There is a new nation-wide project called “Probing Our Country’s Soil Health”. It is being funded by the NRCS. A major goal of the project is to build a national soil health database and new and improved tools for benchmarking and interpreting soil health metrics. The anonymous data will be used to expand a new and exciting tool called the Soil Health Assessment Protocol and Evaluation (or SHAPE). This tool helps provide better references for farmers seeking to understand and build soil health.

The project is seeking for about 50 farmer and rancher participants. Each will contribute 2 or 3 fields (e.g., grain crop, pasture, hay, etc.).

If interested in participating, you will need to:

• Sign up for a 1-hour Zoom Meeting where a facilitator will lead you through a management survey for 2 or 3 fields.

• Grant access to fields for hand-probe soil sampling 2 or 3 sampling sites from each field. Normally this will happen 3-6 months after the survey; you will be notified beforehand.

Participating landowners will receive:

• A personalized soil health report of your fields (worth about $1,200 per field).

• A copy of a book called “Probing Our Country's Soil Health”. This will be a hard-copy photo book illustrating soil health across the country and the outcomes to this project.

• An appreciation gift card

**All contact information, farm management, and soil health data for participants will be kept confidential. The data that is published will protect the identity of participants.

To enroll as a landowner participant, select a time from one of the following facilitator schedule links. Once these times have been filled, more will be made available:

https://scheduler.zoom.us/kaitlin-flick/probing-our-country-s-soil-health  or  https://scheduler.zoom.us/savannah-kitchen/probing-our-countrys-soil-health-shape