Indiana leads way in soil health management, conservation

INDIANAPOLIS — One million acres of cover crops were planted in Indiana in 2014 — a sign that many farmers are taking conservation practices seriously.
Indiana serves as a leader in soil health management, according to conservation experts who gave a presentation at the annual Certified Crop Adviser program. Cover crops are used to build organic matter, reduce nutrient runoff, decrease erosion and more.
Successfully maintaining healthy soils all comes down to management.
“You have to be a good manager,” said Justin Schneider, senior policy adviser for Indiana Farm Bureau. “There are a group of farmers that aren’t great managers, and we’ve written them off. Nobody tries to talk to them anymore.
“They don’t go to any educational days or anything a university puts on. They aren’t showing up at workshops. We’re not pointing out the challenges they have, and we’re not trying to help make it better. That’s something we can’t do. We have to reach out to everybody.”
Around 30,000 new conservation practices were installed by Hoosier farmers during the last calendar year, said Jordan Seger, director of the Division of Soil Conservation at Indiana State Department of Agriculture.
While this is a great start, he said, farmers need to keep soil health at the forefront of their farms, not just to grow the healthiest plants, but to reduce harmful nutrient runoff in rivers.
“You can see that the bulk of the water in Indiana eventually ends up south into the Mississippi River, which runs into the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “Our steams locally are our top concern, but the reality is that there’s a bigger picture here.”
Nutrients and sediment from Indiana fields, as well as several other states, end up in the Gulf of Mexico. This has resulted in hypoxia, reduced oxygen content in a body of water.
Farm fields are not the only factors leading to hypoxia, Seger said, but they do play a role.
“The nutrients entering the water create large algae blooms,” he explained. “Once (the algae) is done depleting the nutrients from the fertilizer, it dies. When it dies, it decays and takes up all the oxygen in the water that’s needed for wildlife like shrimp, fish and crabs.”
There are several management strategies farmers can use to keep important nutrients on fields. Soil health techniques include soil sampling, manure management, conservation tillage and cover crops.
Seger encouraged farmers to look at the timing, placing and form of nutrients.
The Indiana Conservation Partnership, a collaboration between government agencies and organizations, serves as a good framework for future conservation growth.
“Because of this partnership and good farmers willing to try new things, we’ve become a leader in soil health on a national level,” Seger said. “In the past, we’ve had a pretty good understanding of the chemical and physical properties in the field.
“The missing third link is the biological component. To me, soil health is really about better understanding that biological component, figuring out how those symbiotic relationships between microorganisms — getting Mother Nature to work for you.”