Monitoring and setting targets for soil health: Farmers' contribution to natural resource management goals

Abstract

Capacity to change demands the willingness to adapt and to learn from experience. This mantra applies to all participants in natural resource management, and the acknowledgement that stakeholders learn through their experiences and modify their actions accordingly. A further decline or deterioration of soil condition will be inevitable if local knowledge, built from learning experiences, is ignored by people/organisations concerned for the management and maintenance of soil health. Adaptive management, along with environmental partnerships, presents a model of co-operative natural resource management that would result in more accurate problem identification and consequently more appropriate management approaches being implemented and assessment criteria being developed. Examination of soil health issues and their identification in the north-west cropping region of NSW resulted in a, set of indicators at the farm and paddock level that were formed by farmers' experiences and reality. Understanding fatmers' capacity to adapt these indicators of soil health to wider applications such as monitoring and setting targets for soil condition that are relevant to catchment health requires farmers, and other stakeholders to: learn through experimentation; build on their own knowledge and practices; blend their past experiences with new ideas, and realise that their experiences are valuable learning tools. A framework, advocated by government, to encourage farmers to identify priority environmental issues on their property is Environmental Management Systems (EMS) with the hope that this voluntary system will define the duty of care, set standards and . check compliance without the need to resort to regulation. This government initiative has just received $25 M over five years to encourage farmers to develop and implement an EMS on their property. The incentive program is run by Centrelink on behalf of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Australia (AFF A), and the grants will partially support the costs of professional advice required to develop a property EMS such as salinity mapping, biodiversity assessments, separating land classes and remedial work on land degradation problems. It seems that the lessons learnt from previous research on agricultural extension (Vanclay 2002) are being ignored by government in their enthusiasm for EMS, and that farmers' learning and information preferences/needs, local knowledge on soils and identification of land degradation problems are not being considered, incorporated into or supported by these type of government programs.