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Workshop speakers lament lack of data for soil health decisions

 

 

By RACHEL LANE

D.C. Correspondent

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — While many analysts, scientists and farmers agree soil health is important, data on how healthy soil can affect crops still need to be collected.

Soil has been a focus in 2015 for many U.S. agricultural programs. As part of this International Year of Soils, the USDA and Farm Foundation hosted a joint workshop Sept. 21-22, "Soil Renaissance: Economics of Soil Health." It focused on how soil health can assist farms with crops, livestock feeding and public benefits.

"This isn’t an issue just for us. Look around the globe and you will see we have degraded soils everywhere," said Jim Moseley, an Indiana farmer and co-chair of AGree, a nonprofit that seeks to improve food and agriculture systems.

As a farmer, he told the assemblage he’s recognized the importance of soil health for decades. In the 1980s, he spoke to the U.S. EPA about how healthy soil has been shown to help with water – both in drought conditions and flooding, by having better water absorption – but no one at the EPA paid attention.

He attended Senate hearings, climate change workshops and other events, discussing the importance of soil health, but said no one paid attention until the past decade. Moseley hopes the awareness of the issue has arrived quickly enough to assist with climate issues, but said scientists are going to need to work with farmers to collect the data needed.

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is working on a tool to assist farmers in making decisions about the use of cover crops. It takes into account tilling practices, herbicide use, erosion and other factors, said Lauren Cartwright, a Missouri NRCS state economist.

"We don’t know how many years it will take to get 1 percent soil health increase," she said. There are some data available, but it is not significant. "We can’t say (the spreadsheet) is 100 percent accurate. We worked with several farmers and all are different, but this is a starting point for the conversation."

Roger Claassen, with the USDA Economic Research Service, said farmers want data before implementing new practices but to get that information, farmers need to first report data. He has been working on recording no-till data, determining if farmers are using the practice across the entire farm, only on certain fields or if some fields sometimes are no-till and other times tilled or strip-tilled.

Farmers are asked about practices on specific fields for the previous three years. "No one went from tilling to 100 percent no-till in a single year," he said.

The data did indicate highly drained and erodible soil was more likely to be no-till while poorly drained and not-likely-to-erode soil received the most tilling. Cover crops were used most often in the Southeast while the Midwest, the Corn Belt, was the region least likely to use cover.

"I’m not equating no-till with soil health, but it’s often equated," Claassen said. "No-till seemed like the right thing to talk about today because we have a pretty rich data system on it."

He said in the end, farmers are deciding what will produce the best yield on the farm at the end of the year. They know how to operate a no-till field, they know the technology and how it will affect the farm in the coming years. Those are the data missing from the soil health conversation.

"Whatever soil health is, we need to be able to measure it. If we can’t measure it, we can’t achieve it," said Bruce Knight, founder of Strategic Conservation Solutions, LLC.

Fertilizer is an area of data missing from the soil health conversation, he said. Without that information, decisions cannot be made.

He would like to have a system in place to allow farmers to anonymously provide data. If someone in the county is already using cover crops, the farmer could input the data and other farmers in the region would be able to see how cover might work on their own farms, with more information on which to base decisions.

10/7/2015