Regional legislators and staff gathered at WSU’s Northwest Research and Extension Center in Mount Vernon this week to see its new soil health long term research plot. Under cloudy skies and among the 16 acres of research fields, WSU soil health scientists explained the real-world impact of their research and how some stakeholders have already chosen to implement the four-year crop rotation cycle in their fields as a pathway to fight diseases and increase crop yield.
In 2021, the Legislature authorized funding to complete the Soil Health Initiative to expand soil research as part of a broader effort that included the state Conservation Commission and the state Department of Agriculture.
WSU researchers are researching not only how to improve agricultural yields but how to make environmentally-friendly strategies more profitable. An important measure of soil health is the presence of organic matter. Soils with little organic matter are less resilient to disturbances like drought. WSU soil Ph.D. students and researchers are assessing the presence of organic matter and particulates like sand and clay at different levels of soil depth. To a farmer this would mean the ability to further increase their soil health and mitigate diseases which impact the crop, and the end result after four years of crop rotation is an increase in crop yield which is significant enough to make this a viable solution economically.
Previously, 900 soil samples were collected throughout the state which helped inform and organize the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment plots in Mount Vernon, Puyallup, Wenatchee, Othello, Prosser and Davenport. Legislators and staff participated this week in a demonstration at Mount Vernon plot with a rainfall simulator that depicts the movement of water on soils containing different crop systems. On the right side the vibrant crop system consisting of a cover crop of grass and clover allows water to seep through the soil quickly and gather in the container underneath the crop system. Alternatively, in soil conditions in which structure has broken down, the water is unable to permeate the soil and runs off into the container in front of that crop system, taking with it the important topsoil and increasing erosion.
Another important factor WSU soil scientists are measuring in the soil, is the presence of microbiomes. Microbiomes are communities of organisms that live on and in people, plants, soil, oceans and the atmosphere. Dr. Deidre Griffin LaHue has creatively tracked the presence and activity levels of microbiomes in soil by burying cotton shirts and seeing how the microbiomes begin to break it down. Fields that are routinely disturbed but without attention to crop rotation to break disease cycles tend to show less microbial activity. Shirts buried in fields in which strategies to deliberately promote soil health come up in tatters – with microbial activity effectively disintegrating the shirt previously buried, signaling healthy vibrant soil.
The LTARE plot at Mount Vernon is one of several throughout the state, which together establish a network that measures and observes a number of soil health indicators and their impact to different crops throughout the state’s diverse agroecological climates. An important feature of this initiative includes stakeholder involvement and feedback. This has enabled WSU researchers to design sandbox research site at Mt Vernon which is exploring the stakeholder feedback of including alfalfa as part of the rotational crops. These efforts are crucially dependent on stakeholder input and feedback as WSU works to develop the soil health solutions to feed Washingtonians and the world for decades to come.