5 Great Reasons to Create a Soil Health Roadmap for Your Diversified Farm
How much time do you spend thinking about the health of your soil on your diversified farm?
Every week it seems there’s at least one new soil health article, research bulletin or fact sheet that arrives in my inbox. And my mailbox is a constant stream of marketing flyers touting “new astounding results!” with a multitude of “safe natural products that improve your soil!”
“Do this, don’t do that, buy this, apply that.”
Yikes!
Understanding what each of these ‘soil health improvements’ really entail and how they can be pragmatically implemented is daunting. How do all these recommendations fit together? What about the significant risk associated with changing our current practices?
The complexity inherent in diversified farming systems can exacerbate the challenges with improving soil health. You’re not working with one system, but many systems.
If you raise pastured poultry and market produce, or a wide variety of grains and pulses, or you rotationally graze multispecies, what exactly does ‘improving soil health’ look like? Improving it for what and for who?
Is your head swimming? For the first decade of my farming career, mine sure was.
Which is exactly why three years ago I became determined to find a better way.
With support from a regional team, I developed The Soil Health Roadmap (SHR).
A SHR is a framework and set of tools for systematically evaluating the health of your operation’s foundational asset: the living soil, and creating an integrated set of strategies for enhanced stewardship.
Here are five excellent reasons to create a Soil Health Roadmap for your diversified operation:
1. Diversity is complex. A SHR can help you identify and implement strategies that make the most sense for your operation.
Working in partnership with a wide variety of crops, animals, and of course the natural ecosystem (weather, wildlife, etc.) on your farm means there are a lot of moving parts to consider.
How often have we heard: “reduce your tillage!”, or “add more organic matter,” or “use cover crops.” These strategies may all be great for improving the soil health on your farm, but every single one adds another layer of complexity to your already dynamic and diverse operation.
Which strategies are going to net you the biggest bang for your buck? Which strategies are actually feasible for you to find time to implement?
A Soil Health Roadmap allows you to evaluate many different soil health strategies in a very systematic way and in relationship to the needs of your soil and your management goals.
A SHR is specific and tailored to your operation, and thus will help identify which group of implementable practices will most improve the health of your soil and maintain your economic viability.
2. Soil health planning is essential.
Many farmers understand that soil health is really the basis of all health, but their management practices approach soil health in a scattershot way.
At the end of every season at April Joy Farm, Brad and I take time to rest, evaluate the year, think deeply about where we want to go next, and then plan how we’re going to get there. This means creating a solid marketing and sales plan, developing an annual budget, and building a detailed crop plan and schedule.
It also means updating our SHR!
I like to think of a SHR as a master planning tool for building soil equity. Just like a profit and loss statement or a rotational grazing map, a SHR allows you to make sure you’re creating a holistic, integrated strategy to set you up for success.
When we first drafted our SHR, it was a great opportunity to go back and look from a fresh perspective at our historical practices and think about what we really wanted to do, without the pressure and stress of having to make decisions in the heat of the season – and that was a game-changer.
We were able to see patterns that we didn’t know existed, assess our progress and identify and close critical gaps in knowledge and tools we needed to successfully implement our roadmap.
Updating our annual SHR brings clarity and confidence that we’re on the right track.
Winston Churchill made a statement to the effect of: “Plans are worthless but planning is essential.” Business planning is an essential component of successful farming; diversified farmers can’t afford not to plan, and yet many of us are not comprehensively planning for soil health.
What’s your vision for soil health? A SHR is the ‘whole’—which is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.
3. Receive collective wisdom from a team of experts.
What farmer doesn’t dream of more support staff? Just as we wouldn’t create our annual sales plan without first meeting with our key wholesale accounts and confirming what they want to buy, building a SHR is a team endeavor. Having a team is a major benefit of creating a SHR!
At April Joy Farm, we built a high caliber team to help us craft our SHR. Our team included our Natural Resources Conservation Service conservationist, three Washington State University Soil Scientists, Conservation District personnel, and an experienced farmer mentor. Once we completed the first draft of our SHR, I sent it to my whole team for comments and review.
Boy did we learn a lot from their collective wisdom.
How did I develop our team? I certainly didn’t pay anyone. I simply asked for help.
The best part about building this SHR was the chance to build a supportive team that I continue to rely on. If I didn’t understand the results of my soil testing reports, I called one of my experts. If I was brainstorming solutions to a particular management challenge, I reached out to my farmer mentor. If I was thinking about buying a new piece of equipment, I called someone on our team who knew someone who had experience using it.
Not only were they willing to help, but they now had an extensive knowledge of both our farm and our farming practices, which always leads to better, more helpful advice.
There is one more serious perk to developing a SHR team. The next time anyone on your soil health team comes across a grant or other funds and resources that may be perfect for you, they’ll both alert and advocate for you! Think of all those various networks and circles of support working for your benefit in a passive non-labor-intensive way. That’s a serious win.
4. Fund your farm and business goals.
A fantastic reason to create a SHR is that this process will help you get clear about what is most important to focus on.
Our SHR plan has a series of short and long term recommendations. As we plan our annual budgets, we have our key SHR goals in mind. And like I said above, so does our SH team.
Because of our SHR, our local Conservation District was able to secure funding to help us build a composting structure that is ideally suited to our operation. Without our SHR, we would certainly have spent a lot of time worrying about what type and size of structure to build.
With a SHR in place, we knew how much material we needed to handle, and how we would utilize the materials for maximum gain. Providing the justification for the grant funding was streamlined—it was already built into our SHR.
As carbon sequestration and regenerative soil health practices become incentivized—a producer with a SHR will have a definite leg up.
A SHR can show investors, grant agencies, banks and other collaborators how dedicated you are to soil health. A SHR will help you quantify what you’re doing, the progress you’re making, and justify what you want to be doing, and what resources you need to make it happen. Now that’s a roadmap that can result in serious dollars flowing through the farm gate.
5. Learn how to leverage your existing and available resources to improve operations, save money and reduce your workload.
We’re all facing a scarcity of resources in one form or another. It could be time, money, the right tools or the right expertise.
A SHR is a great way to help you maximize the benefits of your scarce resources. By strategically thinking through how different soil health strategies both meet your goals but also connect to other strategies, you can leverage your resource base for the maximum good. A strong SHR can reduce your workload, reduce recordkeeping chores and reduce your out of pocket expenses while still improving the health of your soil.
That may sound sensationalized, but I can vouch from first hand experience that it’s true. I used to spend time worrying about soil compaction. It wasn’t until we developed our SHR that I learned that compaction isn’t even close to one of the most critical of my soil health challenges.
So unless our annual management practices and equipment changes drastically, why would I keep focusing on it?
Through our SHR we came to understand how significant leaching was to the loss of fertility and subsequently the health of our soil. So instead of buying a lot of fertilizer and spending the time and fuel resources to get it spread on our fields, we’ve shifted our attention to the use of fall cover crops, specifically timing our sowing to maximize their value as nutrient scavengers.
We’ve increased the use of hairy vetch to provide as much nitrogen as possible. This means in the last few years, Brad and I have spent less money and time sourcing and spreading fertilizers and more time growing plants, which has been less work, less expense and definitely more enjoyable!
When it comes to improving soil health, diversified producers face significant challenges.
It can be difficult to figure out exactly what practices to focus on and also how feasible they are to actually implement.
A SHR is a comprehensive, systems-based approach to managing soil health—one that maintains the unique nature of every producer and their land.
Your soil, the way you work your land and what you produce is complex, diverse and unique. To learn how to create an SHR that makes sense for your operation read about the components of a SHR or download our Case Study.