Though well-intentioned, government efforts to solve the problem of dysfunctional soil have not resulted in major gains; the answer is farmer-led education
Since its inception, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), formerly the Soil Erosion Service and Soil Conservation Service (SCS), has pursued a goal of protecting soil and water resources from degradation. However, as a former career employee of NRCS, I often questioned this goal.
Over the years, NRCS has been fairly effective in its efforts to reduce soil erosion. But therein lies the predicament: I felt that the agency having a focus on controlling erosion left the question unanswered of why soil continued to erode. I believed that soil leaving the field was never the problem — it was a symptom of the fact that we really didn’t understand why it was happening. I received a great deal of training about how to calculate how much erosion would occur in a given scenario, but that did not answer the question of why.
But as I began to understand how the soil functioned as a biological system, it became apparent to me that soil was leaving the field because those soils had been degraded to the point where they could no longer function to protect themselves from erosion.
Partial Fixes
During his work mapping soils for the USDA, Hugh Hammond Bennett (who later became the first chief of the Soil Conservation Service) observed a striking difference between a forest soil and a cropland soil, side by side, in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1905. The forest soil was “teeming with life,” dark and soft, while the cropland soil was hard and light-colored, with the original dark layer of topsoil gone. Bennett realized that the way the soils had been managed directly affected their long-term productivity. He noticed that when the life in the soil was gone, the soil lost its ability to function and was thus subject to erosion. Because the symptom of erosion was very evident in the form of gullies, sedimentation and dust storms, this subsequently became the focus of the Soil Conservation Service when it was formed in 1935.
As we learned more about the important role biology plays in the sustenance of the soil, I and a handful of other NRCS employees proposed that restoring the capacity of the soil to function (aka, soil health) should be the real goal that NRCS should pursue. We realized that concentrating on controlling soil erosion was not only an exercise in futility but was a very difficult thing to sell to producers. It was an admission that the foundational resource on which agriculture depends is deteriorating and that we didn’t know how to fix it — we could only slow the rate of its demise. Hardly a message of hope.
Our efforts in educating folks about soil health, both within and outside of NRCS, eventually resulted in the creation of a soil health division within NRCS. While this action was well intentioned, it created a new predicament. By creating a soil health division, instead of an agency-wide focus on soil health, NRCS missed an opportunity to actually solve the problem of dysfunctional soil.
The adoption of systems of crop production that do restore soil health requires that producers understand that their only hope of continuing to make a living depends on restoring the capacity of their soil to function again. Getting producers to understand soil health and to implement the restoration of their soil requires a great deal of information transfer and education. NRCS’s continued emphasis on developing contracts to pay producers to implement conservation practices to control erosion without those producers understanding what soil health is, and how to restore it, is a crapshoot. Instead of only developing contracts and paying out cost-share for practice implementation, time and money will also need to be spent on information and education regarding soil health in order to move the needle on actual improvement of soil health on cropland.
Current Implementation Concerns
How much progress has been made over the past 90 years since Hugh Hammond Bennett led SCS and first recognized the need to do something to assure the future capacity of our soils to produce? To see how we are doing at restoring soil health and resolving the symptoms of soil erosion and poor water quality, let’s look at the principles of restoring soil health and see how well they are currently being implemented.
Disturb the soil less. Some form of reduced tillage, including no-till, occurs on the majority of row crop acres in the U.S. at times. A USDA Economic Research Service study of corn, soybeans and wheat found that only about 20 percent of the acres planted without tillage were done so continuously for at least four years (Claassen et al., 2018). This translates to roughly 10 percent of overall cropland in continuous no-tillage planting. This means 90 percent of U.S. cropland is still regularly tilled, thus likely cancelling out whatever soil health gains might be made by planting only periodically without tillage.
Increase the diversity of plants grown in the soil. Let me begin by saying that corn-soybean is not a crop rotation. An effective crop rotation should not only feed and build the biology of the soil but should effectively reduce weed, insect and disease pressure. There is a long list of symptoms producers deal with in corn-soybean crop sequences (herbicide-resistant weeds, soybean cyst nematode, corn borer, tar spot, crop nutrient losses, etc.) that illustrate this point. There are four main crop types: warm-season grass (i.e. corn, sorghum, millet), cool-season grass (i.e. wheat, barley, oats), warm-season broadleaf (i.e. soybean, sunflower, cotton) and cool-season broadleaf (i.e. pea, lentil, flax). An acceptable crop rotation would include at least three of the four crop types, ideally all four. There are concerted efforts underway to reintroduce wheat and oats (cool-season grasses) back into corn-soybean sequences to build respectable crop rotations that more effectively deal with weed, insect and disease.
Planting cover crops is often viewed as the gateway to soil health. According to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, U.S. farmers planted about 18.0 million acres of cover crops, a 17 percent increase since 2017. This represents less than 5 percent of total cropland, though (USDA NASS, 2022). It is encouraging that adoption of cover crops is trending upward, but it remains far from a universal practice, nor is it fully understood for the potential role it could play in effectively restoring soil health.
Maintain living roots in the soil. The majority of the cropland in the U.S. is planted to annual crops. Some of those crops provide live roots that feed the biology of the soil longer than others. However, there is often a significant period of time in most cropping systems in which something could be growing in the soil but is not.
Crop rotation diversity can address this issue to a significant degree, but cover crops between cash crops can provide more of what is needed. Again, it is encouraging to see an increasing use of cover crops across cropland acres in the U.S., but only a small proportion of U.S. cropland sees a cover crop between cash crops on a regular basis (Zulauf 2024).
Keep the soil covered at all times. With 90 percent of U.S. cropland acres tilled, often shortly after harvest, very few acres of agricultural soil have continuous crop residue covering it. A major dust storm in the central U.S. in May of this year was blamed on dry conditions, but soil covered with crop residue does not move even when it is dry. From a water erosion standpoint, NRCS’s national CEAP cropland assessment (a synthesis of field data and modeling) concludes that conservation tillage (such as no-till) and other conservation practices have substantially reduced sheet/rill erosion from U.S. cropland (USDA NRCS 2016). Keeping the soil covered with plants and their residues can not only reduce soil erosion, but it provides habitat for the organisms that help build erosion-resistant soil aggregates, which increase water infiltration so water does not run off the soil surface in the first place.
As CEAP points out, major gains in soil health will depend less on whether farmers adopt a single conservation practice, and more on whether they adopt enough conservation practices, together with an understanding of how to build soil health. Though well intentioned, government efforts to solve the problem of dysfunctional soil have not resulted in major gains.
What Does Meaningful Change Look Like?
For meaningful change to occur, producers, landowners and lenders will need to be educated on the economic and environmental benefits of restoring the soil to its full capacity to function again. This must begin with an admission that all cropland soils have been degraded by excessive tillage, lack of crop rotation, fallow periods, lack of soil cover, etc.
Subsequently, all stakeholders must also come to an understanding of how to turn the soil into favorable habitat to allow the organisms in the soil to restore all of those lost functions. This is why the most effective approach to educate producers about soil health to date has come via fellow producers who make up soil conservation district boards and other farmer-led conservation groups.
I have had the privilege of being part of several farmer-led conservation organizations over the years and have witnessed their effectiveness in implementing true soil health management systems on the land. Some of these groups included the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmer’s Association, Southwest North Dakota Soil Health Demonstration Project, South Dakota Soil Health Coalition, Sustainable Farming Association (of Minnesota) and the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association. Each of these groups have focused on research, education and demonstration to teach farmers and ranchers the importance of soil health and how to improve soil health on their operations.
Restoring and maintaining healthy, functioning soil is the only economically viable long-term scenario for profitable crop production; the current paradigm of managing dysfunctional soil with expensive inputs is not. We have now learned how to accomplish what Hugh Hammond Bennett sought to address all those years ago — to restore what has been lost in order to profitably produce food and fiber into the future. The time has come to apply what we have learned about how the soil functions as a biological system to restore the capacity of our agricultural soils to function again.
| References Claassen, R., et al. (2018). Tillage Intensity and Conservation Cropping in the United States. USDA Economic Research Service, EIB-197. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). (2022). 2022 Census of Agriculture: Cover Crops. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). (2016). Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP): National Assessment of Cropland. Zulauf, C., et al. “Cover Crops and Covered Cropland, 2022 US Census of Agriculture.” Farmdoc Daily (14):37, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 22, 2024. |
Jon Stika is the author of A Soil Owner’s Manual, 2ndedition, available at bookstore.acresusa.com.
