Regenerative agriculture and soil health
What has the rise of regenerative agriculture taught us? It has taught us to focus on soil health. Talk of farmers “soiling their undies”, farming their “underground livestock”, and making their own “bugs and brews” has me intrigued.
Turns out, soil health is a huge topic, and it is a hot topic. There are new resources appearing every day to help farmers understand and better manage soils. Our top picks are:
· Ecovineyards – everything you need to know about soil health, and improving it – set in a vineyard.
· Soil HASH – easy to understand DIY indicators of soil health
· Soils for Life – great resources and case studies of farmers doing it for themselves
· Soil Health Guide – a handy little book, again for farmers, from the North Central CMA
The key elements of soil health?
Each of these resources outlines the three key elements of soil health and provide several DIY indicators for checking the soil health of your paddock:
· Physical (soil texture, structure and aggregates)
· Biochemical (pH, salinity, nutrient cycling and availability)
· Biological (soil dwelling macroinvertebrates and microorganisms)
We didn’t find any equivalent resources for soil health in natural environments but there are some scientific papers that we deep-dived into (you’re welcome).
Soil Health to Enhance Ecological Restoration and Conservation - This review paper has some nifty diagrams, including this one that nails “soil health” and why we can’t continue to focus on just revegetation and ignore the linkages between above- and below-ground.
Figure: Interactions between soil health belowground (chemical, physical and biological) and the aboveground plants factors. From: Raupp et al. (2024)
So how do we restore soil health in our natural ecosystems?
I found an impressive list of possibilities in another mega review paper: Soil restoration increases soil health across global drylands: A meta-analysis
And again, the clever folk at Western Sydney Uni had me covered with this handy diagram of where and when to apply soil restoration treatments:
Figure: Suggested soil restoration techniques that can be applied to move along the continuum from a degraded ecosystem with poor vegetation condition and soil health to a target ecosystem. Techniques in brown focus on below-ground processes and those in green are aboveground interventions.
On Raakajilm, we are getting pretty close to our target ecosystem (she says optimistically) so of course, I want to know more about these inoculations with soil microbes!