Healthy soils play a central role in supporting sustainable crop production, water quality and climate change mitigation. While quality standards have been developed to protect water and air, there hasn’t been enough documented information to develop similar parameters for maintaining soil health.
To fill that research gap, a team of soil scientists in Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), conducted a state-funded project to characterize soil health across New York state agricultural lands. This was previously reported here as the project released two technical reports in 2020.
“We’ve always known that soil texture is a key control factor, but we now established that cropping practices are equally impactful,” said Harold van Es, co-author and professor in the Soil and Crop Sciences Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) at Cornell University.
Published in the new Elsevier journal Soil Security, the team collected 1,750 soil samples from across New York State. By cataloging the basic soil texture (coarse, loam, silt loam, and fine) and which crops are in rotation where the sample was taken, the team was able to shed light on how these factors impact soil.
The team collected samples from five different cropping systems:
- Processing vegetables
- Mixed vegetables
- Annual grain
- Dairy crop
- Pasture
They then noted how the samples measured on several health indicators:
- Soil organic matter (SOM)
- Permanganate-oxidizable carbon (POXC)
- Soil respiration (Resp)
- Soil protein (Protein)
- Available water capacity (AWC)
- Wet aggregate stability (WAS)
- Surface and subsurface penetration resistance
- Seven other soil chemical properties
The top three findings revealed:
- Pastures maintain the best soil health due to a continuous living plant cover and an absence of tillage.
- Dairy crops and mixed vegetables (mostly organic) have intermediate soil health due to greater organic matter inputs, cover crops and perennial forages.
- Annual grain and processing vegetable systems tend to yield the lowest soil health due to greater exports of carbon and nutrients from the farm, more intensive tillage and a lack of organic amendments.
Note: These findings were also published in two technical reports using a smaller dataset of 1,456 samples, which can be found here.
Citation: Joseph P. Amsili, Harold M. van Es, Robert R. Schindelbeck, Cropping system and soil texture shape soil health outcomes and scoring functions, Soil Security, Volume 4, 2021, 100012, ISSN 2667-0062, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soisec.2021.100012.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667006221000095)