Soil health changes with the use of intercropping supporting good practice - IntercropVALUES Practice Abstract

Summary

Knowing the state of soil health allows for management decisions to be made to maintain soil- and agro-system sustainability using a selection of robust soil indicators.
Practical recommendations
Farmers and advisors can use Soil Health Check Cards, a scientifically based scorecard that brings together soil health indicators in one Excel file with automated cell colouring.
The scorecard system was adapted to cover the three areas of soil health—chemistry, physics, and biology—using an outline from the UK AHDB GreatSoils method and the Biofunctool® tool. This prototype scorecard was first tested in 7 experimental sites, comparing cereal monoculture, legume monoculture, and cereal-legume intercropping over two cropping cycles (Figure 1).
The indicators taken together provide a quick-and-easy visual representation of the health of the soil investigated—mainly green: good overall, mainly red: soil in poor health with work needed to improve these indicators to green.