Soil Health Days Tour Kickoff

Join us on August 8th at 8:30am for an educational morning of soil with Dr. Derek Mackenzie.
Event will be to educate on the importance of soil health for our future in sustainability in agriculture, forests and overall landscape.
Soccer and other events and games will be set up for children and youth.

Hotdogs, burgers, and sides will be served for lunch.
Cost is $10 for adult members, $15 for adult non-members
$5 for youth 11-18 and children 10 and under are free
Lunch is included in registration.
Register now below or by contacting 780-836-0641 or extension@npara.ca

Registration 8:00-8:30am

Introductions and soil information – 8:30am
• Western view, definitions
• Soil health, function, importance
• Regenerative Agriculture
• Importance of organic matter
• What is it, what does it do for soil
• What does it mean that soil is alive?
• Soil body analogy
• Influence of fire on soil properties
• What is charcoal, biochar, what makes the top soil black?
• Soil health and climate change mitigation

Soil Observation and Sampling – 9:30am
• Look at soil profiles – grassland, forest land OR Conventional vs Regenerative OR Pasture vs AMP
• Look at difference in color, structure, texture, discuss
• Look at aggregate stability
• What is the scientific method?
• We are going to use scientific principles to answer a simple question:
o What type of soil (grass or forest/C v R/P v AMP) will have more fungi than bacteria?
o What do we hypothesize?

Hands-on soil analysis – 10:45am
• Perform microbial extraction (instructions to follow)
• Measure fungi to bacteria ratio

Scavenger hunt for kids – 11:15am
• Find 5 things that will become soil organic matter
• Find 5 things that will never become soil organic matter

Discussion – 11:40am
• What did our data (evidence) show?
• Did it match our hypothesis?
• If yes, what next? If no, why? What next?

Lunch – 12:00pm
• Discussions continued, sharing experiences

We acknowledge the financial support of RDAR (Results Driven Agriculture Research).