Healthy Living Productive Functioning Soils
I attended a workshop last week on “Paddock Labs for Drought Resilience”, a project funded from the Australian Government Future Drought Fund with a focus on increasing drought resilience. I was keen to be involved as the focus was on Soil Health and Function which is what we are all about at Soil Management Systems. We want to achieve Functioning Soils.
Functioning Soils Improve Soil Health
The project runs for twelve months, then leading into an ongoing model. It is dedicated to improving soil health and landscapes on farms with a plan of monitoring and understanding impacts of any changes they make to their farming systems. The days discussion centered around “how do you do it and what works, what doesn’t, and how do you monitor it, what data to collect?”
The plan is for about ten farm focus sites, baselining these sites soil and biomass and monitoring changed practices to soil health. I supported the discussion around Visual Soil Assessments as the first and best way to assess any changes in the soils.

Ongoing there will be site visits and workshops for farmers to engage with this project. This project is an initiative of Soils for Life, and we look forward to working with this group.
The project is intended to increase farmer confidence in practices to improve soil function through providing technical and analytical support to landholders wanting to monitor and understand the impact of changes to their farm systems.
You also might be interested how to start the journey to achieving HEALTHY SOILS, visit our webpage
We will keep you updated with results and photos of this great project.
Our Quote for Today
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture