Soil is an essential natural resource for all farmers.
Over recent years many initiatives have sought to provide information and advice on soils and Soil Health, notably AHDB Great Soils.
You can view a summary on the AHDB Knowledge Library from which much of the info in the soil topics on Farm-PEP has been taken.
There are lots of other resources and organisations that provide info and advice on soils including:
Tell us about any resources and initiatives that you find useful.
Content below is from across the PEP community and is not necessarily endorsed by Stewards or by PEP
Field drainage is installed to rapidly remove excess soil water to reduce or eliminate waterlogging and return soils to their natural field capacity. Drains can be used to control a water table or to facilitate the removal of excess water held in the upper horizons of the soil.
Tell us how you are improving your soils. Share useful resources, organisations and initiatives.
We help farmers improve their soil health by enabling them to benchmark their existing soil data.
The standard way to measure and monitor soils has been through soils samples taken to 15-30cm in representative W patterns. A range of technologies are now available commercially and in development to provide higher resolution data across a wider range of metrics. This page provides a space to share and discuss the available and coming tools, services and technologies.
The British Society of Soil Science (BSSS) is an established international membership organisation committed to the study of soil in its widest aspects. The society brings together those working within academia, practitioners implementing soil science in industry and all those working with, or with an interest in soils.
Grass in farming is interconnected with livestock systems for their feed, in the form of grazing, haylage and silage, and is also used as 'leys' (short-term grasslands) to regenerate soil structure and quality.
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Scientific paper looking at the relationships between scientists and farmers:
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ipaast-czo: Interoperable Precision Agricultural and Archaeological Sensing Technologies Remote and near-surface sensing technologies such as satellite imaging, UAV imaging, and geophysical survey are used in the practice of precision agriculture to support farmers and land managers to make data-driven management decisions. Archaeologists use many of these same sensing technologies to investigate the buried evidence for past human activities and make this evidence for the heritage of agricultural landscapes visible. Fundamentally, practitioners and researchers in both precision agriculture and archaeology are invested in developing a better understanding of soil conditions and their impacts on plant development by using advanced sensing technologies and related analytical methods. Consequently, there is a vast, untapped potential for sharing data and analytical approaches, enabling new research in both domains at an unprecedented scale and level of detail, leading to enhanced interpretations of the character of the agricultural landscape.
The VESS is a semi-formal approach to assessing soil structure, first developed by SRUC.
Enviresearch exists to provide the best regulatory and risk assessment service in Europe for the global chemical industry.
AgriTech 4.0 focuses on supporting farms and farmers in providing them knowledge and assistance on the key aspects of the evolving technologies, processes, and practices being developed and used for sustainable farming.
The VESS is an approach you can use to assess soil structure. Developed by Aarhus and
Guide by Graham Shepherd (Landcare Research, New Zealand) giving an approach to assessing soil qu
The intricate web of relationships between physical, chemical and biological soil components underpins crop and livestock health and productivity. Protecting soil health is also critical to environmental sustainability, as soils: • Exchange gases, such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, with the atmosphere • Regulate the flow of water and rainfall in the water cycle • Provide nutrients for plant growth, by breaking down organic matter and altering chemical fertilisers • Transform and store organic materials, as part of the terrestrial carbon cycle • Degrade contaminants applied through human activities or left by floods and aerial deposition A healthy soil is able to sustain, in the long term, these important functions. In a healthy soil, the interactions between chemistry (pH, nutrients and contaminants), physics (soil structure and water balance) and biology (including earthworms, microbes and plant roots) are optimised for the conditions in that place. View more from AHDB GREAT Soils. Share resources you find helpful below.
The soil health scorecard brings together information about the chemical, physical and biological properties of soil. Watch Anne Bhogal give an overview of the research that has gone in to the Soil Health Scorecard.
We are a world-leading independent research organisation providing objective, expert geoscientific data, information and knowledge.
Funded by AHDB and BBRO, this five-year Soil Biology and Soil Health Partnership is a cross-sector programme of research and knowledge exchange. The programme is designed to help farmers and growers maintain and improve the productivity of UK agricultural and horticultural systems, through better understanding of soil biology and soil health. See https://ahdb.org.uk/soil-biology-and-soil-health-partnership
In February 2018, ADAS, AHDB and Defra launched the Grass and herbal leys farm network. The network is a partnership between farmers, researchers and industry and provides a platform to investigate the long term impacts of leys in rotations, such as: Quantifying changes in soil organic matter and soil health from introducing temporary grass/herbal leys across a range of soil types and rainfall areas. Quantifying subsequent changes to soil organic matter and soil health following the destruction of the temporary grass/herbal leys and return to arable production. Investigating the effectiveness of grass/herbal leys in controlling blackgrass in ‘problem’ fields.
There is a lot of interest in soil carbon currently, due to the opportunity to store and sequester carbon in soil. It is also vital for soil health, forming part of soil organic matter.
Farmer Innovation Group as part of YEN Yield Testing project on achieving Deeper Rooting. Encouragement of deep burrowing earthworms might enhance yields by enabling deeper rooting, and capture of more sub-soil water.
Good soil management is essential to maintain a wide range of ecosystem services, including sustainable food production, water regulation and carbon storage, and to minimise diffuse pollution of the air and water environments.
AHDB's GREAT Soils brings together all the work on Soils, to help farmers protect their soils and improve its productivity
Routine topsoil samples should be taken from all fields for analysis of pH, P, K and Mg every 3-5 years. Accurate information on soil nutrient Indices and soil pH is essential for nutrient management planning. Various approaches and services are now available for in field mapping of soil nutrient availability.
Series of 20 videos from USA exploring Regenerative Agriculture and the "Future of Agriculture for Ecosystems and Human Health"
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Environment Digest is a quarterly publication that provides a synopsis of recent news, reports and other materials that are of interest to the farming community. With a particular focus on how agriculture links with the environment, each issue focusses on articles across sustainable food production, climate change, water and waste management, soils and biodiversity. Environment Digest principally focuses on stories and policy changes that are relevant to England and/or the UK with a slant towards the arable sector.
As a specialist postgraduate university, Cranfield’s world-class expertise, large-scale facilities and unrivalled industry partnerships are creating leaders in technology and management globally
Precision approaches and technologies will play a key role in successful, economically viable and
From Crop Action Feb 2022: Sulphur is an essential plant nutrient and
A major reason for the predominant failure of translational research from laboratory to field is
Discussion
Useful resources and fact sheets on soil quality from Australian perspective at https://www.soilquality.org.au/