2022 Fall Soil Assessment

2022 was a crazy year. We had a lot of spring rains that prevented the crops from being planted at the normal planting time. Most of the crops in Wilkin were planted the last two weeks of May and then the rains shut off and we had a very dry windy summer. Unfortunately this lead to dry crusted soil that were sealed so tight it was tough getting a shovel to penetrate the ground. Years like this tend to show the benefits of no-till and strip-till as those plots were easier to dig in compared to the conventional plot.

NRCS and SWCD staff completed the soil assessments on November 3rd. We were turning over big chunks of soil and the worms were curled up tight into little red balls as they prepared for winter with a lack of moisture. We were able to complete all our analysis and collected the 72 samples of soil to ship off to the labs. Our goral is to graph these results so you have a comparison to see the data changing over the course of five years.  

Below are the links to the data that was collected in 2022. For trends on these results check out the graphs on the Soils Monitoring main page.