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Ann MillsDeputy Under SecretaryNatural Resources and Environment, USDA
FY 16-17: Agency Priority Goal
Soil Health & Sustainability
Priority Goal
Goal Overview
The world population is expected to rise from approximately 7 billion in 2013 to over 9 billion by 2050. To sustain this rate of growth, we must provide as much food in the next 40 years as has been grown in the last 500 years. From 1982 to 2007, over 41 million acres of rural land was lost to development (the size of Illinois and New Jersey combined). Approximately 23 million acres of this was active agricultural land, and 14 million acres was prime farmland.
At the same time that we need to grow more food on a shrinking available land base, we are also asking more and more of our farmers and ranchers. We ask that they help reduce our Nation’s dependency on fossil fuels by growing more bioenergy crops, that they provide adequate pollinator habitat (required for about 35% of our food supply), that they protect water quality, and that they incorporate management practices and technologies that optimize efficiencies of water and nutrient use. In addition, while addressing these needs, producers are increasingly faced with extreme weather events, ranging from drought to flood.
Improving soil health allows us to simultaneously address these and other pressing natural resource needs. Improving soil health allows us to improve water quality, increase soil water availability, enhance resilience to extreme weather, enhance nutrient cycling, increase carbon sequestration, provide wildlife habitat (including pollinators), enhance rural economic opportunity, and meet the food and fiber production needs of a rapidly growing population on a shrinking available land base. Simply stated, improving the health of our Nation’s soils is one of the most important things we can do for this and for future generations.
USDA assists agricultural producers with improving soil health through increased knowledge, education, and technical and financial assistance in implementing soil health management systems. The research and educational activities conducted by USDA and its partners contribute much more than a body of knowledge. The information is integrated into policies that lead to the development of science-based standards and specifications for management practices, used for appropriate implementation of practices. The practices can then be combined in a systems approach, to form customized location-specific plans for conserving selected resources. Such conservation plans are applied by land managers to improve soil health. In addition, the impact of implementing these standardized practices can be measured and modeled nationally, especially when combined with land, soil, climate, and other data.
Strategies
- Establish and incorporate the current state of knowledge as a scientific foundation and economic basis for soil health.
NRCS and ARS scientists will pursue this strategy by continuing to conduct, write, update, and make available to stakeholders literature reviews on land management practice impacts on soil biological, chemical, and physical properties; and their relationships to important outcome factors such as: environmental outcomes, producer risk, crop quality and yield. Further literature reviews and case studies will be conducted and documented on soil health management options in rangelands, and on the economics of soil health, as measured by both profit potential and reduced economic risk. This information will be incorporated into training materials and conservation practice documents by NRCS.
- Increase the knowledge base on land management impacts on soil health and associated economics.
NRCS, ARS, and NIFA scientists will partner to identify knowledge gaps. This information will be incorporated into the priority requests associated with partnering agencies’ grants programs (e.g. Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) for NRCS; Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) for NIFA). NRCS will also participate in the “Soil Health Partnership” that includes The Nature Conservancy, Monsanto, National Corn Growers, and the Environmental Defense Fund; and in the Soil Renaissance effort to identify and address soil health related knowledge gaps and priorities.
- Enhance abilities to comprehensively assess soil health and constraints in specific soil processes, to target management planning and implementation for rebuilding soil health, and to predict soil health management practice impacts on nutrient and water availability to plants.
Multiple soil health assessments currently available for public service will be evaluated across a range of cropping systems, climates, soils, and management practices. These assessments include:
- The Soil Health Nutrient Tool developed by ARS that measures indicators of biologically active carbon and nitrogen, to integrate biological activity into nutrient recommendations
- The Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health developed by Cornell University that measures a number of biological, physical, and standard chemical indicators to identify constraints and provide management suggestions to manage all three realms that must be considered together to manage soil health
- Phospholipid Fatty Acid profiling that provides insights into microbial community composition and function; and
- An additional enzyme indicator
Evaluation sites will include commercial farms, NRCS Plant Materials Centers, and long-term experimental sites managed by partners, as resources and broader collaborations allow. NRCS, ARS and multiple university partners will cooperate on collecting samples and land management information. A national database of test results and management histories will be developed and used to improve our ability to interpret and make soil health management recommendations (including nutrient application). The results will contribute to the development of a soil health management planning process that guides agricultural service providers in comprehensively assessing, planning, and facilitating implementation of location-specific, science-base, farm-appropriate implementation of soil health management systems.
The NRCS Soil Health Division will also partner with appropriate entities (ARS, universities, etc.) to develop predictive relationships on the effects of soil organic carbon and particle size on available water holding capacity. Soil chemical and physical data from the Kellogg National Soil Survey Laboratory’s database, the scientific literature, and existing models will be used as necessary to develop these relationships. Evaluations will then be performed to assess the feasibility of prescribing soil health management practices to achieve a targeted increase in available water holding capacity.
- Enhance capacity to transfer technology to landowners.
The new Soil Health Division and its NRCS and external partners will continue to train all appropriate field staff on the basics of soil health (101 level) and then develop and offer a more comprehensive advanced soil health (201 level) training course. NRCS will establish and implement soil health demonstration and training sites at selected Plant Materials Centers covering a range of climates, soils, and cropping systems. Within resource limitations, NRCS will make training and training materials available to Conservation Districts, Certified Crop Advisors, Industry, and other partners to leverage spreading a coherent science based message from all agricultural service providers that reach our Nations’ farmers.
- Enhance adoption of soil health management systems through partnerships.
NRCS will partner with The Nature Conservancy, Monsanto, Environmental Defense Fund, and the National Corn Growers to implement soil health demonstration sites. NRCS will partner with the National Association of Conservation Districts and the National Grazing Lands Coalition to enhance adoption of soil health promoting practices on crop land and grazing land, respectively. NRCS will provide educational, promotional, and other materials or resources to Conservation Districts and other partners for their technology transfer activities.
- Enhance communications to increase awareness and adoption of soil health management systems.
NRCS will develop and maintain an updated Web site with fact sheets, partner resources, learning resources, and other material designed to educate landowners and conservation planners on the benefits of soil health and practices for increasing soil health. Monthly or more frequent communications of updated educational and awareness materials will be provided to all NRCS staff and partners. Technology updates will be periodically provided to all NRCS employees through “soil health nuggets” via email.
Progress Update
During the 4th quarter, USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) conducted soil health outreach including over 90 direct assistance activities and more than 140 training and outreach events. More than 14,000 people participated from many stakeholder groups, NRCS staffs, and conservation partners along with farmers and ranchers. The agency continues to participate in over 30 different committees or groups including:
- No-Till on the Plains
- State Soil Health Advisory groups
- Midwest Cover Crop Council
- Newly emerging Northeast and Southeast Cover Crop Councils
- Soil Health Institute committees
- Climate Hubs, among others.
A number of soil health publication efforts are in progress:
- Cover crop fact sheets
- Grazing fact sheet
- Paper reviews
- White papers (soil health assessments and grazing land soil health)
- State soil health video shoots
As a follow up from the 3rd quarter Soil Renaissance meeting in Ardmore, OK, NRCS led subcommittees representing multiple organizations to recommend standards for soil health indicators/methods to become part of an assessment of the nation's soil health status and to identify and recommend on-farm tools for soil health assessment and management.
NRCS is working with the new Soil Health Institute (emerged from the Soil Renaissance group) and will host a follow-up meeting in Louisville, KY to continue the decision making process. As part of the Soil Renaissance meeting, participants from NRCS, ARS, LGUs and private labs will participate. Subcommittees will present the work they have done over the past quarter.
NRCS partners, especially those with Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) funding, continued to conduct a large number of soil health projects. A partial accounting of the impact of 82 existing soil health demonstration sites in the Mid-west tells us one project alone hosted 40 events reaching 2,000 participants, in addition to 20 events for agricultural retailers and certified crop advisors with over 200 million viewers from media coverage.
As part of its overall soil health effort, NRCS’s “Unlock the Secrets in the Soil” awareness and education campaign continues to provide foundational educational materials and messaging to farmers and consumers alike. NRCS’s soil health-related videos have generated more than 800,000 YouTube views. The latest “Soil Health Lesson in a Minute” video posted to the USDA Facebook page generated more than a quarter million views in just three days. Since their release earlier this year, NRCS’s soil health television public service announcements have aired approximately 23,000 times in 35 states.
Next Steps
The Soil Health Division (SHD) staff will continue to compile and design standardized advanced level trainings that contain the latest updates in the science of soil health. SHD staff will continue to work with NRCS State staff to provide training, participate in summer field days and instruct advanced soil health training efforts. SHD is updating the advanced National Employee Development center sponsored soil health and sustainability course that will be partly available via webinars during FY 2017.
Expand All
Performance Indicators
Number of soil health management system demonstration sites implemented
Soil Carbon Retained
Number of Stakeholder Reached
Other Indicators
Grants Awarded
Literature Review
Contributing Programs & Other Factors
The Agency Priority Goal contributes to two of the four goals outlined in the USDA Strategic Plan. Specifically, it contributes to meeting Goal 2: Ensure Our National Forests and Private Working Lands Are Conserved, Restored, and Made More Resilient to Climate Change, While Enhancing Our Water Resources; and Goal 1: Assist Rural Communities to Create Prosperity So They Are Self-Sustaining, Repopulating, and Economically Thriving.
Several USDA agencies will work cooperatively to achieve the APG. Scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in collaboration with our new NRCS Soil Health Division and other NRCS partners (for example universities and foundations and broader stakeholder groups) will conduct and summarize research on the impacts of soil health promoting practices on soil functional processes such as available soil water holding capacity, soil carbon, water infiltration, nutrient availability and other important production system attributes. Programs administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will be used to provide competitive grants aimed at filling in the knowledge gaps (e.g. for specific soil properties or soil health management systems). Programs administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will be used to demonstrate soil health assessments, soil health management systems, and their benefits (e.g. through Conservation Innovation Grants and Plant Materials Centers) and provide financial and technical assistance to enhance adoption of soil health promoting practices (e.g. through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, EQIP). This cooperation will allow each Agency to contribute its own strengths to enhancing soil health across the public value chain from research to technology transfer to landowner adoption. Existing partnerships with non-government organizations, Universities, foundations, and other partners will be leveraged and broadened to amplify the impact of these investments. These combined efforts to enhance the health of our Nation’s soils will allow USDA to help farmers and ranchers feed the world, while regenerating and sustaining other ecosystem services, more profitably and sustainably – now and for generations to come.
Objective: Lead Efforts to Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change, Drought, and Extreme Weather in Agriculture and Forestry
No Data Available
