Understanding Soil Health

Soil health is one of Heliae Agriculture’s primary focuses in its agriculture division. Working directly with growers, our scientists and agronomists collaborated to create PhycoTerra. PhycoTerra is a first-in-class soil amendment, providing both a conventional and organic option. They can be applied with various applications. Our soil promoting benefits include: increasing active carbon, increasing water efficiency, improving marketable yield, improving shelf life, improving product taste (measured in brix), and creating resilience to crop stressors.

As this article explains, 3 Key Things to Understand About Soil Health, there is a great momentum building in the vision that soil can regain its biological activity and regenerate soil health. At Heliae we are excited to help assist with creating sustainable soil solutions.

Baldwin says there are three keys to soil health:

1. Healthy soil is a carbon and water sponge. Soil health best practices minimize surface disruption (e.g., less tilling or no tilling), keep the soil covered as much as possible (e.g., cover crops) to limit erosion, and provide plant diversity (e.g., cover crops and crop rotations) to naturally feed the soil and support greater biological diversity below the ground.
2. Soil health is connected to our health. At the most basic level, soil health is a food security issue. At least 95% of our calorie consumption is derived from soil. Thus, soil productivity is critical to feed our growing population. The FAO points out that agricultural production must increase 60% globally in the coming years and that sustainable soil management could produce up to 58% more food. However, the connection between the health of the soil and our health runs even deeper.
3. Soil health = economic health. Economic contributions of soil health are notable. Beyond the human health and environmental services discussed, thriving soils can bring greater yields and resilience with reduced input costs to producers.

Understanding soil health is the first step, seeing it pay off is the next. Download our free case study, Unlocking Buried Yield Potential with Brown Farms, to see how one grower put these principles into practice with PhycoTerra.