The recently held Holistic Assessment Soil Health (HASH) days at Mulloon Creek Natural Farms gave the local community and Mulloon staff an opportunity to come together to learn about soil health and how to monitor this.
Soil health is one of the indicator groups identified as part of the LiFT project as being integral to agricultural production and a functioning landscape. The workshops provided techniques to monitor soil health, which can be done by time-poor farmers and land managers with simple equipment. Soil monitoring is useful to identify any soil constraints, check condition and track any improvement progress.
Over each of the two days of sampling, we divided into four teams and sampled two sites across four different properties, including the Mulloon Rehydration Initiative (MRI), which is our flagship catchment-scale demonstration project, showcasing how landscape rehydration, natural sequence processes and collaborative long-term monitoring can restore hydrological function, improve soil health, enhance biodiversity and build drought-resilient farming systems.
We dug three soil cubes at each site, from which we assessed soil structure, porosity or air spaces, soil organism diversity, topsoil depth and pH which affects nutrient cycling, biological processes and the general root zone environment. We also measured water infiltration rate, which showed good subsoil structure and drainage capabilities of the soil. This provided some good baseline data for each of the four properties sampled and a number of sampling sites, which we can return to in the future.
HASH will make up part of our LiFT toolkit to help land managers and farmers assess the baseline condition of their property, track their property health and identify strategies for improvement. All LiFT monitoring information will be collected in a secure database with a user-friendly dashboard.
Pictured top: Peter Mattson (Soil Land Food) delivering training for HASH day talking about the HASH toolkit.
Pictured right: Peter Mattson (Soil Land Food) delivering training for HASH day looking for biological organisms.
Pictured below: David Hardwick (Soil Land Food) delivering training for HASH day.
