The Wisconsin Soil Health Lab is a partnership between University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). The intent is to provide testing services for dynamic soil properties or soil health indicators.
Bryant Scharenbroch, Associate Professor of Soil Science at UW-Stevens Point says these are things that would typically change in soils in response to different management actions in agricultural and other settings.
No- till systems or conservation tillage cropping strategies are the types of measurements that they will be doing in the lab.
“Some of the things that we would measure to characterize that would include things like the organic matter content, things that are directly involved with microbial biomass activity and even diversity, stability of the soil, structural aggregate, and microbial respiration,” says Scharenbroch.
Many of the clients who will be utilizing the lab will be those who are working with USDA programs and need to validate some of their management actions. However, the lab can also be used by the general public to send samples for analysis as well.
“We’re really focused on soil health in general, and that often includes biological properties, and there’s not a lot of labs that do it,” adds Scharenbroch. “So that is one of the reasons why this lab is needed. As for the location in Stevens Point, we have a really strong soils program, and we have a real strong emphasis on undergraduate education in soils program. The lab will run analysis but also be integrated in activities with our undergraduate and graduate students.”
The lab is at the stage of vetting protocols and test samples. Once they finish analysis and provide the results back to the NRCS, and everyone’s on the same page then it will be open to the public. Scharenbroch and his team are hoping that it will be open before the Spring semester of 2023.
There will be two soil health packages offered. One would be a routine assessment, and one would be a little bit more extensive. Additionally, they are offering individual analysis on a gee for analysis basis. These packages will cost anywhere between $25 and $100 a sample, depending on the things the farmer wants to know.
Scharenbroch adds, “One of the additional analyses that we’ll be conducting is more related to urban settings. We found that there’s been recent interest in people wanting to know if they have contaminants in their soil, so that would be an additional test service that we would also be providing.”
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