Soil Tests

How to use Soilmentor year-round
How to use Soilmentor year-round 888 716 Soilmentor

How to use Soilmentor all year round

Whenever you’re out and about on the farm; crop walking, moving animals, drilling seed, or walking the dog – Soilmentor is there as a support to record your observations. A patch of bare soil, a plant you’ve never noticed before, your clover understory coming through – all useful information to record, so you can keep track of what’s happening on the land.

While some soil testing is seasonal, there are useful insights to be gleaned all year round, so we’ve written this article as a guide on some of the tests you can consider in each season, as you learn what works and what doesn’t in your context.

Winter

It can often be too cold to get a spade into the soil during the winter months, so this is a great time of year to get observing above ground. Measuring your basal ground cover involves a walking test (along a line transect), which gives you a quick, visual indication of your field’s ground cover percentages.

The new Soilmentor Ground Cover Report displays these ground cover results in a table, so you can see each field’s results at a glance, and identify problem areas with more bare soil or undesirables or even areas you are improving the diversity of plants present.

Measuring ground cover is a great way to make sure your winter covers are doing their job of protecting the soil against wind and water erosion. You may notice a higher proportion of undesirable plants than you’d like, and this is also often a sign that you need to look closely at your management. The ‘Brix Barometer’ is a great way to explore this further… Taking a Brix reading of your undesirables, as well as a reading of your crop or grass, will tell you whether your soil is catering to your crops or your weeds (undesirables). If the weeds are thriving with higher Brix scores, it’s an indicator to stop and think about why they’re doing well – and the answer will likely be found in the soil!

It’s also useful to keep on top of your biodiversity monitoring over winter. A great way to start with wildlife monitoring is to go out on a recording session in one of your fields of interest – put a timer on for 15 minutes, and keep a note of everything you spot in that time. You can do separate timers for birds, mammals, invertebrates and plants (more info on this method here). If you have children, this is a great challenge to recruit your kids for! Making this a recurring activity during a certain week each season is a great way to monitor how your management may be affecting your farm’s biodiversity. 

If you’re overwintering your animals on pasture, you can also keep up with grazing tests – like counting dung beetles & monitoring dung quality. 

Winter testing checklist

Spring

When the weather begins to warm up in spring, it’s soil testing season! This is the time of year to take a spade out with you on farm walks and get digging. If you’ve already recorded results at set soil sample locations and mapped them with GPS on Soilmentor, you’ll want to return to these same sample locations to continue your soil monitoring journey. If this is your first time going out soil testing, you can follow these instructions to choose sample sites, and map the location for future recording…

Five simple soil tests to start with on a field of interest are – counting earthworms / soil insect pests, looking for rhizosheaths, measuring rooting depth and testing your infiltration rate. These are all on our ‘Regen Indicators’ list – which means they can be benchmarked on the Regen Platform, with useful inbuilt pointers and tips from our collaboration with Nicole Masters!

The Regen Dashboard showing soil test results at various sample sites benchmarked with traffic light colours
Digging deeper into a specific result – against scientific benchmarks (graph on left), and how the result compares against other farmers in the same biome & soil type (graph on right)

Once you’ve made the most of the perfect conditions for spade testing, and you’re hungry for more monitoring on your fields, you can keep up with your above ground monitoring – with more grazing tests, basal ground cover transect-ing, Brix reading and biodiversity monitoring!  

Spring testing checklist

Summer

In the driest and hottest months of summer, you will likely struggle to dig holes for soil testing. In this way, the best tests to work on at this time of year are similar to our winter recommendations…

In the run up to harvest, be sure to record any general observations you make while out doing crop walks, like an area with low growth, a crop developing well, an area with good diversity of plants. Summer is the best time of year to observe butterflies and moths on the wing – the presence of a diversity of butterfly species can be a great indicator of wildlife friendly farm management! 

The Biodiversity Tool – showing the range of species spotted by field and by season
The Biodiversity Tool – showing five most frequently spotted species on a farm

The Brix Barometer will also be of particular interest again in Summer, as problem areas with thriving undesirable plants like black-grass tend to be much more visible – so make sure you are keeping on top of this practice. For example, when black-grass has a higher Brix than your cereal crop, this can indicate an overuse of nitrogen fertilisers, or soil without enough abundance of fungi microorganisms. These are the kinds of considerations that Nicole has built into the Regen Platform… if you’re interested in benchmarking your results and discovering insights from Nicole about your soils, you can subscribe to a Soilmentor Regen subscription. 

Summer testing checklist

Autumn

When Autumn arrives, it’s time to dust off your spade again!

Many of the observational soil tests included on Soilmentor don’t take much time at all, but can give you an enormous insight into the health of your soils, so you can infer what management is working well for your soil, and what’s not!

For example, Sam and Claire at Gowbarrow Hall Farm were able to use Soilmentor to demonstrate how their transition to mob grazing with long rest periods has benefited their soil, with photo evidence of how their soil has changed (read their full story here).

Keeping a photo diary of how your soil sample sites are changing on Soilmentor is a hugely valuable way to monitor your soils. Photos can be logged in Soilmentor alongside all of the Regen Indicators, which we recommend working through in Autumn and Spring.

You might notice your rhizosheath and legume nodule scores are consistently low in a particular site, which could be a sign to think about bringing in more plant diversity to deal with low fungal diversity and abundance in your soil. Our article summarising a series of talks by Christine Jones should clarify the importance of incorporating functional diversity into your rotations! 

Autumn testing checklist

Do you have any favourite seasonal soil activities to do on the farm? Let us know – we’d love to hear from you. 

Case study: KUHproKLIMA group in Germany
Case study: KUHproKLIMA group in Germany 2560 1920 Soilmentor

Case study: Francisco Telles Varela & the KUHproKLIMA Germany group

We’re really proud to have supported the KUHproKLIMA group in Germany with their farming research project over the last couple of years.

We recently caught up with Francisco Telles Varela about how their research is going, and how soil monitoring and observation supports their project aims.

Could you give us a summary of the KUHproKLIMA project and what you’re hoping to achieve? 

The KUHproKLIMA (or Cow for the Climate) project is an on-farm practice-oriented research project, created by farmers for farmers in the pre-alpine region of Allgäu in South Germany, where seven dairy / meat farms dared to take new steps in the direction of environmentally friendly and regenerative farming.

Christine Bajohr, one of the seven farmers, has created the project that is funded by the EU program EIP-AGRI, in which science and practice jointly research how nature-based grassland management can improve ecosystem processes and services, which will contribute to climate and resource protection. Our goal is to treat the results in such a way that they can be implemented in everyday practice and are comparable with other studies.

For this, in the KUHproKLIMA project, the use of cows is of central importance, as their co-evolutionary development with grasslands makes them suitable for improving the synergies between soil, plants and animals.

The knowledge and experience obtained during the project have been shared through workshops and field days. An online platform for ongoing documentation as well as exchange between farmers was also created, and the outcomes, jointly developed by scientists and the farmers, will be presented in a practical guideline available as a free download on our website at the end of the project. 

Could you also give us an explanation of how you have designed the project to test the effects of different grazing techniques?

The aim of the project lies in holistic grazing management adapted to the location as well as the precise promotion of active soil life. That includes initial analyses of each site, herd, type of vegetation (biodiversity), carbon and infrastructure.  After these initial baseline assessments, the “Holistic Planned Grazing” pasture management (following the methods of Allan Savory) combined with improvement of soil life (liquid compost extract applications) were introduced during the project on all farms. Based on the inventory of the participating farms, individual land planning concepts were developed to improve the pasture areas mainly by planting hedges and trees.

Workshops were hosted in order to introduce the concepts of Holistic Management and Holistic Planned Grazing multi-paddock system to all seven farmers. Also, an app was provided to each farmer where the initial grazing paddocks were designed and inserted, and data regarding pasture dry matter before and after grazing has been recorded. This monitoring tool provides useful data to inform farmers to better adapt their management regarding pasture productivity, grazing times/periods, number of animals, paddock design, etc.

What have been the biggest challenges to you as a group?

Perhaps the most challenging but also the most rewarding and valuable, has been to try to match scientifically sound research with the daily-life activities of the farm and farmer. The conventional scientific method wants dozens of replicates with very controlled conditions. This is not possible in an on-farm research environment and we had to take this into consideration in the design, and adapt along the way. Things change all the time on a farm, but we know this is the sort of complementary science we also need; science that studies complexity. 

Embracing the complexity of nature and research directly into the ecosystem is more difficult, adding to the social unpredictability of farming daily operations, but we believe this is a type of work and research that should be done more to find urgent solutions for our current challenges. 

The on-farm experimentation & research approach that we are taking, and already looking for new coming projects, is fundamental to bridging the gap between fundamental scientific research and farming practical challenges, and we aim to develop these concepts to help others create similar projects in different contexts.

How has using Soilmentor supported you to achieve your project goals? Could you give an example of a way that Soilmentor has benefited you?

In order to measure the progress and effects on plant and soil health by the grazing methods and the microbial inoculations, twice a year (Spring & Fall), more than 15 different measurements are carried out on the test areas of all seven farms, which allow statements to be made about various developments, such as soil structure, erosion and compaction, water infiltration, the development of plant species, Brix values and biodiversity levels in flora and fauna. This monitoring work has been fundamental in understanding the immense complexity of these ecosystems and for this, using the Soilmentor app has been key. 

Soilmentor makes our fieldwork very efficient and quick, recording all the data points directly in the field and smoothly transferring all the data to the online platform automatically where we can work later on treating the data for research purposes. We can not really imagine doing the field work without Soilmentor anymore, as using paper forms and pens in the very wet Allgäu region would be a disaster besides the immense time we would have to be introducing data later on spreadsheets.

What do you feel have been the biggest successes so far as a project, & are you able to share any early outcomes?

We are still collecting and treating our data points for the project until March 2023, and we are now planning the extension of the project for a further 3 years in order to obtain more long-term data, therefore there are not many relevant numbers to share so far. But one success we can highlight already is the farmers’ quality of life. 

Several of the project farmers’ that started adopting the Holistic Management framework expressed that they have reduced their work-load and have more free time, leading to a more balanced and happier life. This makes us already quite happy as a team, knowing that just by changing management it is possible to improve farmers’ quality of life, in a profession with the highest rate of suicide globally.

How important is observation to you to support the KUHproKLIMA project?

Our project supports a more agro-ecological and regenerative way of farming, and we know that if we want to improve our lands in a regenerative trend there are no recipes, every farm context is different. We heard this before many times but actually, we proved it during the project, based on our monitoring results where very similar practices applied in the seven farms produce very different results. So, observing, measuring and reading each context well over time is absolutely key for good management decision making on the land.

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Farmerama #73: Nicole Masters on the Regen Platform
Farmerama #73: Nicole Masters on the Regen Platform 1000 668 Soilmentor

Nicole Masters interview on Farmerama:
The Regen Platform

Episode #73 of Farmerama Radio featured Abby interviewing Nicole Masters on the power of digging a hole, the inspiration behind the Regen Indicators, and how the Soilmentor Regen Platform can support a regenerative transition.

Tune into the full episode below (or on your preferred podcast platform):

Do you dig holes on your farm? Does the Regen Platform sound interesting to you? Get in touch with us at info@vidacycle.com – we’d love to hear from you 🙂

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The Soilmentor Regen Platform is here!
The Soilmentor Regen Platform is here! 2665 1961 Soilmentor

🌱 The Soilmentor Regen Platform is live 🌱

The Soilmentor Regen Platform is here! We’re so excited to be launching this addition to Soilmentor, created in collaboration with Nicole Masters and the brilliant team at Integrity Soils.

The Soilmentor Regen Platform gives you access to clear benchmarking of the Regen Indicators – 10 soil metrics compiled with Nicole, which represent key aspects of soil health. Your results for each of these Regen Indicators will appear as a traffic light in the Regen Platform – either red (critical measure), amber (early warning alert), or green (great result).

From the regen scorecard you can quickly identify potential problem areas and click into the relevant Regen Indicators to explore them further. Every result you log in the Soilmentor Regen Platform comes with regenerative pointers from Nicole, providing explanations for each result, and things to consider for your future management. These considerations are bespoke to your field’s soil type, rainfall level and biome (learn more about these classifiers here). 

We are proud to include leading organisations such as Yeo Valley and their supplier network, and EIT’s Regenerative Agriculture Transition Program in Southern Europe as early adopters of the Soilmentor Regen Platform. We created this toolkit with Nicole to empower farmers to monitor and build on a variety of soil metrics that reflect the importance of taking a diverse & holistic approach to soil and farm management. We’re excited to support farmers and organisations to learn from Nicole’s insights and knowledge in the Regen Platform.

Working with Nicole on the Regen Platform was the perfect fit – her insights are deeply rooted in the importance of observation, supporting mindset shifts, and building diversity and microbiome health in soils. We couldn’t be more excited to support this approach. Nicole’s book ‘For the Love of Soil’ is a firm favourite of ours, and we can also highly recommend her online course as an excellent companion to the outcomes-based learning supported by the Soilmentor Regen Platform!

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Soilmentor support for DEFRA Soil Management Plan
Soilmentor support for DEFRA Soil Management Plan 1080 1080 Soilmentor

Soilmentor support for DEFRA
Soil Management Plan

Farming in the UK and planning to create a DEFRA soil management plan in future?

Soilmentor can support you to monitor your soil health and structure, detail how an area is managed, and report problem areas.

In order to align with the UK government’s Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme (currently in its pilot phase), DEFRA requires that participating farmers and landowners submit a runoff and soil erosion risk assessment, to be updated every 2 years. This assessment can then be used in your government soil management plan. 

Among other details, the assessment requires in-field monitoring of:

  • Soil structure
  • Earthworm numbers
  • Soil compaction
  • Steepness and length of slopes
  • Visible signs and risk of runoff and erosion

The assessment also requires recording of problem areas where there is existing runoff or erosion, soil compaction, poor crop growth, capping, or low earthworm activity. 

If you are currently part of the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot scheme, please get in touch with us to learn more about how Soilmentor can support your audit!

In January 2022, we launched the Regen Platform – a significant update to Soilmentor. The Regen Platform brings you 10 key ‘Regen Indicators’ to monitor, with access to benchmarking and comparison to other farms. These Regen Indicators will allow you to accurately gauge the health of your soils, and their resilience against runoff and erosion. We’ll also be adding more soil tests to our standard list of tests for monitoring. 

If you have any questions about Soilmentor, or any ideas about reports we could develop to support you in future – please also get in touch! We’re always interested to hear from you.

We’re already in the process of developing a clearer framework on how Soilmentor can support UK farmers to conduct their soil risk assessment – and we’re always interested to hear from you. 

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Soil Lab Test Series #2: Nutrient Analyses
Soil Lab Test Series #2: Nutrient Analyses 784 1090 Soilmentor

Soil Lab Test Series #2: Soil Nutrient Analyses

This is the second post in the Soilmentor Soil Lab Test Blog Series exploring soil lab analyses, what we can learn from them, and where to get them done. In this blog we look at soil nutrient analyses, and we’ll be exploring leaf and tissue analysis, and SOM / SOC tests in future posts. We explored soil biodiversity tests in the first post in this series, you can read it here.

We’re often asked for lab test recommendations, and although we don’t offer them directly with Soilmentor, we want to support you in choosing which tests you can learn from, and to keep building your soil health.

It’s worth noting that we don’t necessarily see these tests as essential for understanding your soil health – every system is different and many people get great results by simply observing their soil with in-field tests. It’s important to consider soil sample testing as a snapshot of your soils at one moment in time. Soils are dynamic, so we keep testing and monitoring over time to understand the full soil health picture.

There are many parameters to consider when looking at soil nutrients, and there will always be variability in what comes up in different areas of the farm. Nutrients need to be in an available form to be taken up by plant roots, and this can be hard to accurately measure. In some cases, soil nutrient tests have shown severe deficiencies, while plants growing from the same soil show optimum nutrient levels! Nutrient interactions in the soil are complex, so it’s important to look at your soil more holistically, and look for signals of soil biology and good structure, too. We find simple tests like VESS and the slake test are just as important when indicating your overall soil health, and should always be done alongside lab tests.

If you want to add your lab tests to be viewed alongside other tests in Soilmentor, this is possible for key results in the Soilmentor lab tests category. We also work with some fantastic soil advisors who help you to understand your soils and soil test results. If you’d like us to put you in touch with an advisor, let us know.

Soil Nutrient Analyses

Soil nutrient analyses quantify the nutrients in your soil, suggesting which minerals and nutrients your soil may be deficient in, to inform future inputs and management. This information can help locate problem areas on your farm, and allow for more efficient fertiliser or mineral application, or cover crop plantation.

Most soil nutrient analyses will also include a pH test of your soil, as this is likely to affect the solubility of minerals and nutrients, and the activity of microorganisms. Generally speaking, a pH of 6-7 is thought to promote ready availability of plant nutrients. CEC (Cation Exchange Capacity) tests are also normally included in nutrient testing. CEC tests tell you the negative charge of your soil, which is another measure of the extent to which soil particles can attract and hold onto dissolved nutrients. Simply put, soils with a higher CEC are able to hold onto more nutrients needed for growing, although this varies depending on which nutrients you’re hoping to retain, and what proportion of nutrients your soil has in the first place!

Where to get your soil nutrient analysis measured

  • Albion Laboratory provide comprehensive soil mineral, pH and CEC analysis with a range of package options – see more here.
  • Lancrop offer a wide range of soil analysis options for pH and available nutrients.

We have never personally sent soil samples to any of these companies, so we are really keen to hear people’s feedback! This list is also by no means exhaustive – if you have any good suggestions for us to add or any other feedback, please let us know at info@vidacycle.com.

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Soil Lab Test Series #1: Soil Biodiversity Testing
Soil Lab Test Series #1: Soil Biodiversity Testing 1654 984 Soilmentor

Soil Lab Test Series #1: Soil Biodiversity Testing

This is the first post in the Soilmentor Soil Lab Test Blog Series exploring soil lab analyses, what we can learn from them, and where to get them done. In this blog we look at soil biodiversity tests, and we’ll be exploring nutrient analysis, leaf and tissue analysis, and SOM / SOC tests in future posts.

We’re often asked for lab test recommendations, and although we don’t offer them directly with Soilmentor, we want to support you in choosing which tests you can learn from, and to keep building your soil health.

It’s worth noting that we don’t necessarily see these tests as essential for understanding your soil health – every system is different and many people get great results by simply observing their soil with in-field tests. It’s important to consider soil sample testing as a snapshot of your soils at one moment in time. Soils are dynamic, so we keep testing and monitoring over time to understand the full soil health picture.

If you want to add your lab tests to be viewed alongside other tests in Soilmentor, this is possible for key results in the Soilmentor lab tests category. We work with some fantastic soil advisors who help you to understand your soils and soil test results. If you’d like us to put you in touch with an advisor, let us know.

Soil Biodiversity Testing

Soil biodiversity tests quantify your “underground herd” (as Nicole Masters puts it in her book, ‘For the Love of Soil’). Understanding the proportions of different microbes living in your soil ecosystem helps to inform what kind of management techniques would support a balanced soil food web – and balance is key, as soils that are dominated by one type of microbe can lead to problems.

For example, a disrupted ratio of fungi:bacteria in your soil can be an early warning of soil health issues. Fungi and bacteria occupy different habitats within the soil, and have different roles and diets. Productive and healthy agricultural soils tend to have a fungi:bacteria ratio close to 1:1, so learning where your soil sits on this ratio can help you to manage your soils to encourage more bacteria or fungi as necessary. The proportions of bacteria and fungi also have a knock-on effect to other soil microbe communities, such as protists, viruses and nematodes. Following the Soil Health Principles is the best way to keep these soil communities in harmonious balance, and observation and testing is the best way to understand where action may need to be taken.

mycorrhizae roots

Fungal mycorrhizal associations with roots. Image source here.

Where to get your soil biodiversity measured

  • MicroBIOMETER is a global company that offers microbial biomass tests that can be done with a starter kit in the field – no need to send your samples off for soil analysis. Their ‘lab grade’ tests also indicate the fungi:bacteria ratio in your soils, and results can be returned in as little as 20 minutes, removing the risk of your sample degrading on its way to the lab. In the UK, you can order a microbiometer testing kit by contacting Jack Ingle here. If you’re not in the UK, get in contact with the MicroBIOMETER team on their website to find out how best to get a kit!
  • Lancrop offer microbial mass tests for identifying fungal:bacterial ratios of your soil in the UK. You can enquire about Lancrop’s services on their website here.
  • Yara offer soil biology ratio tests as part of their UK soil health testing package – you can enquire for more information on their website here.

We have never personally sent soil samples to any of these companies, so we are really keen to hear people’s feedback! This list is also by no means exhaustive – if you have any good suggestions for us to add or any other feedback, please let us know at info@vidacycle.com

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In Collaboration with Nicole Masters: Soilmentor Regenerative Platform
In Collaboration with Nicole Masters: Soilmentor Regenerative Platform 1000 668 Soilmentor

In Collaboration with Nicole Masters: Soilmentor Regenerative Platform

We’re thrilled to announce our collaboration with world-renowned soil health specialist and author, Nicole Masters and the team at Integrity Soils. We have read Nicole’s book ‘For the Love of Soil’ and we are in the process of completing her online course – both highly recommended. Nicole shares many of her key insights around moving your mindset, microbes and SOM into a place of resilience and shares the best ways (both observational and lab-based tests) to understand how farm health is changing. Working together feels like a perfect fit to share the power of observational monitoring as farmers move to a regenerative approach – helping to build ecology, profitability and beauty on farms around the world.

Integrity Soils use Soilmentor with their clients across the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, allowing land managers to compare year-on-year how earthworm counts, slake tests, ‘weed’* pressure and much more is changing in each field. It is their key tool for monitoring farm health and providing their regenerative consultancy work on farms. Together we will take Soilmentor to the next level, making it an essential tool for organisations, consultants and farms to practically and simply “measure their soils like a pro!”.

We have joined forces to share our experience of working with farmers, ranchers and scientists, bringing together our knowledge of monitoring, management and observation. Together we are developing the Soilmentor Regenerative Platform, a new and effective method to monitor land health from a regenerative perspective. It is a bespoke dashboard designed to visualise key soil health metrics and biodiversity indicators, and encourage farmers to ask questions about how to manage their land more regeneratively; How biologically active are my soils? How healthy is a crop? Is my farm supporting wildlife? How do I compare with my neighbours?

The platform brings new functionality to our current Soilmentor offering, which already empowers farmers and advisors to easily record results of observational tests in the field. Farmers can compare year on year how earthworm counts, slake tests, pest pressure and much more is changing in each field.

With the Soilmentor Regenerative Platform, organisations will be able to create combined data sets, learning from each other using the metrics they monitor, and creating a picture of landscape level change in these metrics. The Platform will enable farmers to compare their results against scientific benchmarks and other farms in their group. Biological, chemical and physical metrics sit side by side, each playing their part in this more holistic understanding of the farm. Each metric will have a ‘traffic light’ and action, to give a sense of how the farm is performing against benchmarks and encourage farmers to ask questions and take the next steps in their transition to regenerative farming.

The prototype of this new technology was initially developed by Vidacycle working with Elizabeth Stockdale at NIAB, and the Great Soils project in the UK, thanks to SARIC funding. It was a great success, wow-ing farmers, consultants and scientists with its easy interface and clear pathway for understanding soil health monitoring. Collaborating with Integrity Soils builds on the prototype and takes it in a groundbreaking direction by focusing on the mindset and thinking required to farm regeneratively.

The features of the Regenerative Platform will be available over the course of this year to all organisational Soilmentor customers – many of the tools are suited to enabling farmers to learn together and so we are making it available to organisations first. If you are already a Soilmentor, Soilmentor+ or Soilmentor for Groups customer then you will see relevant aspects of the Regenerative Platform becoming available to you over the course of this year. By working together with Integrity Soils every single one of our customers will benefit as their knowledge helps inform how our Soilmentor offering develops.

This is a very exciting step forward and we’d love to hear what you think – get in touch at info@vidacycle.com

*An important distinction in the shift to a regenerative mindset is rethinking what we mean by a weed, and what plants might be telling us when they grow in undesirable places.

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Case Study: Sam and Claire Beaumont, Gowbarrow Hall Farm
Case Study: Sam and Claire Beaumont, Gowbarrow Hall Farm 1600 1200 Soilmentor

Case Study: Sam and Claire Beaumont, Gowbarrow Hall Farm

Gowbarrow Hall Farm is an upland farm in the Lake District, run by Sam and Claire Beaumont and their family. They returned to the farm three years ago, which had been managed intensively by a local sheep grazier since the 1990s. Nitrogen was regularly used to improve the pasture, increasing grass growth which was cut and taken off the farm. Continuous fertiliser inputs and overgrazing disrupted the natural system, leading to a decline in soil biology, biodiversity and plantlife.

Sam and Claire have been working with Caroline Grindrod of Wilderculture to develop a blended regenerative and rewilding approach on the farm, to naturally regenerate the landscape. They gradually took back parts of the farm from the grazier, bringing in a small herd of Shorthorn cattle as well as a few Cumbrian Fell ponies and Kunekune pigs. They want to grow forage without inputs, using grazing and long rest periods, while restoring soil health, building biodiversity, and producing nutrient dense food.

Previously the sheep were grazing wood pasture in the parkland in summer, allowing hay to be cut on the meadows. This system was turned on it’s head with Caroline’s help; the cattle are now mob-grazed on the meadows in summer, and outwintered on standing hay in the wood pasture and woodland in the old parkland. The small number of fell ponies and pigs remain in the parkland all year round.

Claire and Sam are using Soilmentor to monitor their soil health and get instant feedback on how their management is supporting the awakening of soil organisms belowground.

Photo Credit: Anthony Cullen

“It was amazing to see the differences in the profile between the soil under hedgerows and the soil under pasture that has been over grazed for years. I saw a clear, dark topsoil layer in the hedgerow but out in the middle of the field the soil was yellow and there were no obvious layers. Doing VESS scores has been so interesting, looking closely at how the soil crumbles and even smelling it! We can already see a huge improvement in soil structure in the fields we’re mob grazing – it’s all down to rest.

Soilmentor is a great way to monitor what’s happening with our soil as it changes – we’re excited to see how it progresses. We love looking back at photos of our soil health on Soilmentor, and it is so useful to have the exact gps locations tagged for every soil sample site.”

Below is an example from their meadows of how the soil has changed since being rested in the winter and mob grazed in the summer. The left photo was taken in September 2019, and is noticeably more blocky than the right hand photo taken in October 2020. Bobbly, crumb like soil structure is appearing as the soil biology is being fed with manure and root exudates. Long rests allow the forage to grow up tall, not only providing more feed for the cattle, but also assisting the development of extensive root networks, increasing the capacity for nutrient exchange between the plants and the soil organisms.

The farm is beginning to regenerate naturally, as the soil biology and dormant seed bank start to awaken, allowing plants that have been overgrazed and outcompeted to spring into life. “We’ve got tons of forage now and we are seeing diversity return to the meadows. There is a lot more cocksfoot grass which has dense root networks and we are even seeing docks in a new light; they are excellent at breaking through compaction layers with their deep tap roots. We were thrilled to hear the call of a curlew when we stopped cutting the meadows for hay.”

In the parkland native wildflowers like Devil’s Scabious and tree saplings are popping up in the summer. Wildlife is moving in; little burrows are littered across the rough ground, and barn owls are returning to the farm.

We recently visited Gowbarrow Hall Farm for some soil testing with Caroline Grindrod – it was fantastic to see the natural regeneration first hand, and we look forward to following their regenerative journey.

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Don’t think you’ve got time to go out and dig holes? Think differently!
Don’t think you’ve got time to go out and dig holes? Think differently! 559 397 Soilmentor

What does the future hold for farming? Well, the truth is, we don’t have a crystal hoof! But, there is one way to make our farming enterprises resilient, through the wettest of winters and driest of summers. A way of reducing inputs, increasing biodiversity and building a healthy planet. Farming with a focus on regenerating our soils.

We all need to start somewhere on this journey. What does your soil structure look like? Is it compacted? Is your soil at risk of erosion? Is it alive with worms, microbes and fungi? These are the questions we should be asking ourselves as farmers today, and they can be answered by getting out into your fields and observing for yourself.

Whatever type of farm you are, whatever your location, you can benefit from soil monitoring. It is the basis for knowing if your soil is healthy or not and if it supports healthy crops and animals. Without knowing how healthy your soil is, how can you improve it?

Lab tests are only part of the picture, numbers on a page. Soil health analysis is visual, connecting you to your land, monitoring it’s pulse. It is your guide.

But what will you get from soil monitoring? (Apart from muddy fingernails!)

From your first set of tests you create a baseline of your soil health. Straight away you can draw insights from comparing soil test results on fields under different land use. But really the magic happens when you come back to the same sample spots and do these tests again, and again, and again.

Record observations, photograph what you find and save the GPS locations of your sample sites using the Soilmentor app. Next time you can return to the exact same spot on the map and compare it with the last time you were there. Worms love the camera!

Then you will learn if your cover crop roots are improving soil structure, or if your new grazing system is stimulating microbial life and so on. All this information is available to you through simple, low cost tests, and acts as your guide for how to improve your soil health.

Don’t think you’ve got time to go out and dig holes? Think differently!

To be successful at soil monitoring you need to build it into your routine. The first time is always the hardest and perhaps you have another more pressing task (like tidying the farm office!) BUT once you get going, you’ll be hooked.

Day-to-day farming activities you can do when you’re soil monitoring:

Checking livestock
Once you’ve made sure they are all there, no one has jumped the fence and the water trough isn’t overflowing why not fetch your spade, dig a hole and count earthworms? Manure from the beastys feeds dung beetles and worms, so you should find lots of activity.

Crop walking
Heading out to see what growth stage you’re at? This is the time to assess how well your soil is supporting your crops. Is there an area that doesn’t look so good? Perhaps there is a compaction issue, you’ll only know once you get the spade in and do a visual evaluation of soil structure.

Fencing
Need some light relief from moving electric wires or post bashing? It’s likely you’re in fields grazed by our furry and/or feathery friends. Check out the diversity of their forage by throwing a quadrat around and see how what’s growing affects soil biology by doing a slake score.

Taking the dog(s) for a W-A-L-K
We have it on good authority that dogs love to go soil testing, we’ve seen it with our own eyes. They will get a good leg stretch and tail wag as you tour the fields with your spade. They might even carry your quadrat for you.

..and remember, digging one hole is better than digging none. Just dig it!

 

Ready to get started soil monitoring? Check out Soilmentor – a handy smartphone app to record soil test results and photos in field and online account to analyse your observations.

Get started with Soilmentor
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