Beyond T: Standards for Sustainable Soil Management

The Soil and Water Conservation Society (SWCS) is leading a multi-year project to give conservationists the tool needed to holistically manage soil.  SWCS will develop a blueprint for new soil management standards and planning tools and facilitate tests of their utility and workability.  The goal is to build consensus that new standards and tools are needed and build confidence that the task is feasible.

Rationale

Degradation of the earth’s soil resources is among the most serious and widespread threats to sustainability and environmental quality.  Soil management is fundamental to achieving economically and environmentally sustainable agricultural production systems because soils provide essential agronomic and ecological services to those systems.  The most widely used and federally supported soil conservation tools—the Soil Loss Tolerance Standard (T) and the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE)—fall far short of what is needed to manage for those services.

The scientific basis for recognizing the comprehensive services soil provides in agro-ecosystems is maturing and advances in information technology make it easier to implement more integrated approaches to managing soil.  Indicators of soil quality have been proposed for use in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the European Union.  A growing number of projects are piloting comprehensive soil management at the field level.  SWCS intends to couple advances in science with growing field experience to construct a blueprint for an effective set of soil management standards and planning tools.  The ultimate goal is to get such a system in the hands of practitioners, program managers, and policymakers, who can use it to enhance soil and environmental management.

Approach

 SWCS will use a two-stage approach to implement the project. 

The first, and most important stage, is to produce the initial blueprint.  The blueprint will articulate a vision of the capabilities and structure of the new system and answer key questions such as: what functions and roles should the new system; how should those components be structured; how should the new system relate to existing or emerging soil assessment systems; and, how should the new system relate to other existing or emerging environmental standards and planning tools?

SWCS will develop a white paper—based on a review of existing or proposed soil management standards and planning tools—highlighting lessons learned from research and practice.  An expert panel of soil scientists, conservation planners, program managers, and producers will review and revise the white paper.  SWCS staff and consultants, working with the expert panel, will produce the initial blueprint.

In the second stage of the project, SWCS will distribute the initial blueprint to scientists, practitioners, program managers, and policymakers for review, critique, testing, and revision.  An interactive website will be designed to create a virtual community of scientists, practitioners, program managers, and policymakers to test the blueprint against their research and practical experience.  Information, discussion, and criticism will be used to refine the blueprint and work towards institutionalizing the new tools.  Activities such as workshops, conferences, published reports, field trips, and pilot programs, may also be used to help refine the blueprint.

Status

Work has secured half of the funding needed to complete the first stage of the projects from the Wallace Genetic Foundation.  Activities began in summer of 2005.