Every farm needs long-term goals: why improving soil health should be one of them

ARTICLE SUMMARY:  Productive soil plays a significant role in determining farm profitability. Improving soil productivity occurs through reduced tillage, no till, and/or cover crops.

Early on in life, my parents told me an interesting insight: you can tell a lot about the quality of the land of a farm by the condition of the buildings. The simplicity of this concept does not do justice to the insight and significance for farm management. If the land was productive then growers typically experienced solid profitability and could afford to invest in farm buildings. Conversely, if the farmland had low productivity, then profitability sank, often preventing any investment in farm buildings.

When it comes to the productivity of the land, there are certainly some natural attributes that help (we’re looking at you, deep prairie soils of Iowa) and others that do not (thin topsoils to bedrock of southern Missouri). And yes, even in the midst of that context, growers in poorer soil regions can still have success. Similarly, growers blessed with highly productive soils can falter due to unfortunate circumstances or poor management decisions. But don’t let unique situations overshadow two fundamentals here: 

• Healthy, productive soil should be the top goal for maintaining and building a profitable farm
• Soil productivity can improve or decline with management practices

When we view these two facts together the lesson is clear: farm profitability hinges on the maintenance and improvement of soil productivity. Hoping to maintain or build profitability while ignoring land productivity will likely lead to a farm sale sometime in the future. 

So how can we maintain or build land productivity? The simple answer is by adopting practices that build soil organic matter, soil structure, and soil biology. In essence, practices that often qualify for Carbon by Indigo, like reducing tillage and adding cover crops, are exactly the same practices to build these key soil metrics while generating income through carbon credits. 

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As with any long-term goal, how one gets there matters. Identifying a path that not only gets you to your destination, but does so quickly while providing the most benefits is ideal. Indigo’s Soil Health Optimizer helps growers identify immediate agronomic challenges, identify the best solutions, and generate a plan that can simplify implementation as well as data management for participating in Carbon by Indigo.