Soil tests to examine soil health first arose half a century ago as the new alternative farming movement put pressure on scientists to allow scrutinizing farming systems for potentially deleterious soil effects. But how much does soil testing itself cause deleterious effects on the trait being measured? The recent popularization of soil health has brought to the forefront concerns on how labs may be influencing results when crushing, drying, and grading soils. Now, in a recently published Woods End Research paper, the author William Brinton found that many of these concerns were addressed decades ago in the literature. Topics covered extensively are how moisture levels affect respiration, how grinding soils disrupts the relationship of C : N mineralization, and in some cases how grinding increases and does not decrease traits, such as by exposing new organic matter. A soil scientist in 1958 warned that soil processing was a form of “laboratory tillage” which “causes an increase in the oxygen uptake of soil microorganisms … an effect is closely related to aggregate disruption”. However, modern lab scientists and researchers may be loath to accept responsibility since proficiency programs and lab high-throughput handling are tantamount to success. Brinton cooperated with NAPT to examine two-step crushing and sieving to 2mm and 0.8mm fineness and found some tests are more affected than others. What is proposed is that researchers and lab technicians start by explicitly acknowledging (instead of denying) that soil test handling fundamentally compromises the traits of soil quality and soil health measured, and proceed cautiously.
Soil health: scrutinizing farming systems, or soil lab practices, or both, for deleterious effects?
