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Noble Institute, Farm Foundation pushing soil health in action plan
 
By RACHEL LANE
D.C. Correspondent
 
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Most farmers will explain how soil is important, but a new action plan details how to make that information available to all farmers, politicians, conservationists and more.
 
The Soil Health Action Plan was released last week after four years of work from the Soil Health Institute (SHI), which was formed after several different organizations realized there was information available about soil health, but none found in a single location.

The lack of cohesion between the groups led to the Soil Renaissance in 2013, when the Noble Research Institute and the Farm Foundation, NFP convened leaders from agriculture, government agencies and non-governmental organizations to examine the state of the world’s soil health and its role in a vibrant, profitable and sustainable ecosystem.

“People have been interested in soil health since (Thomas) Jefferson,” said Bill Buckner, president and CEO of the Noble Institute. Recently, the need for a roadmap linking the efforts of researchers and results caused people around the world to work together.

The action plan focuses on what data are still needed and possible ways to get the information while letting others know what can be done immediately to improve soil health and the economic impact of better soil – including the financial benefit to farmers receiving high crop yields, less soil erosion and better nutrient levels.

In the future, healthier soil may lower crop insurance premiums because it retains more water, said Wayne Honeycutt, president and CEP of the SHI. “It represents one of those rare win-win situations where what’s good for the farm and the farmer is good for the environment,” he noted.

Constance Cullman, president of Farm Foundation, said the plan tried to address the different types of soil, different regions of the country and different crops. While there are still knowledge gaps, benefits of soil health have been found in all soil types when organic material increases.

“We were really excited about the energy in the room when people talked about soil health,” she said.

As the Soil Renaissance conversation expanded to include more stakeholders, it became apparent to the members of the Noble Institute and Farm Foundation that another organization was needed. The stakeholders continued to work together until the action plan was formed.

Cullman said every question answered leads to opportunities for more sophisticated understanding of soil health. The next steps are to provide education about the benefits of it and to find funding from nontraditional stakeholders to help fund the research.

“In industry, we talk a lot, but it’s when we actually put those action plan steps into place that we really start to make some good progress,” she explained. She said farmers have been doing soil tests and composition of soil nutrients for a while. Soon, they will be able to look at more aspects of the soil to determine how it should be treated for production agriculture. Starting to build the record of the condition of the soil will be important in a few years, even if farmers don’t decide to take any other action right now.

“We’re excited about this action plan. There has been a lot of good conversation that has gone into this,” Cullman said. “It’s exciting to see a tangible plan in place for how to work across all those different stakeholders and folks involved in agriculture and soil health.”

The soil health plan can be found online at http://soilhealthinstitute.org/soil-healthinstitute-announces-action-plan 
5/25/2017