Step 5 – How do I know that my soil health is improving and that I am making a difference?

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Back to Soil health checklist – managing for healthy soil

A healthy soil will competently deliver services without experiencing degradation.

Improving soil health will decrease degradation and improve soil condition. Good monitoring is needed to observe the changes, and to evaluate the management techniques influencing these changes.

Knowing what to look for, looking, thinking, testing and looking again is of primary importance. It will need to be backed up from time to time by regular measurement of particular soil characteristics, which in turn may be done in the field, or by sampling and forwarding to a reputable laboratory.

Unfortunately soil health cannot be represented by a simple value or description. And further, soil is not uniform with paddock location, with depth, nor with time.

Some of the observational tests include: soil surface condition, density of rooting, presence of soil organisms, presence of plow-pans, proportion of visible pores, friability, penetration resistance, conductivity, bulk density, clay dispersibility, soil strength, and aggregation.