Looking beyond yield: Tools for producers to capture and communicate the results of their soil health experiments in the semi-arid High Plains

Objective 1: Identify soil health indicators that are most relevant for informing and quantifying outcomes of on-farm soil health experiments in semi-arid cropping systems.

• Identify fields; collect management histories

  • We will use a participatory research approach through which producers will identify their resource concern for one field using management history and baseline soil health information. We will co-design an on-farm experiment to evaluate management strategies to address that concern. This research activity will be integrated with the on-farm experimentation tool described in Objective 3. Minimum experimental design criteria for each farm will include: a change in management from status quo across all or part of one field while maintaining a control (status quo) management at the scale of either a strip within a field or on a separate field with the same soil type and management history. Thus, we will have 10 paired treatment-control sites across which to assess the short-term sensitivity of different soil health metrics to changes in management. Producers will be encouraged to add additional replication of treatment and control areas.

Objective 2: Identify systemic barriers, best practices, and effective support strategies for historically underserved producers to adopt or scale up soil health practices.

• Literature review
  • The relational values and systems-focus of regenerative agriculture draws heavily from indigenous or traditional ecological knowledge, however the recognition of these contributions of BIPOC ways of knowing and managing natural resources have largely been erased within the framework of Western science. In addition, more than 98% of U.S. farmland is white-owned, reducing the BIPOC producers and their value systems to the literal margins of modern agriculture. As a first step, we will synthesize existing literature to collect history and explore RA practices amongst HU producers. The vast majority of literature on RA and soil health have involved white producers; BIPOC farmers are left out of published research studies. For example, of the 30 most highly cited papers that include “soil health” + “semi-structured interviews” on google scholar, only one spoke with minority populations. The outcome of this literature review will be a ‘state-of-the-science’ perspective article and a call to action for more inclusive research moving forward.
• Identify final interview participants
  • We will use qualitative, semistructured, ethnographic interview methodology to obtain the stories, concerns, and practices of five BIPOC participating farmers. We have intentionally chosen to focus on depth of content quality with our methodology rather than breadth of numbers of producers interviewed. Interviews will be centered around the two study areas based on the reach and membership of the two partner organizations, Flower Hill Institute (FHI) and KBFA. Since the majority of BIPOC farmers have been dispossessed of their lands over the last 100 years due to racist practices at the USDA and predatory forced partition sales of heirs property, when interviewing BIPOC farmers in Kansas and New Mexico, we are necessarily sampling from the deviant case. Furthermore, the two partner organizations are likely familiar with most of the BIPOC farmers in their regions, and those farmers’ views on soil health, land ownership, heirs property, and BIPOC representation. KBFA and FHI have proposed potential participants for this study, whose stories would be illuminating to hear. Therefore, our sampling method would be defined as a judgmental sampling of the deviant case. Participant selection criteria includes: 1) participants must be actively farming as an economic business; and 2) participants will consent to the study purpose and goals.