Healthy Soil Is Alive, Productive, & Profitable
Soil is SO much more than some medium that we grow food in or an ‘empty tank’ that we need to throw nutrients into. Soil is a diverse living community. Soil is ALIVE! And we need to view it and treat is as such.
Often the question most people have when it comes to regenerative farming is something along the lines of ‘regenerative farming, where to start?’. Looking at and addressing your soil health is a great place to start as it underpins the workability of your farm both environmentally and financially.
Why soil health is important is because having healthy soil supplies nutrients, water, and oxygen for healthy plant growth and diverse, symbiotic interactions with soil biology to be created, it allows for water drainage and retention to create resilience to climate extremes of drought and flood, resists erosion, allows for gas exchange and limits greenhouse gas emissions, sequesters carbon, and resists disease.
What is soil health? There are many different definitions of soil health out there, but in a nutshell, healthy soil is soil that is functioning as a living system, carrying out ecosystem functions that support plant and animal health and productivity, maintain or enhance environmental quality, and underpin the very survival of us human beings. The health of soil depends on favourable interactions between microbes, plants, animals, and us.
There are 5 principles of soil health under the umbrella of regenerative agriculture; soil armour, diversity, maintaining a living root and allowing full plant recovery, integrating livestock, minimising soil disturbance, and of course your context is key when aligning your management with these principles.
Soil Armour: keeping the soil covered.
Covered soil is protected from wind, water, and livestock erosion. Covered soil provides habitat and food and buffers temperature extremes for soil biology to carry out functions of nutrient release and cycling, carbon sequestration, and soil aggregation. This results in improved soil structure and aeration, water holding capacity and infiltration, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, bare soil is susceptible to drought and flooding, and doesn’t provide an environment for favourable interactions to occur within the soil ecosystem. Look at limiting your tillage, and grazing management is important here too; i.e. not grazing too short or grazing in a way that allows for gaps to appear in our pastures, as well as looking at how you can use diverse perennial species in your pasture to ensure that you have soil cover all year round.
Diversity: manage for maximum diversity
Diversity above ground is matched with diversity below ground. Microorganisms can improve soil health dramatically so we want our management to foster them; think planting cover crops and diverse perennial pasture mixes, and looking ‘outside the box’ with what stock classes you run. Just like a diverse diet for yourself increases your health and wellbeing, the more diversity of plants and rooting structures in the soil, and different stock classes excreting their biologically diverse dung, the healthier your farm and everything that you harvest from it.
Roots & Recovery: maintain a living root, and allow your pastures to recover!
Maintaining living roots in your soil for as much of the year as possible is vital to feeding soil biology to ensure their services continue. Living roots are especially key to carbon sequestration in keeping the Liquid Carbon Pathway open. Equally important as maintaining living roots is not stunting or reversing root growth through overgrazing and allowing plants to recover fully after each grazing event. This allows for plant roots to grow longer and deeper, essentially growing your farm vertically.
Livestock Integration: livestock are essential to improve soil health
Managing for covered soil, and maintaining diversity and green growing plants throughout the year will get you on your way to regenerating your soils, but the real benefits start to appear when you add livestock. Livestock function as walking composters; dispersing seeds, and bringing biology and fertility back to soils that are otherwise poorly functioning. You can use your livestock to break and aerate capped soils and lay down soil armour. Livestock function as a walking composter; dispersing seeds, bringing biology and fertility back to soils that are otherwise poorly functioning. Research has found that health and growth benefits in plants are achieved when enzymes from livestock saliva is left on plants, and the kinetic energy created by animal hooves stimulates soil biology.
Minimise disturbance: soil health can be affected by disturbance quite easily – so don’t mess with your soil!
Minimising or better yet, eliminating mechanical cultivation is fundamental in allowing soil microbes, in particular fungi, to survive and thrive in our soils. Cultivation is not the only form or disturbance; synthetic fertilisers and chemical sprays such as herbicides and pesticides are just as detrimental to microbial populations, which needs to be considered when making management decisions. Conventional parasite drenches also disrupt biological function, rendering dung lifeless and preventing it's nutrients from being cycled back through the soil food web.
Context is EVERYTHING
Context is defined as the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood. Everyone has a different context and a different context for their farm; who is involved in your farming operation, your environmental factors, your farm vision, etc. This is why we don’t believe in the one size fits all approach to regenerative farming and our coaching – it’s catered to you!
When assessing the health of your soils, it’s not just about the nutrient report. The power of a keen eye and gut feeling should not be underestimated! There are soil health indicators to look at when observing and assessing the health of your soils, including soil structure, porosity, mottling, rooting depth, colour, smell, earthworm abundance, and more. Carrying out a water infiltration tests allows you to gauge the capacity of your soils to drain water and therefore how they will respond in rainfall events. Will your soil drain freely or waterlog and erode? Penetrometer readings give you an indication of the level of compaction present in your soils and therefore the state of your soil structure, aeration, as well as biological populations and function. Brix test readings allow you to assess the quality and nutrient density of your pastures. Of course, at least a basic understanding of the ecological functions and interactions that go on in your farming ecosystem is key to joining the dots and addressing the root cause of where your soil health and farm productivity is limited.
If you’re wondering how to improve soil health and reap the benefits, environmentally and financially, we provide coaching in the form of custom annual coaching plans as well as coaching by the hour. Our custom annual coaching plans are created to suit YOUR farm size, type, goals, values, knowledge, and farming experience, and provide you with continual support whenever you need. Our coaching by the hour is best suited for those with a bit more experience in regenerative farming.