Sustainability Practices for Soil

Lesson Objectives

  • Increase awareness of a breadth of topics related to soil health, including amending soils with compost, cover cropping, agricultural soil health practices, soil contamination issues, and soils for trees.

Continuing Education hours
Video lecture:  1.0 hour
Activity: 1.0 hour


Lecture

Sustainability Practices for Soils

  • Amending Soils, Dr. Doug Soldat, UW-Madison Prof. of Soil Science and Mike Maddox, Director of the Master Gardener Program
  • Cover Crops: Claire Strader, Dane County Extension. (Cover Crops handout)
  • Promoting Soil Health: How Farmers Manage Soil Health: George Koepp, Columbia County Extenion
  • Soil Health Playlist
  • Note: These three videos range in time from 10 -25 minutes.

Activity:  Relating to Sustainability

Post a resource related to soil sustainability in our Google+ Community.  Include in your own words how this resource is related to sustainability and one interesting thing you learned from reading it. 

Instructions:  Connecting gardening practices to sustainability is an important theme for Master Gardeners.  After watching the above videos that look at a few aspects of soil health, we want you to practice finding more information.  Seek out a resource (preferably online) that discusses some aspect of soil health and sustainability.  This is a very broad topic area so there should be lots to choose from.  For example, if you’re interested in learning more about no till practices, you can use search terms like “agriculture no till extension” and find an appropriate resource that you want to share with your colleagues.  Post the link to this resource in the Google Community in the Soil Health section.  In your post, include in your own words how this resource is related to sustainability and one interesting thing you learned from reading it.  

Wondering how to go about finding credible, research-based information?  Read these tips to get started.

Need a specific definition of sustainability? Here is one provided by the  Wisconsin Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) Program.

Extra Resources