Soil Health Collaborative Wraps up Year 1
In Autumn 2022, in partnership with SDA ARS Dairy Forage Research Center (DFRC) and UW-Madison's Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS), Michael Fields launched a 5-year Soil Health Collaborative (SHC) to investigate and conduct outreach on profitable, community supporting, and practical strategies to build agricultural soil health.
On Thursday, September 28th and Friday, September 29th, the Soil Health Collaborative celebrated a successful end to year 1, of the 5 year project, with a field tour and meeting.
On day 1, the Midwest Farmers of Color Soil Health Network (MFCSHN), a SHC funded project which consists of 6 BIPOC led groups in the Upper Midwest, gathered for a field tour in the Madison-Stoughton area. The groups, which all came together for the first time in-person, toured the farms of our 3 Wisconsin based groups (Groundswell Conservancy’s Westport Farm, Robert Pierce’s Half the 40 Acres Farm, and Dan Cornelius’s Yowela Farms).
The group learned about each other’s work and the soil health practices implemented at each farm, and also got to learn from NRCS’s Jamie Patton, who shared about soil health basics, went over soil health tests, and conducted a rainfall simulator demonstration. To top it all off, the group enjoyed two delicious meals together. The first being a lunch at MATC, catered by Elena Terry of Wild Bearies, and the second, a group cooked dinner at Yowela Farms.
On day 2, all Soil Health Collaborative participants gathered at the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center in North Freedom, WI, for a meeting and field day. We kicked off the day with a “Drought, cover crops, and farmer perceptions'' presentation from Jamie Patton and then heard from Jeffrey Hadachek, Assistant Professor at UW-Madison, who talked about “Climate variability & cover crops.” Folks enjoyed a delicious meal from Madison’s Pasture and Plenty, before getting to hear about the work of 4 MFCSHN groups. The day then ended with an educational tour of ARS’s research fields and a UAV seeding demo.
