Leveraging Soil Health Research and Policy: How Many Sustainable Development Goals Could We Achieve through a Healthy Soils Based Farm Bill?.

There has been growing interest in soil health, along with agroecological research and practice that has the potential to build soil health while bringing numerous co-benefits. Despite this interest, research and practice focused on these topics remain relatively uncommon. For example, estimates suggest that cover crops are only used on 2-7 % of corn and soy acres in the US Corn Belt (Rundquist and Carlson 2017), while research that incorporates transformative agroecology receives less than 4% of USDA competitive research dollars (DeLonge et al. 2016). In this analysis, we investigate two primary questions: (1) can research and/or policy lead to the development and scaling of practices that can build soil health, and (2) given limited resources, where are the most promising policy opportunities to incentivize soil health research and practice? To address these questions, we review the peer-reviewed literature and develop a logical framework to explore how public research and policy could work together to accelerate soil health science and practice. We then focus on two specific policy levers, the US Farm Bill and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to identify areas of overlapping interest and to consider how effective these could jointly be in advancing soil health. In particular, we methodically review the 12 titles in the Farm Bill and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and evaluate their relevance for agroecology and soil health. Through the logical framework resulting from our analysis, we suggest that either research or policy can trigger the transition to healthier soils and systems, but that a continuous cycle of improvements of each is likely needed to encourage widespread transformation. Further, while both the Farm Bill and the SDGs have objectives that would benefit from soil health, a targeted approach would be needed to ensure that these levers contribute meaningfully to soil health goals.