Study shows soil microbial structures
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Did you know tillage practices affect soil health?
Liz Rieke, Ph.D., with the Soil Health Institute got into the dirt of how microbial community structures were impacted by tillage during the institute’s annual meeting.
“Over the past few decades many of us know that there has been a lot of different biological indicators that have been incorporated into different soil health tests,” she began. “Three different categories have been commonly used.”
That was looking at the microbial community, available resource pools and the broad scale of microbial activity in the soil. Changes in these categories have typically been linked to changes in management practices on a farm.
What they were looking for were practical outcomes such as an increase in plant-available nutrients or a decrease in environmental losses through leaching.
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