4.4.1: Introduction

... the Garden of Eden, almost literally, lies under our feet almost anywhere on the earth we care to step. We have not begun to tap the actual potentialities of the soil for producing crops.

—E.H. Faulkner, 1943

Good soil has a lot of organic matter. We can test soil for the amount of organic matter it contains, and that is sometimes a good indicator of soil health. However, there are also other ways to test for soil health. Now this is different than most 'regular' soil tests you may have heard about, like testing for N-P-K and pH. And we will discuss soil sampling and those tests in an upcoming chapter. But while we are focused on soil organic matter, let's focus here on soil health tests.

First, ask yourself why you would do a soil health assessment (test).

• The most obvious reason is that it allows you to identify specific problems, such as surface compaction, and then change your management practices as part of the effort to increase overall soil health.
• A second reason might be to monitor the health of your soils over time after you have made some management changes. Is your soil improving after you started planting cover crops, began a new rotation, or switched to reduced tillage?
• A good soil health assessment done over several years allows you to see whether your farming efforts are going in the right direction. While the goal of building soil health is to prevent problems from developing, it also helps to correct previous problems you might have had.
• Another reason might be to better value your soils. If they are in excellent health due to many years of good management, your land should be worth more when sold or rented than fields that have been worn out. After all, healthy soil produces more and allows for reduced purchased inputs. Being able to effectively appraise soil health may be an additional incentive for farmers to invest in good management and build equity in their land.

  An Example from the Author's Farm \(\PageIndex{1}\)

  On my Full Circle Farm, we have 'banked' some wealth in the soil by adding organic matter and nutrients appropriately. Our soil tests generally show 3.5% organic matter. We rented 35 acres from a neighbor and that field has about 2% organic matter. It is a poor field that has been rented to negligent farmers for 20 years. We get 1/3 less hay yield from that land compared to our fields with the same soil type, seed, and management practices. We are trying to bring the rented land up to our field health levels, but it is slow going.

  Similarly, an adjacent 15 acres we bought from a neighbor 25 years ago is finally returning to health after receiving no manure and only synthetic fertilizer inputs in previous years.

  A final example is the shortcut walk I took across another neighbor's field a couple of years ago when I realized I was running late for a meeting. It had rained the day before. I walked off my plowed field and my feet sank in the mud on his plowed field. My field could support me and I had no trouble walking it. His field was so 'puddled' that my shoes got stuck in cement-like soil and I had to walk through it barefoot. His soil management of continuous plowing for 25 years of corn and soybeans had destroyed the soil's health. Any crop yield he had came from a bag of fertilizer or a barrel of herbicide spray.

  To paraphrase Eliot Coleman...... I fed the soil and it fed my crops, he had to feed the crops from his pocketbook with artificial inputs.

We explore soil health assessment at three levels of detail in the next sections:

1. General field observations
2. Field assessments using qualitative indicators
3. Quantitative soil health tests