Soil research investment: Giving your crops a stable footing

Amanda Bennett explains how your levy develops soil management guidance and resources.

I wrote this blog with my ‘crops hat’ on, but there is a lot of common ground with livestock production and many of the points made are relevant to both systems.

Over the last decade, we’ve invested heavily in soil health research, especially to examine how to manage its physical, chemical and biological components.

After the soil biology and soil health partnership project concluded, we released the soil health scorecard in 2022.

It was a key output from the five-year, million-pound, cross-sector project and a major advance.

Underpinned by an independent evidence base and context-specific results, it provided a practical and holistic framework to measure, monitor and manage soil health on a rotational basis for the first time.

SRUC, one of the partnership project partners, is currently asking for feedback on the scorecard’s use and usefulness.

It includes the visual examination of soil structure (VESS) component, which the organisation helped to develop.

Earlier this year, we reviewed indicators to monitor soil health on a more frequent basis than in the scorecard, such as annually.

The review cost AHDB £34,000 and several other organisations, with a stake in soil management, added almost another £10,000 to the pot.

Led by the Organic Research Centre and SRUC, most of the indicators reviewed measured soil biology, either directly or indirectly.

In summer, we published guidance on the most promising approaches, which cover aggregate stability, active carbon and potentially mineralisable nitrogen.

The project could not answer every question, but it did identify opportunities and uncertainties.

For example, it captured the different ways results are interpreted and variations between lab-based and on-farm methods.

We’re also involved in trials on commercial arable farms that tackle soil structure and drainage, which include two that assess new drainage installations.

We’re also helping to steer Defra-funded trials at five other commercial sites in England that start this autumn.

Niab and ADAS will test how organic matter, roots and mechanical interventions can help manage compaction.

As part of the AHDB Nutrient management guide (RB209) review in 2024, you asked us to improve evidence on the nutrients that enter and leave soils across the rotation.

Last year, about 150 farmers and advisors took part in an ADAS-led review that identified a demand for a simple decision support tree that can account for nutrients released from cover crops.

This year, we’ve continued to work with water companies, Anglian Water, Southern Water and Wessex Water, to develop the tool.

They contributed about three-quarters towards the total project value of £39,404.

We will provide an update on this work later in the year.

In summer, we published initial insights from the Environment Baselining Pilot, based on results from 170 commercial farms that cover a range of sectors, systems and soil types.

We will explore the details in an environmental research blog this winter, but the pilot has strong links with soil health.

For instance, soil cores were analysed from more than 5,000 fields, which showed a large quantity of and variation in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks.

It also revealed that most stocks are in the less commonly measured 30 cm and deeper depths, which means we may be generally under-recording the amount of soil carbon.

Soil pH and nutrients were also measured and compared with the benchmark values in our scorecard.

Nearly 30% of samples recorded a pH of under 6.

In such situations, a robust liming plan in non-calcareous soils will help maintain the preferred range of pH 6.5 to 7.49 for most cropping situations.

Our soil research investment is at a crossroads, with many projects completing in recent months and years.

However, there are many reasons why we need to continue investing in soil.

For example:

• Soil questions are frequently sent to our research ideas letterbox
• Soil research continues to unearth evidence gaps, including about soil biological functioning, measurement and interpretation of assessments
• Soil tech keeps hitting the market, but we need to know that new approaches can deliver meaningful results
• Soil needs to cope with increasingly extreme weather events
• Soil health monitoring is in the UK Government’s Environmental Improvement Plan 2025

Behind the scenes, our team continues to work hard to give you the best evidence-based guidance.

Activities include:

• Curating and creating GREATsoils web pages
• Connecting with science through specialist/expert groups and events
• Collaborating with stakeholders invested in UK soil health
• Writing evidence-based reviews and blogs
• Supporting and delivering soil-themed events and on-farm tests and demonstrations

We are excited about the future, with plans to improve and develop evidence-based soil management resources for a broader range of UK farming situations.

As we advance, never lose sight of the basic principles that will provide a stable footing to any soil management plan.

This is the first in a series of blogs that provides a topic-by-topic overview of R&KE investment by AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds.