Dr. Sieglinde Snapp

Professor

Michigan State University

Dept Plant Soil and Microbial Sciences
East Lansing, MI 48824

(w) (517) 282-5644

About

Sieg Snapp is a professor of Soils and Cropping systems Ecology at Michigan State University, where she has worked with potato, vegetable, and field crop producers since 1999. Her research is in the field, with farmers, developing new tools to understand soil health and monitoring in the field to find practical (and profitable) ways to improve soil health. She has led pioneering research on ecology that can be adopted by farmers, including cover crop mixtures and participatory extension approaches. Understanding how to improve soil organic matter is a key tenent, which requires attention to keeping fields green, adding the right browns, including a diversity of cover crops, small grains, composts and judicious tillage. Sieg has developed new ways to measure soil organic matter in the field with farmers, and her group are learning which types of organic matter fractions help crop establishment, and are related to early plant health and vigor, to jumpstart yields in soybean and other crops. Innovations in extension include participatory mother and baby trial design, and field diagnostics including smart phone Apps and our-sci reflectometer and webbased outreach, which has facilitated gains in soil health with over a million farmers in Africa and thousands of growers in the North Central region