Establishing Soil Health and Carbon Benchmarks

Interpretation of any soil health indicator requires defining what values are ideal.

Overview

How can we quantify soil health across the range of soils in cropping systems?

The Soil Health Institute (SHI) has developed a process using locally relevant benchmarks to assess soil health by comparing indicators of soil health across management systems that differ in the adoption of soil health practices. Benchmarking involves a soil sampling process that is implemented at the appropriate scale to control for climate, soil type, and management differences.

SHI’s Soil Health Benchmarks Program as a Decision-Support Tool

SHI has developed the Soil Health Benchmarks program to support farmers’ decisions concerning the production of food, feed, and fiber. A farmer using Soil Health Benchmarks is given the measured values of soil health indicators from their fields and the soil health indicator values aggregated by management systems sampled in the region.

The program is designed to compare managements that differ in soil health practices, especially the degree of physical soil disturbance and length of time with living roots in the cropping system, within similar soils of a small geographic region. One common application of the program compares data grouped into three management systems:

  • Baseline Management System (‘Baseline’): A regionally common management system that may include some soil health practices, but not all of them.
  • Soil Health Management System (‘Soil Health’): A management system with adoption of one or more soil health practice(s) compared to the Baseline system.
  • Benchmark Management Systems (‘Benchmark’): A system that represents the local potential of soil health and is characterized by continuous living roots and lack of physical disturbance.

The intention of this program is that a farmer, given this information, will be inspired to innovate and adopt practices to improve soil health and optimize soil function to efficiently cycle and store water, nutrients, and carbon. The success of this program would mean that a farmer sets a ‘Goal’ value for one or more soil health indicator(s) and will implement new soil health practices to reach that ‘Goal.’

 

 

A Pragmatic Sampling Framework for Benchmarking Soil Health at Scale