Federated Farmers: Science key to resilient farming

Poor and degraded soil directly reduces the resilience of farmers, making it harder to survive weather extremes, affecting productivity and animal health.

The United Nations declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. Their objective is to raise awareness of the role soil plays and promote its sustainable management, writes Dr Lisa Harper.

Good healthy soil and the grass it grows are the basis of New Zealand's farming system. Yet the soil science underpinning it has been neglected for many years.

Now fresh research is planned, on the back of a global push to understand and manage soils better.

Food production relies on soil. Soil also does a collection of jobs described as "ecosystem functions", including nutrient storage, water retention and microbial activity. Soil may also help mitigate climate change; for example through carbon farming, the goal of which is to convert carbon dioxide through land management techniques into soil organic matter.

Here in New Zealand, while we don't have the extremes of desertification and deforestation that some regions suffer, there is potential to manage our soils better.

This would give farmers a greater ability to counter drought or erosion and protect soil fertility.

The first step to managing something is to know what you've got, but there are large gaps in our knowledge of the complex combination of physical, chemical and biological factors that we know as soil.

Among other things, soil maps of New Zealand are incomplete and many native soil micro-organisms still wait to be discovered.

Mapping of soil types/characteristics and relating them to appropriate land use is happening to some extent (mostly with a view to guiding government policy), but much other work remains.

Presently, the Government and research organisations are putting together a document on the future management of soils, with the aim of informing government policy and driving good practice in the primary sector.

Meanwhile, part of the National Science Challenge on Biological Heritage will use of DNA identification techniques to measure the biodiversity of New Zealand soils. In four to five years, farmers will probably be using this information to manage soils in a way that improves soil biodiversity.

Soil, like water, is essential to farming. Managing it well is vitally important, as is engaging with policy development around it. To enable farmers to optimise their systems and stay ahead of any future policy changes, we need to support soil scientists where we can, keep in close contact with people working in this field and add the benefit of farmers' own experience of soil management to their efforts.

Poor and degraded soil directly reduces the resilience of farmers, for example making it harder to survive extremes of weather, affecting productivity and animal health.

All this only goes to show, as I once saw declared above the door of a soil science laboratory, we should never treat soil like dirt.