Category: Physical Soil Health

November 2nd, 2018 By Caro Roszell, NOFA/Mass Education Director What do the terms tilling and plowing mean to you? Furrow-slices rolling away behind you like a smooth wake in calm waters; a clean seedbed, chocolate-brown soil nearly ready for the crop? Or perhaps a machine, ripping through a quiet field, soil clods flying, dust rising…

January 6th, 2021 By Caro Roszell, NOFA/Mass Education Director Farmers manage about 37% of the world’s land mass. As NOFA/Mass followers well know, a significant proportion of the excess carbon in the atmosphere has been lost from the world’s soils due to farming practices that are ecosystem-degenerative. Or, stated another way, the loss of life in the soils…

March 16th, 2022 By Christine Manuck, NOFA/Mass Soil Health Projects Manager I’m frequently telling my kids, “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” With soil, however, you get what you get and you can learn how to deliberately make it better. Soil aggregation and compaction are two key competing components of healthy,…

July 7th, 2021 By Christine Manuck, NOFA/Mass Soil Health Projects Manager As with every living thing, what you get out of soil is related to what you put into it. Transitioning our mindset of soil from an inorganic growing medium to a diverse, living ecosystem can allow us to treat our soil as the essential…

August 12th, 2021 By Christine Manuck, NOFA/Mass Soil Health Projects Manager Soil organic matter is essential to healthy soils. Acting as a sort of “control center”, it regulates a soil’s physical, chemical, and biological properties. Every soil starts with a baseline level of organic matter based upon its climate and soil texture which can be increased or decreased depending upon how it’s treated. The baseline nature of the soil’s…