Developing Soil Health Benchmarks in the Cotton Belt
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
Triple S, or spring soil sampling, is upon us. Dianna Bagnall, Research Soil Scientist with the Soil Health Institute shares details about what that consists of this spring as far as their work is concerned in the Cotton Belt….
“The Soil Health Institute is sampling soils on cotton farms throughout the Cotton Belt in partnership with the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol as a part of the U.S. Climate Smart Cotton Program. And specifically our teams are going to be in Alabama in 2024. We’ll be in the Highland Rim portion of Alabama and also in the Blackland Prairie of Alabama.”
It’ll include Mississippi as well as the Carolinas as they measure for indicators of soil health…
“We’ll be looking at soil organic carbon. We’ll be looking at aggregate stability measurements and potential carbon mineralization, kind of a measure of our microbial activity in soils. And we’ll also be capturing plant available water holding capacity. We’re also out to set benchmarks, and so these benchmarks are going to be data-driven estimates of soil health and organic carbon stock levels that the soils in that particular area could achieve if they had minimized physical disturbance, things like tillage, and maximized time with living roots. So growers can use this benchmark to set their innovation goals, what they would like to achieve in their particular soils and climates.”
She pushes you to www.soilhealthinstitute.org for more details.
