Soil Health Scorecard: How Healthy Is Your Soil?

Quick answer: healthy soil stays covered, gets disturbed as little as possible, grows many kinds of plants, keeps living roots in the ground most of the year and, where it fits, works with grazing animals. Score your fields against those five principles and four simple soil tests below, and see where to start.

How the scorecard works

Each answer earns 0 to 3 points, and your score is the share of points you earned out of 100. The questions follow the five soil health principles that the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and most regenerative growers work from, plus four quick tests you can do with a shovel, a bucket and a glass of water. It is a self-check, not a lab test, so use it to compare fields and track one field over time.

Four soil tests you can do this week

• Earthworm count. Dig one shovelful of soil, about a foot deep, when the ground is moist and not too cold. Break it apart and count the worms. Ten or more is a good sign.
• Infiltration. Watch where water goes after a one-inch rain, or push a short piece of pipe into the ground and pour in a measured inch of water. Healthy soil drinks it in within a few minutes. Puddles and runoff mean crusted or compacted soil.
• Smell. Grab a handful of moist soil and smell it. A sweet, earthy smell comes from active soil life. Sour or no smell points to poor drainage or little biology.
• Slake test. Drop a dry, walnut-sized clump into a clear glass of water. Soil held together by roots and biology keeps its shape. Soil with poor structure falls apart and clouds the water within seconds.

Score the same field every spring and fall. A rising earthworm count and faster infiltration usually show up before yields do.

Where to start

You don’t have to change everything at once. Most growers get the fastest results from keeping the ground covered and adding a diverse cover crop after the cash crop. Cutting back on tillage comes next, then working animals into the rotation where it makes sense. The scorecard picks your three biggest gaps, so start there.

New to these ideas? Start with what regenerative agriculture is, and if you graze livestock, size your paddocks with our rotational grazing calculator.