The Impact and Benefits of Soil Management & Research

Healthy, nutrient-rich and biodiverse soil is not only vital to the sustainability of global agriculture, but it is essential for farmers to grow nutritious crops that keep humans healthy.

This concept—improving soil health—is a concept that has really caught fire across a large portion of Kenya farming systems. Farmers realize that not only are there multiple environmental benefits in improving soil health, but it also improves the profitability of their operation by supporting higher yields, retaining water deeper in the profile that improves resilience to drought and more. There’s a little bit of up-front investment, but a huge amount of long-term payoff.

Policy decisions that prevent the adoption of plant science and soil management technologies have had a huge negative impact on our ability to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and on our ability to avoid soil degradation. These technologies are absolutely critical to maintaining healthy soils.

Healthy soils are not just about maintaining farm yields either, they are also about improving communities and livelihoods. It is directly harmful to people in these areas that are unable to farm, maintain crops – especially during droughts – and avoid excessive loss of soil as well as they could be. There’s a whole host of bad things that happen when you don’t use these regenerative farming techniques to help restore soil organic matter and basically leave the field in a better place for future generations.

Healthy soil retains more water, which means you can actually reduce the amount of runoff, sediment and erosion in those fields. We can employ practices in our agriculture systems to help reduce the impacts to water quality. These very same practices have benefits to soil health. So, there is an interaction there, and therefore it’s important for people to be aware of that and support practices that help farmers make the right decision with respect to how they grow their crops.

Studies have demonstrated that if you’re growing crops in healthy soils, you actually see improved nutrition profiles in the crops. Even when it’s used as animal feed, all those nutrients that go into the animal ultimately end up in the animal products we consume. So, every effort that the farmer employs to improve soil health ultimately has other tremendously positive impacts, from economic, environmental and human health perspectives.

There are two big ways in which soil health helps us in climate change – adaptation and mitigation. Adaptation is where we attempt to adapt to climate as it changes around the world. We can see temperatures rising of course, but for most farmers, the biggest issues are unpredictable droughts and heavy rains. Farms with healthy soil can absorb those heavy rainstorms much better than the ones not employing practices like conservation tillage and cover crops. It is absolutely true that we can adapt to climate change better and build our resilience to more extreme weather by having healthy soils.

The other side is mitigation. As we all know, the most important of the greenhouse gases associated with humankind is CO2, and of course the “C” is carbon. Soil itself has carbon in the form of primarily organic matter, and it’s that organic fraction of carbon in soils that can be enhanced through the use of the types of practices we are talking about – conservation tillage, cover crops, rotation, etc. – thus reducing it in the atmosphere.

Impact of crop protection and plant biotechnology
Soil health involves everything from nutrient management to microbial activity to compaction and moisture retention. As the industry continues to innovate, we ask ourselves things like, “How can that technology reduce the number of passes through the field and, by extension, the potential for compaction?” or “How does this new product or approach help us put nutrients in the right place at the right time, without negatively impacting the microbes in the soil or losing nutrients into the surrounding environment?”

Technology and plant science innovations can go hand-in-hand with the work researchers are doing.

Integrated pest management effect to preserve soil health
Having healthy soils is foundational to a long-term, sustainable future for agriculture – from building soil structure to increasing water-holding capacity to fixing nitrogen and sequestering carbon. If we can focus on increasing the productivity and functionality of our soils, we have a greater likelihood of farming in a way that is both economically and environmentally viable for many generations to come.

Many soil health practices have cobenefits that improve wildlife habitat, biodiversity and the environment. Our partnerships with leaders in measuring those specific co-benefits allow us to share the whole story of agricultural sustainability.

We believe that, as farmers and people who work in agriculture, we have a responsibility to take care of the resources we’ve been given. Being a good steward of the land, water and air is something that the farmers we work with care deeply about. Thinking through how a certain management practice – for example, tillage, cover crops or grazing livestock – impacts not only yields but the other systems in our environment is something we discuss with growers regularly.

What type of technologies are used to study soil health?
On the farm, we leverage technology in a number of different ways. We use drone UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), which are a great tool during our field checks in combination with traditional on-the-ground observations.

There have also been significant advancements in the ability to measure soil properties and functions, both in the field and in the lab. We continue to connect farmers to those resources and implement them where feasible given research design.

Economic implications of failing soil health 
Economics can’t be left out of any conversation around sustainability or conservation – after all, it’s in our mission to build soil health in a way that is not only environmentally beneficial but also economically beneficial. If we don’t invest in building soil health, costs can add up in multiple ways.

I prefer not to think of what we could lose, though, but rather what we stand to gain. We’ve been involved in financial analyses that continue to show that practices like reduced tillage save farmers money in reduced labor and fuel, as well as save time by making fewer passes across the field. And while the financials around cover cropping are more complex – since there is an additional investment in seed costs and time to plant/terminate – there are longterm benefits when you look at what you can gain in microbial activity, nutrient cycling, potential weed control, moisture uptake, etc.

The big thing to remember is that yield isn’t the only way to measure success. Having a goal for implementing a practice is key to evaluating success. When we start looking at things like reduced expenses, net profit over time, and resiliency to weather, there are definite benefits to investing in soil health.

Connecting with food systems
Soil is the base of the FoodShot—you have got to start from the ground up. You can’t have a healthy food system if you are degrading your soil. And there are a lot of historical examples of societies that destroy their soils and are faced with, basically, the end of their empires.

The life within soil, the microbiome is incredibly complex. We are just unlocking the secrets that are absolutely essential to soil function, nutrient cycling, plant health, disease prevention, carbon sequestration, soil fertilities and so on.

Regenerative healthy soil practices
We can’t continue to grow land on soil that’s been depleted and eroded. One of the biggest challenges in feeding the planet is to do it without expanding the amount of land cultivated. The more that we expand agricultural land, the more we push into forests, grasslands and natural habitats.

We really need to think about regenerating and restoring the health of the soil we are already using. A lot of that is about how you manage though, and there are some really simple ways like crop rotation, cover crops, no-till and other technologies to reduce the amount of land we need.

We have to do more with less and be more efficient to feed the planet without converting the entire planet to land for crops. We must start with managing the soil we are using already.

Impact of innovations in plant science to soil carbon measurement and microbiome functionality
A lot of companies are now looking at harnessing the microbiome and the biology of soil to improve and protect soil health. In some ways, we have the ability to be much more precise now in the tools that we use. We really need to be focused on identifying those tools and making sure that they’re usable and affordable. There are real opportunities to evolve into a healthier food system that supports ecosystem biodiversity and farmer profitability at the same time.

What impact does soil erosion have on smallholder farmers in the Philippines? Salguero: Soil erosion is undermining productivity for smallholder farmers in sloping areas. Soil erosion causes fertile topsoil to be carried away and lost. In some cases, farms are totally lost due to stream bank erosion. Erosion also impacts farms in low-lying areas. The soil lost from sloping areas gets deposited at lower elevations, blocking the flow of water from the river systems. This causes more frequent flooding and consequently, the destruction of crops and properties.