Soil Quality Network 2012

I was recently in Oregon to attend/speak at the winter meeting of the Oregon Society of Soil Scientists.  Their meeting this year was centered around an initiative called the Soil Quality Network (SQN).  This is a three year grant funded pilot project focused on soil quality with the following objective statement:



"This system will provide agricultural professionals and farmers with access to soil quality resources including: assessment tool information, models for various aspects of program development, soil quality related research, and lessons learned from programs that promote soil quality."

The organizers did a wonderful job with the meeting and are looking forward to building on their work over the next two years.  This is a program to watch! 

The SQN was a two-day conference, with the first day a series of field workshops.  The first stop was Dancing Roots Farm - a small local produce farm that focuses on organic farming.  The owners spoke to us about the history of the farm as well as their goals, objectives and philosophy regarding the importance of soil.  The attendees had demonstrations on cover crop field sampling and we also looked at the different soils on site and the importance of understanding spatial variability within the soils across the small acreage farm and how it affects the crops grown and the associated managment considerations. The picture below shows the group looking at soil profiles and listening to soil scientist Andy Gallagher explain the soil landscape for the site.

The next stop was Edgefield McMenamins, which is a beautiful historical site complete with hotel and eating establishments.  (They did, indeed, provide a great lunch!) Here there were three stations to visit for the group.  One focused on aggregate stability and infiltration, another on soil quality assessment cards and the last on using soil compaction and the use of penetrometers related to soil quality.

Having fun doing field tests.

Learning about Soil Quality Cards.

Edgefield McMenamins



The second day was spent listening to a variety of talks - the attendees had many choices and the talks that I stopped into were excellent!  This is the second year in a row that I have attended an OSSS sponsored meeting and have been nothing but impressed with their attention to detail, great speakers and a very warm welcome to students. Add to that the beautiful setting of the northwest and it was a great trip!  Thanks to all who helped make SQN 2012 a reality!  I look forward to the success of this project!

Mount Hood at dawn from my hotel room window.



S-12 Field Trip to Anza Borrego State Park

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the first S-12 field trip in February.  The trip was located at Anza Borrego State Park in Southern California.  It was well organized, well executed and overall a fantastic educational opportunity for all - and it was filled with absolutely gorgeous scenery!  While I don't think the photos always do the actual scenery justice, there is a website you can go to and see many photos taken by the group.  The following is a link to a Dropbox site, no you do not need to have Dropbox, but you can access the photos by going here: https://www.dropbox.com/home/S-12%20Anza%20Borrego%20(2012)#:::104145559  This is a link to the Terra Science cloud storage site (dropbox.com). You may need to create a sign-in name/password to get access to the S-12 Anza Borrego folder. You DO NOT need to sign-up for Dropbox service (no install). I highly recommend a look at Pablo's (Phil Scoles) panoramas!

For those who were present on Thursday (a day before the formal field trip) we were able to venture out with a company called California Overland in an old military type vehicle and went to places that normal vehicles cannot reach.  We saw some fantastic sights and had time to hike and enjoy the day.  My favorite was the hike up to and stop at the wind caves.

The first day of the formal field trip, we had 4 stops: 1) Texas Dip buried paleosol with an argillic horizon, 2) Yaqui Ridge dissected pediment and duripans, 3) Stag Cover ancient fans and petrocalcic horizons, and 4) Butte Pass alluvial fan recycling.  We also stopped for lunch at the Kumeyaay Indian Village.  The group also made an unscheduled stop at the end of the day to walk down into a slot canyon (pictures on the Dropbox site).  The first photo below is of a durapan with desert pavement, the second is from the Indian Village site. 





The second day we were off to more adventure and 4 more stops during the day: 1) Stout Research Center Paleontology Lab, 2) Font's Point geology, paleontology and badland soils, 3) Freeman overlook badlands soil mapping, classification and land use, and 4) Clark Dry Lake playa soils and open trenches seismic fault observation.  All were great stops.  Pictures below show a Saber Tooth Tiger from the paleontology lab, the badlands and a group picture of the participants taken at the badlands. (If you look closely at the first picture you can see the size comparison between the Saber Tooth Tiger, a mountain lion and a domestic cat.)

I will be writing in more detail about this trip in an upcoming Soil Horizons article - hopefully with some help from some of the participants.  Until then, please do check out some of the photos and perhaps plan on joining this group next year when they plan to have another adventure...