Local waterways are an important part of your community. When they’re healthy, they have the potential to benefit everyone, including you:
This means healthy waterways have the potential to benefit local farmland and the surrounding community.
It’s a Team Effort
Everyone can help improve water quality. People are working together in specific ways, such as:
Local Communities
- Municipal stormwater runoff management
- Public education around the proper use and storage of household toxins
Local Businesses
- Improved landscaping management
- Urban lawns
Individuals
- Anti-littering campaigns
Farmers
- On-farm soil health management
Together, these practices improve local water sources. As a farmer, you can be part of the effort with good soil health practices.
Healthy Soil Helps
Increasing soil organic matter (SOM) is the key to healthy soil. That’s because SOM improves soil structure, making it more porous and allowing air and water to move more freely. When this happens, it helps protect local water sources in multiple ways.
Start a Soil Health Management Program
To increase your SOM, a soil health management program can help. Here’s how:
Protect the Soil
Minimize disturbance – SOM is highest at the surface, so protect it from degrading forces with no-till or reduced tillage practices and limit equipment passes over the land. If able, rotate livestock on fields in the off seasons.
Maximize soil cover – Use cover crops to help prevent nutrient runoff, slow erosion and evaporation, promote water retention and help with temperature changes.
Feed the Soil
Manage nutrients – The 4R strategy uses the right fertilizer source at the right rate and right time in the right place in order to optimize nutrient management.
Use living roots – Cover crops, diverse crop rotation, and dedicated grass/forest strips work to strengthen the soil and break disease/pest cycles.
Better water means better farms – and better communities. To learn more about how you can help, sign up below
Read More Related Articles Here:
-3 Steps to Healthy Soil
-Good Soil Goes a Long Way
-Make Your Soil Count
