Farmers Invited to Participate in Developing Soil Health Benchmarking Tool

A new national effort called Probing Our Country’s Soil Health, sponsored by USDA, 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 (SHAPE), and it will also provide insights of management practices that may improve crop yields when enhancing soil health. The tool developers are inviting farmers and ranchers to participate in establishing the benchmarks by enrolling to provide soil samples. A soil sampling team will hand-probe two to three sites per enrolled field, and participants will be compensated for their time and receive a personalized soil health report. Learn more about the project from this short video.