Soil Health

Soil Health is a new spin on incorporating several agronomic and ecological principles to help ensure sustainable and productive systems.  Soil Health takes a holistic approach to managing natural systems and ensuring that processes and cycles mimic natural occurrences.  This will help ensure minimal inputs, sustainable output, increased resiliency, healthy and productive resources, and improved financial sustainability.

I recently went to a NRCS training on Soil Health.  Our instructor was Ray Archuleta from the NRCS East Technical Center.  He is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about improving soil health.  He has several videos on Ray the Soil Guy which are great viewing. 

He asked us some basic questions, like "Why do we care about soil?"; and "What do we want from our soils?".  The bottom line is we expect a lot from our soils and we quickly came to a unified understanding of just how important healthy and functioning soils are.


A living root adds carbon and exudates which feed the soil microbes
and builds soil structure.



Top 4 management tips:

1. Minimize soil disturbance; i.e. plowing



2. Maximize diversity of crops in rotation

3. Have a living root in the soil as often as possible

4. Keep the soil covered with plants and plant residues

I look forward to applying these management tips not only in the High Tunnel, but also in our pasture setting with an improved rotation.



The soil has good cover, a living root, and diversity in type of crop;
 i.e. cool season grass to a warm season broad leaf.



Other great links:



North Dakota Zero Tillage Association

NRCS Soil Biology



Knocking down a cover crop with a roller crimper and no-till planting directly behind it in one operation.