4 Steps to Soil Health

Idaho NRCS State Agronomist Marlon Winger told me there is a recipe for keeping Idaho farmland healthy and productive."The bottom line is that there is such a thing as keeping your soil healthy if you follow certain steps. Yes and we have four main driving principles to improve soil health. We are trying to manage for soil health and we try to create the most favorable habitat for the soil food web. Soil food web meaning all of the big and little critters that live in our soil, that they call home. Here are the four keys: minimize soil disturbance, maximize the diverse city of plants in the rotation and use cover crops to help maximize that diversity, keep living roots in the soil as much as possible and finally, keep the soil covered with plants and plant residues at all times. Define a cover crop for me. It is a crop that is currently not in your rotation. We have a cover crop periodic table. Do you remember periodic tables in chemistry? Yes. We have developed the periodic table of cover crops. It is a crop that is not in your rotation. You put that cover crop, this alternative, like behind your winter wheat, for example.