Soil Health Management Planning: Developing An Implementation Framework.

Soil health constraints beyond nutrient limitations and excesses currently limit agroecosystem sustainability, resilience to drought and extreme rainfall, and progress in soil and water conservation. These constraints must be identified and managed explicitly. The Cornell Soil Health Test (http://soilhealth.cals.cornell.edu/), available to the public on a fee-for-service basis, provides field-specific information on constraints in biological and physical processes, in addition to standard nutrient analysis, and is being increasingly adopted to inform conservation and soil health management system decisions. Such information can incentivize and guide targeted implementation of conservation practices. However, so far, there has been no formalized process, as exists for nutrient management planning, for the implementation of soil health management planning that maintains soil health and alleviates field-specific constraints identified through standard measurements. A collaborative effort between Cornell University’s Soil Health Team, the nonprofit Greenstart, and the NH NRCS Agronomist and county offices has advanced a successful NH pilot effort to develop a framework for Soil Health Management Plans. A set of pilot case studies is being established, on the development and implementation of such plans, with producers from a variety of sizes and types of agricultural operations. This approach has potential to be scaled regionally or nationally, and is addressing priorities of the new NRCS Soil Health Initiative.