GREATSoils - The Organic Research Centre

Growing Resilient Efficient And Thriving Soils

Project Aims:

Growing Resilient Efficient And Thriving Soils

The project aims to:

evaluate soil assessment methods for growers
to improve growers’ confidence in ‘reading the signs’
to offer the opportunity to practise assessment methods with colleagues and advisors
to engage with, and disseminate the methods and approaches to a wide range of levy payers, growers, advisors and other stakeholders and
to develop methods and approaches for practical soil analysis and evaluation to enable confident choices for sustainable soil management.

The benefits for growers are:

improved health assessment of their soils;
able to follow a more integrated and accurate strategy for soil management, specifically adapted to their own conditions;
able to optimise inputs, increase soil fertility and organic matter.

Where growers are able to optimise and maintain soil organic matter levels, the benefits can be financially and environmentally significant. Improved soil health management can increase yields and potentially reduce costs as the land will become more productive.

ORC's Role:

ORC leads on two work packages, the first one produced a literature review on the variety of different soil assessment methods and tools currently available for UK growers. This review will be publicly available by the end of the year. In the second work package we have launched a series of grower consultation events in 4 different growing regions of the UK, where we sought advice, critical feedback and opinions from growers and consultants on the usefulness and applicability of currently available soil assessment methods. Based on the outcomes of these consultation events, we will organise 6 field trials during the next two growing seasons (2016+2017) where we will explore various new and improved methods and new combinations of tools for soil assessments. These field trials on 6 different holdings across the UK will be accompanied by a number of field walks where all growers and interested participants from the regions are invited to see the new soil assessment approaches in action, get first feedback from the host-growers and give their own opinions on the usefulness of these approaches.