Now’s the Time for Improving Soil Health

We at BigYield.us really stress soil health. Without healthy soil, plants lack the right nutrients and environment to root, grow and yield well.

This story from No-Till Farmer suggests that proper soil health may enable growers to fully exploit genetic advances in soybean varieties and corn hybrids. In some cases, such genetic progress combined with better chemistries have perhaps hidden on-farm soil health challenges.

Restoring soil health takes time, even when producers diligently implement corrective actions. Take soil organic matter as an example. The No-Till Farmer story reports that organic matter levels may annually improve by 0.1 percent to 0.15 percent at maximum. At that rate, elevating soil organic matter levels by 1 percent could take as long as a decade.

Because soil health development can be time-intensive, we recommend starting now to improve it. For those who have already adopted approaches to address soil health, we encourage those growers to sustain their efforts to make the most desirable long-term soil health gains.

Organic matter isn’t the only soil health variable deserving attention, however, and even soils with suitable organic matter levels may benefit from additional improvement. Soluble carbon is an important measure to consider. It serves as a food source for soil microbial life that perform many critical functions. Our Dinosaur Dirt product is a naturally occurring humate that supplies carbon in a form that’s packed with oxygen. In other words, it’s a soluble carbon. Humate in Dinosaur Dirt originates as a coal mining byproduct from Canada that undergoes further processing to create a soil amendment.

As fall approaches, we recommend that you consider beginning or continuing a soil health improvement plan. Kent Kauffman of BigYield.us and Mike Erdman, an expert in humates, explain more about adding Dinosaur Dirt to that plan in this video.

Call or email anytime to get help with devising a soil health plan for your farm.