By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER

Ohio Correspondent

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — There’s lately been an explosion of interest in soil health. Policymakers have put forth state legislative bills and local initiatives geared at stimulating healthy soils, so the Izaak Walton League of America (IWLA) gathered many for its recent State and Local Soil Health Strategies report.

"We're excited by that interest because we think soil health has so many benefits for water quality, storing carbon in the soil, resilience for our food system, and helping improve the farmers' bottom line and that of our rural communities," said Duane Hovorka, Agriculture Program director for IWLA.

"We want to spread those ideas, and the point of the report is to get some of these ideas – some of them have been adopted, some have just been proposed – out there."

The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship came up with a $5 discount per acre for crop insurance for farmers who plant cover crops, Hovorka said. It’s a new way of thinking about funding incentives.

The Champaign County, Ill., Soil and Water Conservation District created Saving Tomorrow’s Agriculture Resources (STAR) as a free tool to help farmers and landowners assess their nutrient and soil loss practices at a field level. The STAR evaluation assigns points for each nutrient management, cropping, tillage, and soil conservation activity on each field.

Each field earns 1-5 stars based on the points awarded, allowing farmers to see how their conservation system compares to other farmers and best management practices.

“We’re trying to get these ideas into the hands of a lot more state and local policymakers so they can see what’s going on in other areas, and hopefully jump on the best ideas that they could copy and build on in their states,” Hovorka explained.

Included in the report is The Ohio State University’s Healthy Soil Healthy Environment program, now in its second year, said Alan Sundermeier, Wood County extension educator and program leader. This is a statewide signature program for extension, which means it is something almost every county in Ohio should be able to access.

“Soil health is a national topic,” he said. “The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has a soil health division. Private companies are looking at soil health.”

OSU’s program promotes no tillage and cover crops to help improve the soil, as the basic starting principles, Sundermeier explained. The next step is looking at a variety of methods to encourage better rotations, better management of soil inputs, maybe reducing some fertilizer and pesticides, and more natural-type systems.

“Not necessarily organic, but maybe using some of the principles of organic farming, that could be applied on a larger, conventional scale,” he said. “We see too much soil compaction, too much non-rotation, and the reduction of crop yields and crop quality, and more pests.

“Chemical agriculture has overcome a lot of obstacles. At some point, there will be a limitation to what fertilizer and pesticides can overcome if you don’t have proper soil supporting the plants. We haven’t reached that tipping point yet, but as yields continue to slide and as weather conditions get more challenging, we have to look at these natural systems that can overcome that.

“We’re seeing across the country the benefit of changing our paradigm, trying to improve our soil productivity more naturally,” Sundermeier added.

To read the IWLA report, visit http://bit.ly/SHIcatalog