Enhancing Drought Resilience in Soils

Overview

Farmers know that soil health-promoting practices increase soil organic carbon, drought resilience, and farm profitability. Despite this, equations provided in soil science literature have not shown this relationship in the past. As a result, farmers have not had been able to estimate how a management practice will change their farm’s drought resilience. Data from the North American Project to Evaluate Soil Health has allowed scientists at the Soil Health Institute to create new equations. These equations capture the link between soil organic carbon and plant-available water. The newly collected data include the effects of soil health-promoting practices and soil structure. The new equations have been embedded into COMET-Farm so that producers can see how their available water holding capacity can be increased when switching to soil health management practices.



Funders

Enhancing Drought Resilience in Soils was conducted in partnership with Colorado State University and supported by the generosity of the United Soybean Board.