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Soil Research

• Low-cost AI soil sensors could help farmers curb fertilizer use, as recently published in Nature Food.

• Ever heard of canopy soils? Canopy soils that form on tree branches contain three times more carbon than soils on the ground in Costa Rica, potentially serving as an important carbon sink around the world. Another blog about this research can be found here.

• Conventional agriculture and not drought alters relationships between soil biota and functions.

• Researchers from the University of Adelaide developed a new inexpensive method to detect lime in soil. 

• New research connecting gut health with soil health through microbiomes. The article is open access and can be found here.

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Soil Space

• ESA will soon open a container of moon soil from 50 years ago. This was collected back in December 1972 by Apollo 17.

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Soil Art, Film & Fun

• Visual instructions for the #30minworms initiative on the uksoils.org website

• A new documentary soil film teaser is out, as you may have already seen in the soil care network group: Six inches of soil - on agroecology in the UK, due out in 2023.

• “Mud, Glorious Mud” - this Guardian piece interviewing Jake Fiennes on “restored ditches bring birds flocking back to Norfolk wetlands” is definitely worth a read. 

• This apartment in central New York has been accumulating tons of soil for more than 40 years, as a work by local artist Walter de Maria.

• To improve soil health, two farmers in Northumberland are using the Japanese “Bokashi” process (fermentation of organic manure).

• A new piece in the Guardian was published on “Soil carbon sequestration on farms alone won’t absolve our daily emission sins”

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Soil in Policy & Report

• New report by the Sustainable Soils Alliance on "Soil in the Supply Chain - How the food and drink industry can support the transition to sustainable, regenerative agriculture and Net Zero"

• The UK Food Security Report 2021 is now online. Defra provides in this report a analysis of UK food Security, emphasizing the important role of soil. It points out that soil degradation costs £1.2 billion per year for England and Wales, and that intensive agriculture creates large soil carbon losses.

• AgriLand reports: “Farmers face a ‘geographic lottery’ in terms of soil carbon sequestration, if plans to reward them financially for increasing soil carbon stocks are to be introduced, two leading soil scientists have confirmed.”

• Food and Agriculture Organization says most plastics are burned, buried or lost after use in agriculture and threatens food safety.

• Farmers will be paid to look after soil on their land under a new incentive scheme to replace EU subsidies after BREXIT, as the government revealed the first of three parts to its Sustainable Farming Incentive. There is also a video on this here.

• On the 5th of December, World Soil Day, the FAO stressed the risk of soil salinization for food security. They also published a teachers’ guide on "Salty experiments with soil for children" ,including experiments everyone can do. 

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