Time to get dirty

Soil season has arrived! This past month was spent collecting soil samples from both the spring-planted and post-wheat cohorts for analysis. 

Our stellar undergraduate field assistant Bailey, with some cows! Bailey is our resident hydraulic probe expert and gets all of our deep soil samples.

Fields that were finishing up with spring grazing were sampled down to 6 feet for moisture, and will be analyzed for other soil health and fertility indicators including soil carbon and nitrogen, bulk density and aggregation. Check out the video file below to see the hydraulic probe in action. 

hydrualic_soil_probe_video.mp4
File Size:	5043 kb
File Type:	mp4

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Fields that are preparing to plant the cover crop mix for the fall (or have already planted) were sampled for baseline soil moisture and fertility. 

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Soils samples getting ready to go into the oven. By weighing the samples before and after drying out all the moisture, we can calculate the relative moisture in each sample.

Bailey working the hydraulic probe.

Special thanks to Angie Moore for all of her tireless work on this project and helping us pull together all of our sampling trips. Thanks Angie!

Here are some soil samples of increasing depth going right. You can see the soil get lighter as organic matter decreases going deeper. Lots of factors affect organic matter formation, including moisture, plant litter inputs and tillage practices. 

So exciting to see purple top turnips growing! Lots of carbon directly into the soil plus soil pore formation, and the cattle love them!

Angie dividing the soil sampling into our fancy sampling containers: Ziploc freezer bags.