Unlock the Secrets in the Soil

As a soil health promoter I'm always looking for great resources and sites that I can direct people when talking about soil health awareness. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is leading an educational campaign called "Unlock The Secrets In The Soil". This campaign focuses primarily on the importance of soil and soil health management strategies. This quote taken from the websites' mission clearly states their objective.

 

"The resources on this soil health section of our site are designed to help visitors understand the basics and benefits of soil health—and to learn about Soil Health Management Systems from farmers who are using those systems."

The website for the campaign has a host of resources available for promoters and educators to use when talking about soil health. The website focuses on promoting soil health management strategies by showing educational YouTube videos and printing educational pamphlets.

A few weeks ago I shared a set of Public Service Announcements (PSAs) that this campaign put out, which sheds  light on the important functions of soil. These PSA's highlighted the amount of biological activity in the soil and the importance of cover crops in regards to soil erosion. These PSA's a just a mirror image of what the USDA is doing to educate people on soil health. When directed to the website, they have a link dedicated to educational materials. I have often used these materials when talking to different groups about soil health. The part that I find the most intriguing is that they have different materials prepared for the selected age group your targeting. I have found that promoting soil health to younger age groups as a difficult task, due to the little understanding of basic soil concepts. But this campaign does a great job to bring soil health content to a younger generation by making it fun and interesting. Below is a graphic that I obtained from the campaign's website that in my opinion demonstrates this point.

 

 

Another beneficial tactic that the USDA uses is highlighting successful producers that use these soil health management strategies. This in my opinion this uses the bandwagon persuasion theory. By stating that these producers are successful because they used these management strategies, therefore  and you can be successful to by using these strategies. Usually I'm against this form of persuasion, but in this case I think that's the most effective when targeting producers that are weary of making drastic changes to their operation. Producers need real life success stories to feel confident in making these drastic changes to their farming operations. These success stories are really a great tool to target these producers.

 

But in my opinion this campaign is successful because of their use of YouTube as a promotion resource. They have multiple series that focus on basic soil education and soil health awareness and management strategies. These videos have over 100,000 views which is pretty exciting for soil science. One of the popular series "Soil Health Lesson In A Minute" highlights aspects of soil health in multiple minute lessons. These are very effective in delivering their message in a fast and effective fashion.

 

Anyone that wants to learn more about soil health or wants resources when promoting soil health this campaign does a great job. I encourage everyone that's interested to go check it out!

 

              http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/soils/health/

California Drought and Soil Risks

Working in the agricultural industry, the weather can either be a friend or true economic enemy. All aspects of agriculture rely on the weather in some form or another.Essentially it all comes down to water, and when mother nature is going to supply you with that essential liquid. Without sufficient amounts of rain, our crops are prone to stresses which harm both the plant and us as consumers and producers. 

Drought in this country seems to have a natural cycle, but  its no secret that there is a major crisis going on in California. The current drought in California is something that that state has never seen before and the effects are hitting everyone in this country. Below is a picture of the current drought situation in the United States as of November 18th 2014.

As you can see a majority of California is in the Exceptional Drought range. The classification of exceptional drought range comes from the standard that the USDA set which states that exceptional drought implies that there is  " exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies". This standard was taken from the drought mitigation website that produces the drought monitor. 

Below is an image from October 2014 that shows just California's drought situation.

 This image shows that around 95% of the state is classified as severe drought or worse. So these two images really revel the widespread crisis that is going on in California. But some may wonder how this affects us here in ND or in other parts of the nation. Well California happens to be very agriculturally productive, not in corn-soybean production like we see here  in ND, but they produce a majority of our nations fruits, vegetable and most importantly their milk products. According to the California Agricultural Production  Statistics, California's top-ten most valued commodities (in order from #1 to # 10) are milk, grapes, almonds, nursery plants, cattle, strawberries, lettuce, walnuts, hay and tomatoes.  http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/

Currently the drought has cost the state about 1.5 billion dollars in losses and about 17,000  agricultural workers have lost their job.  The total forecast of net loses due to the drought are projected to be around 2.2 billion dollars. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/california-drought/california-drought-cost-2-2-billion-thousands-jobs-n159616

I recently heard a speaker at NDSU talk about how the drought is affecting cattle production and the cattle industry in California. As a native of California she said she knows many of her neighbors have resorted to selling their stock. This due to the the hay crop which has been significantly damaged due to the drought,  and it costs too much money to ship hay from other states so producers are left with no choice but to sell their cattle.  This is an unfortunate occurrence as cattle is California's fourth top commodity.

When researching this topic I stumbled across an article that discussed how the drought is increasing salinity in California and soil born toxins. As these problems make perfect sense to me, it was a side of the drought that I did not think about. In dry weather conditions, we have more evaporation and transpiration than precipitation therefore causing drought conditions. When water evaporates out of the soil, only clean/pure water evaporates. This means that water with dissolved salts in the solution, will ultimately leave behind salts on the soil surface when evaporation occurs. Salts also are brought the surface through irrigation, as water used in irrigation happens to be saline in nature. So not only do producers in these areas have to worry about water deficiencies they have to worry about salinity issues as well.

Here in ND we know all to well the issues of salinity. Salinity causes plant stress and yield loss similar to drought conditions. Salts in the soil are often hard to manage as it takes massive amounts of water to leach the ions down into the soil profile. California does not have the luxury of water to leach these salts into the profile so producers are left to plant salt tolerant crops and tolerant varieties. These methods are often very expensive to implement, which makes it hard for producers to make this transition when they have already seen economic losses the past few years.  Researchers are working on producing cheaper varieties and other methods to fight these issues. Below is the link of the article I found, it really does show another side to the California drought.

http://westernfarmpress.com/grapes/california-soil-toxins-worsened-drought



California has had to makes some very tough restrictions to help survive this economic and environmental crisis. As a resident if you are caught excessively watering your lawn of hosing down driveways/sidewalks you are subjected to a $500 fine. The state started offering incentives to homeowners, if they converted their landscapes from traditional lawns to "climate appropriate landscapes" which means they will plant natural dry desert plants in their yards. They have completely limited the use of irrigation, and now farmers have resorted to using ground water, which is starting to diminish.

While these water measures may seem harsh, California has came into the limelight on decisions regarding the water crisis. Many feel that while this is completely nature related they feel that there was many poor policy decisions made, which made the situation worse.  People have urged politicians to make real changes, other than flushing less and not watering the lawn.
People state that not enough is being done in the eyes of long term conservation. The population say that agencies should have extra revenue to build water reclamation projects and start implementing water reuse strategies.
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/California-s-man-made-water-crisis-5236687.php

Yet others state that conservation alone will not solve the problem, other much more expensive methods may need to be considered. Which the opponents feel is not necessary as this could only be temporary.

With politics aside it's clear that California is in true economic crisis, and the losses will only keep growing unless there is big changes. Conservation might not solve the problem, but people urge that its the only current solution available without costing billions of dollars. Only time will tell how this crisis folds out, hopefully it doesn't forever damage the agriculture in California.

Soil Health Resources: Websites

This week for my Agricultural Communications class we are to review a website that is related to our topic and in my case that would be soil health.

I was searching through the soil health sites and quickly realize that there is really just university websites and the Natural Resources Conservation Services websites. I opened the site from Cornell University up and found myself troubled with the layout and the amount of content on the site. I personally prefer simple sites, that have multiple pages with appropriate links associated with them. This particular site seemed to have an overload of information and I found myself searching for quite a while to find what exactly I was looking for.

                                                   http://soilhealth.cals.cornell.edu/

Below is a screen clipping of the home page of the website. As you can easily see there is a lot going on with this site, there is an overload of pictures and it is very text heavy.

 

One thing I did like about the page, was that there was a simple task bar and a search bar. I also really liked that they had options when searching for information. You could search just the soil health website or the entire Cornell system.

 One way that I feel you could fix the overwhelming issue is by eliminating either the blog section or the online resource section and just make them new tabs on the task bar. This would open up the page and allow for more simplicity.  Also the red lettering brings specific attention to only those areas, which makes it hard to focus on what your really trying to find.  I did really like the use of the pictures and the video, yet I would focus on simplifying the imagery to only a few images, because right now it seems a little overloaded.

While the layout and organization of the website may be a miss, I feel that the information and content are right on point. I really like that the website included videos on soil health testing and other information. I also really like the Soil Health Blog section, while I think it could be condensed into another page or have a different layout, I really like the message that it provides.  Being that this is University website I really found no problems with the information, because most of our information of soil health comes right from the Universities and the people working with them.

I want to show a web page that in my opinion delivers the message a little clearer and more effectively.

                                             http://www.ndsu.edu/soilhealth/

 I understand I may be biased because I'm a bison, but I will point out a few things I like a little better.

The two pages have similar content and information. Both websites have blog posts, and both website shows videos and both websites show research etc. Yet this particular website uses an effective layout so that the information is much easier to access. The user has to focus more on the task bar to find the information and by using this method the information is all easily categorized.  The one thing that this website is missing in comparison to the Cornell site is that advanced search bar. I feel this website could benefit by allowing searches only within the website.

If you looking for soil health information and your a visual learner than the NDSU website is for you. If you click the video tab on the task bar it directs you to all the YouTube videos NDSU has on soil health. These are videos taken from several field days and workshops from around the state. They are incredible useful and resourceful. I sincerely suggest that if you want to learn more about soil health you should watch these videos.

                 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCco9hmhuIafRu1VxAPOrNgA?feature=watch

Soil Science in The Media...

 I was looking for YouTube videos that showed soils in a fun and interesting way, and I happened to stumble across this YouTube video. The following video is an advertisement by the Soil Science Society of America to promote the conversation of soils. The video shows a series of public service announcements (PSA) about soil health and quality. The videos really show the importance of soil science in a new light.  The video is about 8 minuets long, I highly recommend viewing the entire message.

I want to discuss the facts that the presentation presents, that I feel are very important when talking about the importance of soil and soil health.

The first PSA states that soils are important in filtering our water. Some people might ask how does this work? Well think of the soil system as a complete watering filtration system. The water will meet with microorganisms who can help take inorganic materials out of the water. The varying textures of soil fine to coarse also provide varying filters. Clay sized particles are very fine and the pores between the particles are also very fine, so water passing through will leave behind many inorganic products letting clean water pass through into the aquifers. I found various fun experiments online that show exactly how different textures filter. Below is a YouTube video that shows how the experiments work.

 The second PSA shows how there are billions of microorganisms in a tablespoon of soil. There are million of bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes in the soil that help preform many functions such as fixing nitrogen to make it plant available. The microorganisms are very important in making the soil function properly, that's why we need to promote soil health to keep these little guys healthy and happy.  Below is a link to an NRCS document that shows how soil microorganism work and their associated functions.

• http://www.conservationwebinars.net/webinars/soil-quality-the-foundation-for-resource- management/at_multi_download/relatedFiles?name=Soil%20Microorganisms%20and%20their%20Functions.pdf

I feel the third PSA is explanatory. All plants are grown in the soil and animals eat these plants, then we consume these animal products. So in theory everything we consume really can be traced back to the soil. 

The end of the video shows the "Dig It: Secrets of Soil" exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum. I have not had the pleasure to visit this exhibit, but I have heard wonderful things from many that have visited it. I hope to go soon to see soil science in all it's glory!

 

I really think these short PSA's really show how important soils really are and how important it really is to protect and support our soils.