These practical soil health management recommendations are offered for farmers and land managers.
Quick Reference Links
Start with an Adaptive Approach
We can draw many parallels between human and soil health. The best advice for improving health and performance for humans and soil isn’t “one-size-fits-all” but is customized to the patient’s needs and situation. Virginia NRCS recommends taking an adaptive approach when developing a plan of action for improving your soil.
This means we don’t give you a set list of practices to implement. Instead, we recommend that you step back, analyze your existing soil management system and see how it stacks up against the four soil health management principles surrounding this “4TheSoil” graphic.
Ask yourself, “How well am I implementing these principles in my system? How could I potentially change what I’m doing to better follow these principles?”
Advantages: It works for every kind of land manager. Commodity producers, pasture managers and gardeners can all start at the same point to develop a practical plan of action for soil improvement customized to their situation.
Disadvantages: It can take a lot of time, thought and a willingness to analyze your current approach with a critical eye before identifying specifics to try in the field. To help you through this process, we recommend you do all of the following:
- Connect with us.
- Confer with fellow farmers.
- Dig into the fundamentals.
Connect with Us
Our network of local conservationists is our agency’s most valuable asset. If you want soil health assistance from NRCS, we recommend starting at the nearest NRCS field office.
These technical experts are familiar with soil health principles and can help you start thinking about how to best apply them to your situation. They may be able to point you towards local experts and examples to follow. They can also call upon our state-level soil health specialists for assistance.
Use the tool below to find the office that serves your area.
Virginia NRCS also has a team of state-level specialists with soil health expertise. While their primary focus is on agronomic crop and pasture management activities, they can potentially help with other soil health questions.
Connect with Fellow Farmers
Virginia NRCS recognizes that the most credible soil health experts and leaders are often found in the grower community. We, therefore, recommend farmer-to-farmer networking a core strategy for advancing soil health.
This approach has helped many farmers feel more empowered to learn about their soils, learn from each other, and come up with their own soil management solutions.
Get to know and learn from fellow Virginia farmers interested in building soils for better crops by :
- Finding and watching videos featuring leading soil health managers. These collections of videos featuring Virginia cropland and grassland managers are a great place to start.
- Attending soil health conferences or in-person meetings that emphasize farmer-to-farmer networking.
- Participating in a mentoring program in which experienced Virginia growers provide direct assistance and advice to other farmers.
Reach out to your local office or our state-level specialists to learn more about connecting with other growers and participating in farmer-to-farmer mentoring. You can also contact the Virginia Soil Health Coalition (VSHC), which serves as a clearinghouse for partnership soil health efforts in Virginia.
Dig into the Fundamentals
Many leading growers talk about soil health improvement as a journey, not a destination. Opportunities are always available for beginners and experts alike to learn more about and make improvements to their soil management systems. The key is to start small, keep it simple and move forward in incremental steps. This approach reduces the risk of getting overwhelmed by the wide range of soil health information and options available today.
New Virginia Soil Health Guidance
With this in mind, we have worked with Virginia Soil Health Coalition partners to compile a new package of introductory soil health guidance for land managers. The “Virginia Soil Health Management Fundamentals” shown in the diagram below focus on short, simple lists of principles, priorities and paradigms, which are important guideposts for planning soil health improvement. The package also includes a recommended soil health primer or textbook for those ready to dig even deeper.
Core Principles
Since 2013, Virginia NRCS has promoted a simple list of four core soil health principles expressed in just 12 words. They can be thought of as steps to take and keep taking over time to improve your soil health.
Our four core principles are very similar to those used by NRCS and many other organizations nationwide and endorsed by a wide coalition of agency and university partners across Virginia.
We have now joined key Virginia partners in promoting the four core principles through the 4TheSoil educational campaign and associated logo shown here. Go the 4TheSoil website today to pledge that you are for the soil!
Purpose, Paradigms and Priorities
Our soil health educational efforts have been successful because we keep it simple, boiling down core management advice down to just 12 words. Despite the success of this approach, we now see the need for additional framing to help an ever-broader range of clients and partners better understand how to apply the core soil health principles. Like our four principles, our additional framing boils down many key ideas into just a few words.
As shown in the diagram above, we encourage growers to integrate the following elements into their soil health management planning and implementation:
- One key purpose that clarifies the core strategy behind our soil health principles. Farming systems should mimic nature and thereby leverage the power of soil biology to enhance efficiency, productivity and profitability.
- Four key paradigms, which help describe the mindset, attitudes and approaches that tend to be important for successful soil health systems planning and implementation.
- Five key priorities that help clarify the targets and level of performance to aim for when implementing our principles. For example, the principle “keep soil covered” can prompt the question: How much cover is actually needed? The priority “eliminate erosion” helps to clarify how important it is to protect the soil if the goal is to meaningfully boost soil organic matter levels and soil health.
For help applying our recommended purpose, paradigms and priorities to your situation, connect with us and dig into the additional resource below.
Primer or Reference Manual
As explained above, soil health management advice is best when it’s concise. Nevertheless, adaptive soil health management requires a basic understanding of many soil science and agronomic terms and concepts. How do we help growers and crop advisors access that much technical information in a practical manner?
Rather than offering a long list of fact sheets or internet links, we’ve coordinated with our Virginia Soil Health Coalition partners to recommend a single soil health reference manual or primer. The many advantages of Building Soils for Better Crops, 4th Edition are outlined below.
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Complete and technically sound content written in an easy-to-understand style.
- Authored by two highly respected land grant experts and endorsed by many Virginia Tech partners.
- Consistent with NRCS soil health management principles and philosophy
- Time tested and recently updated (4th Edition released in 2021).
- Offers 24 topic-specific chapters that are self contained for individual reading
- USDA published, copyright-free and available at no cost to read online, download and print.
- Readily available paper copies offered at little to no low cost.
Please visit this website to read the book online, download it to your computer or order a paper copy. If you're too busy to think about tackling a 400-page book, we recommend starting with just 31 pages – the beginning of the book through the end of Chapter 1, plus Chapter 24. This excerpt captures many of the book’s core messages while also reinforcing our Virginia soil health management principles, purpose, paradigms and priorities.
For your convenience, we’ve posted these 31 pages of Building Soils for Better Crops, 4th Edition as a freestanding excerpt below. Our lead Virginia NRCS soil health specialist has even highlighted the sentences he considers most important. If you don’t have time to read them all, you can review the highlights!