State-wide soil health programs for education and on-farm assessment: Lessons learned

Abstract

S oil health has received increased attention in recent years. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), state agencies, extension services, farm groups, nongovernmental organizations, and many others are working with farmers to provide education on and promote adoption of soil health systems. Farmers adapting the management of their operations to include these systems typically wish to measure improvements in profitability along with measurable improvements of soil health over time. Both the soil health assessment process and the educational programs require breadth and depth of knowledge from a team of people. The Indiana Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative (CCSI) is completing a comprehensive six year soil health project begun in 2012, involving 17 primary sites across the state in cooperation with numerous partners. Our experiences with this project, lessons learned, and recommendations for other projects of this type may be useful to groups just getting started with soil health education and on-farm assessment programs. Although some of our lessons learned are similar to those of the first three years of the Soil Health Partnership (Karlen et al. 2017), the CCSI project began two years earlier and was structured differently, with conservation partners as key drivers. Therefore, the lessons learned from both projects…