The Soil Organic Carbon network (SOCnet): Farmers building soil health to boost productivity and profitability while increasing resilience to extreme weather in the North Central U.S.

View the project report

Commodities

• Agronomic: annual ryegrass, clovers, corn, hay, medics/alfalfa, oats, peas (field, cowpeas), radish (oilseed, daikon, forage), sorghum sudangrass, soybeans, triticale, wheat, Various cover crop mixtures
• Animals: bovine

Practices

• Animal Production: feed/forage, grazing management, grazing - rotational
• Crop Production: conservation tillage, cover crops, cropping systems, crop rotation, double cropping, intercropping, no-till, relay cropping, strip tillage, zone till
• Education and Training: decision support system, farmer to farmer, networking, on-farm/ranch research
• Natural Resources/Environment: carbon sequestration
• Production Systems: integrated crop and livestock systems
• Soil Management: green manures, organic matter, soil analysis, soil chemistry, soil microbiology, soil quality/health

This is a project funded under the long-term funding option, enabling the researchers to apply for a second three-year cycle of funding given good progress toward objectives and outcomes in the first three-year cycle.

The first cycle was funded for $249,738 and went from 11/1/2022 to 8/31/2026.   The second cycle is being funded for $250,000 and goes from 12/1/2025 to 11/30/2028.

Healthy soils underpin on-farm resilience, productivity, and profitability. Unpredictable and extreme weather puts significant pressure on farmers to produce food and feed for a growing population while simultaneously dealing with fluctuating yields, erratic markets, and unreliable income. Building soil organic carbon (SOC), the cornerstone of healthy soils, provides a means of enhancing productivity and profitability while increasing on-farm resilience. As SOC accumulates, soil structure and water holding capacity improve, nutrient retention and mineralization increase, and soils are protected from the devastating effects of erosion. Moreover, ongoing private efforts to valorize soil carbon present farmers with a novel economic opportunity, provided they can demonstrate management-driven on-farm accrual of SOC. To make well-informed decisions about building SOC, managing soil health, and tapping into nascent carbon markets, farmers need accurate and robust data. Carbon accrual is a slow and variable process, and tracking SOC change accurately requires long-term monitoring and robust methods. The Soil Organic Carbon network (SOCnet) is designed to address these challenges, enhance on-farm productivity, profitability, and resilience, and prepare farmers to engage in emerging carbon markets.
In the first three years of this project, the study team, in collaboration with farmers in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, has made considerable progress towards SOCnet’s long-term objectives as outlined in our original proposal (H009987615). We have built a regional network that includes five long-term experimental hubs (Tier 1), 11 on-farm experimental sites with paired “conventional” and “regenerative” management practices (Tier 2), and 16 on-farm monitoring sites (Tier 3), surpassing the goals outlined for the first funding cycle. We have deployed a statistically robust spatial sampling approach to collect 910 deep soil cores (1 meter), yielding 1,960 unique soil samples that span four soil orders and six suborders. We have completed the analysis of the 856 samples collected in 2022 (primarily Tier 2) and are nearly complete with the analysis of the 544 samples collected in 2023 (primarily Tier 3). We are halfway through the analysis of the 560 samples collected for Tier 1 in 2024. We have built a SOCnet database to curate farm-level metadata, track agronomic management, and store soil biogeochemical data. We have shared our results with participating farmers via customized on-farm reports and regular one-on-one conversations, and provided our Tier 2 farmer collaborators with annual honoraria of $1000, totaling $27,000 in the first three years of this project, to support regenerative agricultural practices on Midwestern farms! We have shared our efforts with both academic and non-academic audiences via 10 invited talks, 8 field days, 3 media appearances, 5 peer-reviewed journal articles, and 1 publicly available published dataset. We pursued three additional funding opportunities to expand SOCnet’s impact. While direct support beyond SARE has not yet been secured, we obtained an AFRI grant ($750,000) to assess the agronomic, economic, and biogeochemical potential of ecological intensification in Midwestern agroecosystems. Conducted with Co-PD Anna Cates (UMN), this project will inform SOCnet by identifying management practices that most effectively enhance soil health and build soil organic carbon across the region.
In the next three years of this project (SOCnet’s second cycle), we will build upon the substantial foundation we have created. We will finalize the analysis of samples collected in 2023 and provide customized farm-level reports and soil data to all our Tier 3 farmers. We will also finalize the analysis of Tier 1 samples collected from our long-term experimental hubs. This work will set the stage for a mid-point soil health assessment for all on-farm sites to be conducted in year four (2026 and 2027 for Tiers 2 and 3, respectively). This assessment, which is a modification to our original proposal, will provide an opportunity for a mid-point check-in with participating farmers to evaluate any changes in soil health since the network began. We believe this will be particularly valuable for Tier 3 farmers, on whose sites we did not originally plan to measure particulate organic matter (POM). We will use this next phase to build a dedicated SOCnet webpage, continue to build our engagement capacity with field days and workshops, and search for additional funding opportunities to build out the growing and invaluable resource that SOCnet has become. Finally, and in preparation for funding cycle three, we will work to streamline our soil processing methods to accommodate the large quantity of deep soil cores that will be processed prior to analysis for the ultimately long-term SOC analysis.

1. Evaluate the carbon-accrual potential of alternative farming through long-term monitoring of SOC stocks on-farm and Long-term experiments throughout the North Central Region.
2. Address major discrepancies in SOC projections from surface-soil estimates and space-for-time experiments, with longitudinal deep carbon data collected by SOCnet.
3. Position farmers to reach their soil health objectives, participate in market opportunities, and maintain ownership of the soil carbon narrative by developing the tools needed to track, interpret, and document on-farm carbon stocks.

This work will enhance farmer livelihoods and foster resilient, regenerative agricultural systems through healthy soils.