The Soil Health and Agriculture Research Extension (SHARE) Farm is the premier site for the NDSU Soil Health program where field-scale, long-term, farmer-driven research is being conducted. To accompany the research program is an equally complex Extension program. The goal of the SHARE Farm is to bring whole-systems evaluation to soil health building practices.

Several different aspects of management systems have been evaluated at the SHARE Farm. Research ideas come directly from farmer input and includes evaluation of soil salinity management approaches, conservation tillage practices, use of cover crops in rotation and soil health indicators. This information has been incorporated into economic calculator tools – with the first tool on salinity available online (https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/bioeconomics/Library/tools/salinity-economics-tool).

Salinity management practices, such as tile drainage, have shown a primary benefit of keeping the water table at installation depth below the soil surface. After 5 years, the tiled portion of the field is starting to show minimal levels of salt leaching from the soil surface. Tiling should not be the only strategy used to manage salts - selecting salt tolerant crops, crops with high transpiration rates or planting cover crops that remove excess soil moisture late in the growing season/fall are options.

When converting to a reduced till/cover crop system, crop yields have not been consistently different between treatments (conventional management versus no-till+cover crop) from year to year in the first three years of evaluation (2016-2018). Moisture and temperature results from the conservation tillage study is in a report by Daigh.
If testing for soil health and looking for guidance, keep these tips in mind. (1) Fertility testing services provided by a commercial soil health testing service, as a bundle, are redundant, inaccurate for our soils, and unnecessary, (2) scoring functions that commercial soil health testing labs provide to rank, or score, a field for soil health (such as 72% soil health score) are not accurate for our region and should be ignored, (3) soil aggregation is a good soil health indicator, especially for high clay Red River Valley soils.

At this time, we recommend watching for development of soil structure (aggregates) as soils are transitioned into conservation practices because it tends to be more reliable than microbial indicators over time. If using microbial indicators to assess soil health, be sure to sample under similar conditions from year to year (soil moisture and temperature), to minimize variability in these indicators.
More information is available online: ndsu.edu/soilhealth.