Farmers are also taking notice of the important role healthy soils play in their input costs and overall return on investment. “If you had asked (a farmer) even five years ago, ‘What’s a microorganism or what are ag-biologicals and how do they influence soil health?’ you were met with the comment that those things weren’t proven science,” says Pete Hayes, vice president of marketing for ABM, a microbiological company that works to provide yield- improving biological solutions. “That’s not the case today. “Science has proven what we and other companies are doing, and farmers have responded to that. They are evolving in their management practices through their understanding of how important soil health is.” Farmers have also taken interest in on-farm research and development and are voicing that inter- est through the allocation of their commodity check- off dollars and participation in research programs. A farmer driven initiative, Soil Health Partnership, is a National Corn Growers Association program funded by corn grower checkoff dollars, government organi- zations, Monsanto and nonprofit partner contributions. The program collaborates with more than 100 farms across the Midwest to create protocols for on-farm soil health promoting practices. The Root and Soil Health Revolution Where does this information leave us along the agri- culture revolution highway? Many believe the next revolution will come as breakthroughs in soil and root health discovery. Long known to be the foundation of agriculture, soil health is generating renewed interest throughout the agriculture community. Advancements in previ- ously existing technologies allow scientists to study the complex symbiotic relationships between the soil biome and plant root systems. Seed companies, tech startups and commodity groups are working independently and through part- nerships to learn more about these relationships and how they can be used to influence higher yields. In turn, these collaborations bring to market industry revolutionizing soil, crop and seed management solutions. The organization offers field days, collects and disseminates data and training information, and works with growers to implement best practice soil manage- ment within each operation. In its fourth year, the Soil Health Partnership hopes to establish a new baseline for the way farmers think about soil health. “There are things that we have known about our soils for a long time and haven’t been able to test,” says Elyssa McFarland, who serves as the Eastern Iowa field manager for the Soil Health Partnership. “It’s exciting that we are now moving into an era where we have the science and technology to test and measure some of those things that we only had a concept of before.” For decades, farmers have made decisions using soil chemistry as the primary measurement of soil health and diversity. McFarland says that while those decisions have helped to advance agriculture and manage risk, there is much more to learn about the soil biome through physical and biological testing on a field scale level. “Universities have been testing soil biology and soil physics for a long time but not in the context of imple- menting precision solutions on farms,” she says. “The farmers we are working with are going to be able to make better management decisions for their acreages by being able to measure things like aggregate stability on a larger scale.” While the Soil Health Partnership creates advanced protocol in testing soil health through crop productivity, other groups are looking to the biology of soil as a solu- tion to seed, crop and, ultimately, yield improvement. 24 / SEEDWORLD.COM SEPTEMBER 2017 A number of companies are investigating how microbials and biologicals impact the microbiome and plant’s overall ability to cope with abiotic stressors, such as soil salinity and drought. According to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, there are somewhere between 100 million and 1 billion microbes in a single teaspoon of soil, and while the industry has been well aware of their presence for decades, improvements in existing technologies have allowed agriculture microbiology to reach new heights in the past decade. With its sights on improvement goals within the major U.S. food crops of corn, soybeans, wheat and sorghum, BioConsortia, Inc., has developed an Advanced Microbial Selection (AMS) process that they At BioConsortia, Marcus Meadows-Smith leads researchers in evaluating natural teams of microbes and how they interact with the plant.