Soil. Ground. Dirt. We all interact with it daily – walking through a garden, planting new saplings in an orchard, or harvesting vegetables for dinner. By Alistair Galloway (SIZA Environmental Specialist).
Soil is a living medium that forms part of the foundation on which global agriculture has been built over millennia. If managed well, healthy soil can contribute meaningfully to maximizing crop productivity and minimizing resource use.
Read MoreNatural resources are finite, and their availability is decreasing with each passing year. Therefore, farmers should aim to maximize the ability of the soil to efficiently retain water, nutrients, organic matter, and to promote microbial life (e.g. mycorrhizal fungi). To achieve this goal, farmers will firstly need to assess and understand the soil on their own farm so that it can be mapped, managed and monitored appropriately. Once this assessment has been completed, this accumulated information forms a baseline from which to progress and improve on, as requisite soil management practices are introduced into the soil management plan. If unproductive soils have been identified on the farm, time, money and resources can be saved by avoiding crop production in these areas. Instead, conserve these areas for their biodiversity value and ecosystem services, such as soil erosion control, raised water quantity and quality provision, and being a source of pollinators.
It’s very important to have a comprehensive soil management plan, based on your farm’s context, to track the various soil improvement strategies that have been chosen. It also serves as point of reference when reviewing the effectiveness of your soil improvement strategies annually. For example, if a green manure crop was chosen in a crop rotation to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, the reasons for this decision and the results of annual SOC tests can be recorded in the soil management plan, to determine if it has been a successful soil improvement strategy on your farm.
The effectiveness of soil improvement strategies in a field or orchard can also be tested by recording the amount of irrigation water required by a crop each season. If the goal is water conservation, a measure of success would be a decrease in irrigation requirements over time, due to better soil quality and higher soil water holding capacity. Therefore, do keep accurate irrigation water usage records and incorporate them into existing recordkeeping systems, such as the SIZA Digital Recordkeeping Program.
These management actions are well-aligned with the SIZA Environmental Standard, especially code requirements 1.7, 2.4 and 5.1, which focus on soil assessments, a soil management plan, and management actions to continuously improve soil health. By looking after the soil on your farm, your soil will, in turn, look after you.
