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Soil Health

This soil health curriculum teaches learners to assess soil using their senses, observations, and testing. They will explore how soil affects crops, develop management plans, and use crop rotation to improve long-term soil health.

Curriculum

Soil Health Modules

Getting to Know Your Soil

This module teaches learners to use their senses and observations to assess soil, identify issues, improve soil health, and understand how field variability affects crop growth.

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Plan to Improve Your Soil

This module guides learners in applying soil health principles by considering environmental and farm-specific needs, building knowledge through soil health assessments, and gaining confidence to develop their own soil management plans.

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Testing the Soil & What Does It Mean?

This module helps learners understand soil testing, practice sampling with a lab of their choice, select activities to address soil improvement goals, and determine necessary soil inputs.

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Designing a Crop Rotation Plan

A crop rotation plan maps out what to grow each year to improve soil and crop health. Tracking pests, diseases, and plant health helps refine future planning, allowing farmers to adjust based on past challenges and successes.

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Beginning Farmers Curricula  © 2025 by Michigan Beginner Farmer Curriculum Team is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Additional Resources
Beginning Farmers logo of a plant inside a water drop

This work is supported by the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program grant no. 2021-70033-35833 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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​Beginning Farmers Curricula © 2025 by Michigan Beginner Farmer Curriculum Team is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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