A Soil Health Partnership to Catalyze Sustainable Agricultural Production.

Global population and per capita income growth are placing an increasing burden upon food, feed, fuel and fiber production systems, which places an emphasis on the need for evaluation and innovation within sustainable cropping systems.  The main objective of the newly formed Soil Health Partnership (SHP) is to catalyze enhanced agricultural sustainability and productivity by demonstrating and communicating the economic and environmental benefits of improved soil health. Innovation in cropping system approaches to improve soil health and data generated to refine best management practices, fostered through the SHP project and a Scientific Advisory Council, will result from the unique inter-professional collaborative approach implemented by the SHP, farmers, private industry and academic personnel – all working together.  Initial demonstration and outreach farms throughout Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio and Wisconsin have been established to initiate a network of proactive crop producers.  Integrated system approaches will continue to be implemented on the working farms of a growing network of proactive and high profile crop producers, who will then serve to implement standardized research protocols to generate data on advanced agronomic systems techniques to improve soil health, improve economic profitability, and act as peer to peer farmer mentors.  Farmer mentors, with the support of the SHP, will host hands-on communication events and field days to highlight the latest integrated agronomic technologies such as cover cropping, no-till, crop rotation, advanced nutrient management, and precision agriculture technology.  The expectation is that such information will be highly impactful at influencing grower decisions beyond the SHP demo farm network itself, and thereby help to catalyze transformational change at the national scale.