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A new national effort called Probing Our Country’s Soil Health is focused on creating a free and user-friendly tool for farmers to benchmark the soil health of their fields. The tool is called Soil Health Assessment Protocol and Evaluation (or SHAPE). The tool will also provide insights of management practices that may improve crop yields when enhancing soil health.
The project is looking for farmers and ranchers to participate.
Participating landowners will receive:
- Compensation for your time (~ 1 hour) for helping
- A personalized soil health report of your fields. The value of this lab work (at no cost to you) is about $1200 per field.
- A copy of a book called “Probing Our Country’s Soil Health”. This will be a hard-copy photo book illustrating soil health across the country and the outcomes to this project.
If interested in participating, you will need to:
- Have a field that is at least 10 acres or greater.
- Sign up for a one-hour Zoom Meeting where a facilitator will lead you through a management survey for 2 or 3 fields.
- Grant access to fields for hand-probe soil sampling 2 or 3 sampling sites from each field. Normally this will happen 3-6 months after the survey; you will be notified beforehand.
To enroll as a landowner participant, click on this booking page link to schedule an appointment: https://calendly.com/probing-our-countrys-soil-health/shape-survey
If you have questions, please reach out to:
Dr. Matt Yost
matt.yost@usu.edu
435-797-4210