over where we’re at now.”