Soil health

Soil health is a state of a soil meeting its range of ecosystem functions as appropriate to its environment. Soil health testing is an assessment of this status. Soil health depends on soil biodiversity (with a robust soil biota), and it can be improved via soil conditioning (soil amendment).

The term soil health is used to describe the state of a soil in:

Soil Health has partly if not largely replaced the expression "Soil Quality" that was extant in the 1990s. The primary difference between the two expressions is that soil quality was focused on individual traits within a functional group, as in "quality of soil for maize production" or "quality of soil for roadbed preparation" and so on. The addition of the word "health" shifted the perception to be integrative, holistic and systematic. The two expressions still overlap considerably.

The underlying principle in the use of the term “soil health” is that soil is not just an inert, lifeless growing medium, which modern farming tends to represent, rather it is a living, dynamic and ever-so-subtly changing whole environment. It turns out that soils highly fertile from the point of view of crop productivity are also lively from a biological point of view. It is now commonly recognized that soil microbial biomass is large: in temperate grassland soil the bacterial and fungal biomass have been documented to be 1–2 t (2.0 long tons; 2.2 short tons)/hectare and 2–5 t (4.9 long tons; 5.5 short tons)/ha, respectively. Some microbiologists now believe that 80% of soil nutrient functions are essentially controlled by microbes. If this is consistently true, than the prevailing Liebig nutrient theory model, which excludes biology, is perhaps dangerously incorrect for managing soil fertility sustainably for the future.

Using the human health analogy, a healthy soil can be categorized as one:

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