DEPENDING ON SOIL
Around town, you can see fall flowers and pleasant landscaping. Traveling into the countryside of Illinois you can see patches of colorful trees and acres of crops or their residue left after harvesting. One remarkable thing is that much of the growth that you see has happened in the short space of the five months since April. Another remarkable fact is that all of that plant life is supported by soil.
We are likely to forget about soil when trees leaf out and flowers, gardens, and crops keep it out of sight. Yet, soil is essential to all plant life and plant life is essential to all life. Soil is simply made up of different sized mineral particles (sand, silt, and clay), organic matter (dead plant and animal matter), and numerous species of living organisms. Soil may all seem alike to us. But soil varies in quality and many of its properties can be changed by what we do with it.
            Soil quality is how well soil does what we want it to do. People have different ideas of what they expect soil to do for them. But soil has some functions upon which everyone depends. Healthy soil gives us clean air and water, bountiful crops and forests, productive rangeland, diverse wildlife, and beautiful landscapes. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service says that soil does all this by performing five essential functions:

• Regulating water. Soil helps control where rain, snowmelt, and irrigation water goes. Influenced by soil quality, water with the substances it dissolves runs off over the land or into and through the soil.
• Sustaining plant and animal life. Soil determines the diversity and productivity of plants and animals.
• Filtering potential pollutants. The minerals and microbes in soil are responsible for filtering, buffering, degrading, immobilizing, and detoxifying organic and inorganic materials, including industrial and municipal by-products and atmospheric deposits.
• Cycling nutrients. Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and many other nutrients are stored, transformed, and cycled through soil.
• Supporting structures. Buildings need stable soil for support.

Beyond their differing inherent natural abilities, all soils have properties that can be changed depending on how they are managed. You, as land manager, must determine what practices can be used to maintain the soil quality needed for sustaining the plants you enjoy and on which you depend. Research continues focused on understanding soil quality and management practices that improve soil quality. More information about managing for soil quality can be found at http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/. Your Soil and Water Conservation District can put you in touch with the most recent research about soil.
Whether you raise lawns, trees, houseplants, row crops or forage, or flowers and garden vegetables, soil quality is yours to manage to get the most of what you want from your soil.

Della Moen, Earth Team Volunteer, NRCS/Stephenson Soil and Water Conservation District, an equal opportunity provider and employer, 10/31/07 (for publication on 11/10/07 in the Journal-Standard, Freeport, Illinois). Della can be reached at info@stephensonswcd.org