HEALTHY SOILS, HEALTHY WATERS: WILL SOIL HEALTH IMPROVEMENTS MITIGATE NUTRIENT LOADING TO THE GREAT LAKES?

Our long-term goal is to provide science-based information to farmers and other stakeholder groups to support sustainable agricultural production while promoting water quality.The principal goal of this projectis to quantify the extent to which soil health practices impact soil health and, in turn, affect nutrient losses at the field and basin scales within the western Lake Erie basin (WLEB). Soil health practices are a suite of management practices, including cover crops, no-tillage, and manure applications, that are widely promoted for their potential to enhance soil health.Our central hypothesis is that soil health practices improve soil health and thereby decrease nutrient losses within the WLEB. The following objectives will test this hypothesis: (1) Quantify soil health practice impacts on soil health properties;(2) Quantify soil health impacts on nutrient loss;and (3) Project water quality impacts of soil health practices to the watershed scale.The supporting goal of this project is to provide this information to stakeholders to support adoption of effective soil health practices in the WLEB. It has the following objective: (4) Support decision-makers on the hydrologic and nutrient loss impacts of soil health practices.