Thank you to all who signed on to support soil health and outcomes-verification!

Thanks to our broad coalition of support, Land Core has passed language in both the House and Senate Committee Reports accompanying the FY20 Ag-Appropriations Bill:

From the House Committee Report:

Outcomes-Verified Soil Health Program — The Committee understands the importance of soil health programs that promote on-farm resilience while increasing farmer profitability. The Committee urges the Secretary to establish a voluntary, outcomes-verified soil health program within NRCS, allowing farmers to enroll and demonstrate that recommended soil health benchmarks are being met.


From the Senate Committee Report:

NRCS — Soil Health — The Committee recognizes that improving soil health on agricultural lands is key to achieving both meaningful conservation and economic benefits for producers. The Committee notes that the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–334) provided $25,000,000 in mandatory funding to carry out new on-farm conservation innovation trials to test new or innovative conservation approaches and directed the Secretary to carry out a soil health demonstration trial to provide incentives to producers to implement practices that improve soil health and increase carbon levels in the soil. The Committee encourages the Secretary to implement the soil health demonstration trial and establish protocols for measuring and testing carbon levels to evaluate gains in soil health.

View Land Core’s original Appropriations request and accompanying letter of support, submitted in August 2019.

The language passed sends an essential signal to USDA (and the wider soil health movement) about the infrastructure that needs to be created in order to connect producers with a wider range of economic incentives.

Establishing standardized protocols for measuring and testing carbon levels to evaluate gains in soil health will also:

  • Enable identification and integration of soil health-focused producers into supply chains nationally;

  • Facilitate access to carbon markets and ecosystem services markets;

  • Provide demonstrable risk-reduction data that can enable lower rates for crop insurance policies as well as bank loans down the line;

  • Give guidance to state-level soil health initiatives across the country.

We are thrilled and immensely proud of our collective efforts. We look forward to continuing our work together to help implement essential infrastructure at USDA and to identify policy opportunities that reinvigorate our food and agricultural systems.