Summary of the Soil Health Benchmarking Work, 2024-2026

by Dr. Bijesh Maharjhan, 8.8.26

Soil health benchmarking provides a science-based approach for evaluating the condition of agricultural soils relative to their inherent soil health potential. Rather than comparing one agricultural field with another, the approach benchmarks cropland against carefully selected native or minimally disturbed reference sites with similar soil-forming factors and climatic conditions. We termed it the soil health gap (Maharjan et al., 2020). The main premise is to allow differences in soil health to be more confidently associated with agricultural management and provide a locally relevant benchmark toward which soil health improvement can be measured.

The Nebraska soil health benchmarking effort applies this framework across agricultural landscapes by pairing croplands with appropriate reference sites and evaluating a comprehensive suite of physical, chemical, and biological soil health indicators. These include bulk density, aggregate stability, soil organic matter and organic carbon, microbial biomass and respiration, enzyme activities, and nutrient profile. The fields evaluated include both conventional systems and regenerative systems incorporating practices such as no-till, cover cropping, intercropping, and livestock integration. This approach moves soil health assessment beyond simply documenting progress from certain practices to evaluating the extent to which those practices are improving soil condition relative to an ecologically meaningful reference.

Initial results demonstrate the value of this benchmarking approach. In most cropland–reference comparisons, reference sites exhibited better overall soil health, while regenerative systems generally showed a smaller soil health gap than conventional systems. Across the measured indicators, the general pattern was reference site > regenerative system > conventional system. However, fields with long-term implementation of practices such as no-till and cover cropping substantially narrowed the gap, and some indicators even exceeded those of their corresponding reference sites. Thus, soil health benchmarking provides both a baseline and a measurable trajectory for improvement- instead of asking whether one farm is healthier than another, it asks how close a particular field is to realizing the soil health potential of that specific soil and environment. Unlike in the past, when farmers may have been satisfied if their fields performed better than neighboring farms, benchmarking cropland soil health against native reference sites shifts the perspective. In this soil health benchmarking framework, farmers effectively compete with themselves.

Maharjan Soils Lab • www.maharjanlab.com • bmaharjan@unl.edu