£2.6 million of funding will go towards maintaining UK soils’ ability to produce arable crops. £1.6m was awarded by HGCA and the agency today announced a further £1m in co-funding will go towards improving soil management.

The funding will be spent over four-years as part of a national research and development programme. The programme will focus on delivering “practical and sustainable soil management practices” which it is hoped will help contribute towards tackling global food security, diffuse pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural practices.

Amongst other things work will investigate the impact of major changes in soil management practices towards more ‘sustainable’ systems, allowing researchers to determine the effects on soil structure and organic matter. HGCA Research and Knowledge Transfer Manager Dr Shamal Mohammed said, “Soils are an essential foundation for agricultural production. The management of this foundation is crucial in order to respond to the current challenges of producing ‘more with less impact’ as well as improving farm profitability. This programme aims to fill the gaps in current knowledge to help growers improve production and reduce inputs and environmental impacts; wherever in the UK they farm. The investment will help provide regional solutions to soil management.”

HGCA experts also promised much longer term projects would also be supported by the funding and research findings from other research projects will be incorporated into work carried out under the programme. They also said the project’s findings will be transferred as quickly as possible to farmers in the field through a national network of soil management demonstration sites and regionally balanced best practice information being made available to growers and agronomists.

The HGCA funding will be allocated to three projects, which will be coordinated by HGCA in a single Soil Programme.

The first project will study soil variability by better exploiting increasingly available yield-map data. Simple-to-use software will be developed from complex information to help growers analyse historical yield data – taken from several harvest years – at the click of a button to create soil management zones. User-friendly guidelines will allow the underlying causes of variability to be established and management practices to be changed accordingly, HGCA said.

The second will investigate improving soil organic matter; the project will identify the optimum blends and rates of organic matter addition. An economic analysis will also be undertaken to establish the costs and benefits of sourcing, transporting and using organic amendments.

Long-term field experiments, examining shifts in soil cultivation practices, will be studied in the final project.  Such trials are essential to demystify the complex interactions between soil type, weather conditions and management practices on economic and environmental outcomes, according to HGCA experts. As such, the research will have a strong focus on tillage technique choices.

Scientists believe soils are living, dynamic biomes in their own right. Healthy soil forms a habitat for millions of microbial and animal species and as they take hundreds or even thousands of years to build up, soil scientists view soils as a non-renewable resource. The last major soil study conducted in the UK revealed the country loses 2 million tonnes of topsoil each year through degradation and erosion.

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